Microsoft already had a proven business model and established products and services before the AI boom. If a company goes under it would almost certainly be one focused almost entirely on AI such as Palantir.
Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days agoPotentially even one or two tech companies that have been around for decades depending on how large it gets before that burst.
Please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 days ago
msage@programming.dev 3 days ago
Lol, Palantir isn’t going anywhere.
And the AI bust will hit primarily generative AI, and Palantir does things a bit differently.
baines@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
if boeing fuckups can kill people palantir is not foing anywhere
jj4211@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Nah, they already converted all their business clients to recurring revenue and are, relatively, not very exposed to the LLM thing. Sure they will have overspent a bit on datacenters and nVidia gear, but they continue to basically have most of global business solidly giving them money continuously to keep Office and Azure.
In terms of longer term tech companies that could be under existential threat, I’d put Supermicro in there. They are a long term fixture in the market that was generally pretty modest and had a bit of a boost from the hyperscalers as ‘cloud’ took off, but frankly a lot of industry folks were not sure exactly how Supermicro was getting the business results they reported while doing the things they were doing. Then AI bubble pulled them up hard and was a double edged sword as the extra scrutiny seemingly revealed the answer was dubious accounting all along. The finding would have been enough to just destroy their company, except they were ‘in’ on AI enough to be buoyed above the catastrophe.
A longer stretch, but nVidia might have some struggles. The AI boom has driven their market cap about 5000%. They’ve largely redefined most of their company to be LLM centric, with other use cases left having to make the most of whatever they do for LLM. How will their stakeholders react to a huge drop from the most important company on earth to a respectable but modest vendor of stuff for graphics? How strong is the appetite for GPU when the visual results aren’t really that much more striking than they were 3 generations of hardware back?
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Itll be nvidia and openai primarily, id have to imagine
Womble@piefed.world 3 days ago
It wont be Nvidia unless they play things incredibly badly, they're the only ones making actual profit by selling shovels in the goldrush.
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Yeah, but dont they also have the largest promisory debt? Havent they loaned the most most money that they dont actually have?
Womble@piefed.world 3 days ago
From a quick look they have ~40B USD in liabilities and make ~115B USD gross profit. Being able to pay off the entirety off their debt with 4 months of profit seems pretty healthy to me.
Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
They “loaned” money to companies that immediately turned around and used that money to buy their products… So they got the money back and are only maximum out the production costs of those units if the loaner can’t pay.
But if there is a bankruptcy, they’d be at the front of the line to collect
jj4211@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah, but can they handle the collapse of going back to the company before the AI boom? They’ve increased in market cap 5000%, attracted a lot of stakeholders that never would have bothered with nVidia if not for the LLM boom. If LLM pops, then will nVidia survive with their new set of stakeholders that didn’t sign up for a ‘mere graphics company’?
They’ve reshaped their entire product strategy to be LLM focused. Who knows what the demand is for their current products without the LLM bump. Discrete GPUs were becoming increasingly niche since ‘good enough’ integrated GPUs kind of were denting their market.
They could survive a pop, but they may not have the right backers to do so anymore…
Womble@piefed.world 3 days ago
Definitely a possibility! But dealing with "only being a normal profitable company" is a very different problem to "oops, we were selling $10 for $5 and VCs have stopped giving us money to burn, and people are using self hosted models too", which is the possible outcome for the big AI labs.