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  • Hacker News
  • Whether inference hardware will be a commodity remains to be seen. We had twenty years of most servers being x86-64. That's commodity compute. Inference hardware isn't a mature architecture yet. There will be progress and obsolescence.
    by Animats
  • It will be in less than 5 years. You can already buy second hand RTX3090 TIs and with most of modern Macs being able to run some mind of AU locally already, in 5 years, things will be very commodified once you get the Chinese start rolling out Cuda-compatible GPUs.
    by asdf88990
  • Observing how the US stock market is behaving this week (up-down-up-down...), I feel like many investors don't appreciate the distinction between good and bad circularity.
    by cl42
  • Part of the market issues this week are Korea imploding and Japan about to implode. Japan's bond rate moving up could mean the end of the carry trade. Korea apparently has many stock tickers but only two distinct companies behind them. This caused their market and their overly leveraged retail investors a lot of pain.
    by gadflyinyoureye
  • Excellent piece, but it does hinge on the idea that what we’re building is actual AI (still hotly debated), if it can be successfully commoditized like utilities (very unlikely given compute continuously evolves and the hardware cycles of datacenters relative to power plants or water filtration systems), and if such a healthy cycle - should it develop at all - survives the multiple decades needed to effectively provide ROI.

    Which is an awful lot of “ifs” to be hedging a bet on, especially at nation-state scales.

    by stego-tech
  • The problem with circular transactions is that they can make companies look healthier than they really are, distort investment decisions, and cause widespread damage when the cycle breaks.
    by unjuno
  • I think the real question in all sorts of financial setups is really “is the dollar actually worth a dollar”. So when company A invests in company B which buys from company A the actual question is whether the valuation of the investment and the valuation of the purchase is correct or are they getting high on their own supply
    by firasd
  • A recession is a cash/dollar bubble.

    First cash/dollars are considered bad so they collapse in price. When the psychology shifts, suddenly the dollar climbs in value and itself bubbles over, causing a recession.

    by dragontamer
  • If healthy and risky circular financing deals look similar at first, how can investors or regulators tell when a circular deal has crossed the line into something dangerous...especially when it's off the balance sheets?
    by andiey
  • This has been bugging me quite a bit. I think the more "off-balance-sheet" the deal is, the shadier it gets... But it's really hard to tell early on.

    I actually think Nvidia's deals have been above-board, generally speaking, because they are transaprent.

    Less true for Meta and Terawulf.

    by cl42
  • We don't have an Artificial Intelligence yet. It is not intelligent, yet.

    Here's a quick reality check. Several companies have formed with a goal of creating and AI engine that can think for itself and reason through difficult or previously intractable problems.

    In order to accomplish this goal they have used scrapers to hoover up content from a multitude of sources, many of which can be seen as being the ground truth source for their discipline. A lot of this content, most of it, was copied and is being used without attribution to the original sources, without permission from the content owners or publishers, and in violation of copyright laws.

    Look at all of this for what it is. It is a knowledge base, like a collection of Lego parts, each of which is important to the goal but none of which will get you there without the other parts in the proper relative position. Once you have collected all these parts and stuck them together you have an LLM. If you are careful in your parts selection, that LLM can be useful for answering specific questions that are properly framed so that the LLM can make use of the contextual information in formulating a response.

    There's nothing intelligent about being able to answer a question correctly when the answer is effectively right on the tip of your tongue. You're just drawing from your knowledge base and regurgitating.

    Glomming all of it together only gives you a huge knowledge base. There is nothing intelligent about that knowledge base. Knowledge is not intelligence.

    You have an AK today, an Accumulated Knowledge base.

    We may never reach the point where it is ever intelligent enough to reason alongside of, or better than those whose life's work went into the foundation of the AK base.

    by doodlebugging
  • We’re way beyond that, LLMs are used for reasoning - plan, do, check, act. They will define a goal, decide how to get the info needed (run a script for example), and use these new insights to adjust the plan. This is way beyond just retrieving info from a knowledge base.

    And where the info comes from (scraped, or classroom books) does not influence if something is intelligent, Humans are also trained on pre-existing knowledge.

    Real intelligence is being able to use your stored knowledge to solve new problems, which both humans and agents+LLMs can do to different levels.

    by ako
  • > commodification of intelligence

    Is HN really this fast!? Everybody already skipped the hard questions whether LLMs are intelligent? 'It' can already be commodified?

    So how much time and effort it took from these companies? A couple of years and millions spent on PR? And LLMs are "intelligent" all of a sudden, is what everybody says nowadays?

    Especially applicable for programmers: naming things is not only hard, it's also important, and can be very insidious. Remember, marketeers also name things. For example, naming the internet 'the cloud', some 15 years ago.

    I can't stop thinking about a quote of one of my favorite authors (Theo Kars): "Progress can only be technical in nature, because knowledge is transferable and wisdom is not." [translated from Dutch]

    by rambambram
  • > A couple of years and millions spent on PR? And LLMs are "intelligent" all of a sudden, is what everybody says nowadays?

    Inequality gives a few people the resources to change the mind of millions. As far as inequality remains high, propaganda will shape the ideology of a big chunk of the population. That is not good for society.

    by Frieren
  • There's a very extreme, asocial monoculture on this particular website regarding AI whereby dissent is tolerated though the true believers and devout acolytes quietly seethe at any skepticism towards their beloved frontier models, are quick to dismiss concerns about generative AI profitability, the enormously negative externalities resulting from the manner in which it's being scaled, marketed, and used, and its more profound ethical and philosophical effects on our collective future.

    Because, you know, they know best, so the hoi polloi ought to just shut up and watch as the poorly socialized quiet children exact their revenge upon those not as enlightened as them. Cue Dario adjusting his glasses and baring his teeth, or Sam Altman bulging his eyes at a camera. They can't wait for the rest of the world to be just as deeply mediocre and spiritually empty as they are.

    by kunai
  • Intelligence doesn't require sentience.

    Think of it like this: if you can offload a task to an AI model that requires reasoning or representing a nonlinear system, you are offloading intelligence.

    by wnmurphy
  • I'm pretty skeptical of the LLM hype, but I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.
    by root_axis
  • So, companies are just prepaying with seemingly large parts of their livelihood for (use of) potential value.

    Expecting demand to stay equal over longer stretches of time in IT is an interesting bet as both hardware and software tend to depreciate in value extremely rapidly, unlike oil from the example. Or water. Both are limited in nature.

    Commodifying something that is the fraction of its value the next year might be possible, but I don’t see how. Perhaps MS Windows or Office are such things, but might not compare.

    There are more limits to demand. For example what humans can process. The AI might write the finest prose and the best software but have nobody to read or use it.

    by Stitch4223
  • As long as companies will pay for AI and providers can offer better models cheaper than others… there will always be a strong incentive to optimize to make the best value model. Companies can use harnesses that can swap models on a whim, and you could just buy whatever’s cheapest/smartest for your criteria on a particular day.
    by anon7000
  • Recently: "Nvidia, CoreWeave, and Nebius: Inside the Circular Financing of the GPU Boom" (io-fund.com)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873836

    370 points| 18 days ago | 182 comments

    by WalterGR
  • Has a competent economist modeled the circularity of these deals ? [ numerically or analytically ]

    It seems a healthy economy has a lot of wide circularity .. money circulating is a good thing, a result of a functioning market, tracking the flow of real goods / services. But large corps circulating paper 'self-deals' or debt-swaps seems like a bad thing - a creative accounting practice designed to pump up their stock price/valuation.

    How can we _quantify_ the difference ? I guess it would need to match the cash / debt flows against the movement of actual goods and services ??

    Not an economist, feel free to weigh in, suggest links.

    by jgord
  • Also these deals are not circular - NVIDIA has to pay a lot of money for chips and foundry capacity just as an example, so money leaves the circle and participants have to raise capital to replace it, which means if this were just a financialy trick, it would be very expensive to maintain.
    by torginus
  • I think there's not much to model. Either AI actually becomes a hot commodity, or the people invested in these deals are going to take a bath.
    by AlexCoventry
  • you'd need to look at prior work associated with the Dot com boom and Enron. Economists rarely look into today's actual activity because America makes it nigh impossible to actually understand who owns what around the fringes; contracts arn't required to be publically disclosed and a bunch of other dark interests make it impossible to really know.

    MLMs exist in the same murky waters and tread the same ephermal economics by pushing useless product but hiring people to hire people to hire people, etc.

    by cyanydeez
  • The leverage is the trick in the whole equation. During dotcom days the leverage was fine until the cash flow ran out. Then bankruptcies started and the bottom fell out. It appears this is happening again but perhaps the business model will just evolve. Although right now it feels more of the same.
    by larrydag