And the companies faking revenue instead of profit.
Comment on Nvidia insists it isn’t Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 10 hours agoEnron crashed because they were cooking their books and faking income, declaring potential profit where none existed
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Sell chips to X
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Receive stock in X
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Value of stocks = discounted sum of future (fake) income
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Booked as an asset on the balance sheet
This is exactly like Enron but the underlying commodity isn’t energy, it’s compute.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Nvidia sells plenty of GPUs for actual money, they are good for it.
No, the real issue is the depreciation for the people owning GPUs. Your GPU will be usable for 4-6 years, and 2-4 of those years will be spent as ”the cheap old GPU. After that time, you need new GPUs. (And as the models are larger by then, you need moahr GPU)
How the actual fuck do these people expect to get any ROI on that scale with those timeframes? With training, maybe the trained model can be an asset (lol), but for inference there are basically no residual benefits.
PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
I feel like what sounds personally insane to us (and is, don’t get the wrong idea), to the people making such decisions the situation is more like -
“Emerging market with unknown upside thanks to new and evolving capabilities, exploration and competitive advantage shaped and constrained, globally, by hardware capability. Not my money I’m betting, ‘risk’ is extreme opportunity for me, negative consequences borne by others. Let’s go”
SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
I’m still rocking a GTX970 from 2014
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
Do this:
You’ll probably end up with 4-6 years as the usable lifetime of your billion dollar investment. This entire industry is insane. (GTX 1080 here. Was considering an upgrade until the RAM prices hit.)