The GPU Bubble (GPUs Marketed by Useless Slop)
Have we learned nothing about buzzwords and hype?
"Every bubble pops eventually. When this one goes, what will be left behind? Well, there will be little models – Hugging Face, Llama, etc – that run on commodity hardware. The people who are learning to “prompt engineer” these “toy models” have gotten far more out of them than even their makers imagined possible. They will continue to eke out new marginal gains from these little models, possibly enough to satisfy most of those low-stakes, low-dollar applications. But these little models were spun out of big models, and without stupid bubble money and/or a viable business case, those big models won’t survive the bubble and be available to make more capable little models." -Cory Doctorow
Earlier this year we explained that GPUs (even if marketed as "hey hi chips" or whatever) are basically a gold rush and NVidia is therefore a bubble. Weeks later we saw the mainstream media saying the same, reciting the words of some Wall Street bigwigs. This demand won't last and NVidia's CEO making up phony narratives/storytelling like "China might win the AI race" is merely reinforcement of the observation that their infantile marketing is based on a lie, which gets perpetuated by media (high-profile publishers that those opportunists are paying).
All those publishers that kept pushing "metaverse" and now promote "hey hi" (to sell GPUs and create "market rallies" based on false advertising or unfulfillable capabilities) will pay with their credibility.
An associate has explained that "they're selling GPUs for the sake of selling GPUs. As mentioned above, it would not be a surprise if the number sold already exceeds the amount of 'spare' electricity by a large fraction (another related thing about GPUs)."
There were reports earlier this month about many servers with GPUs just sitting there unconnected (turned off perpetually), presumably as a result of hoarding without actual deployment/s. They over-provisioned based on hype, or ordered way too much based on a false projection of expected excess demand (hence shortages). They thought they were being clever by buying "in advance" or "well ahead of the competition", but now that usage of slop is waning they must rethink their dumb actions.
"GPUs lose value when sitting on the shelf, unused," says the associate. "However, when used full blast, they burn out in a couple of years, any way. So one question is whether the speculators even can recover their insane investments before the chips have time to burn out. Or is this just another case similar to the 'sub-prime' lending (aka another Ponzi scheme) but one based on burning electricity for no reason? If they're not able to recover their full investment and then some profit before the unused chips lose their value or the used chips burn out, then..."
I never owned or bought a GPU other than basic, integrated graphics-accelerating cards. I never was a "heavy gamer" and back in the 90s the most popular games very seldom required a GPU (there was an article last week about how Voodoo cards would no longer work, even if maintained in fine/optimal/good condition, due to the way their components were aging).
GPUs were mostly sold because of games, not people who make and edit videos. Seeing that the gaming industry is more or less collapsing (lots of layoffs reported every day), the "GPU industry" hopped onto the Bitcoin et al bandwagon (basically a power-hungry pyramid scheme) and now "hey hi".
This won't end well. The report below is from last night. █
