Submitted 3 weeks ago by Curmuffin@fedia.io to technology@lemmy.world
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue
When the AI bubble pops, what will remain? Cheap GPUs at firesale prices, skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and open source models that already do impressive things, but will grow far more impressive after being optimized:
There were supposed to be cheap GPUs after the crypto bubble burst
There were when the first Ethereum bubble burst. That was one easier for the average person to get into with gamer GPUs, and they flooded the market on eBay as soon as it was no longer profitable.
Bitcoin won’t do that, because it hasn’t been based on GPUs for a long, long time. Ethereum doesn’t even work like that anymore.
The AI bubble popping will only flood the market with GPUs that are useful for running AI models. The GPUs in AI datacenters often don’t even have a display output connector. I think Corey is overstating his case on that one. Most likely, those GPUs are headed to the landfill.
You can still use such GPU as an accelerator either for running AI, or for gaming. In either case, given that you workload is Vulkan-based on Linux, you can use vkdevicechooser.
Of course, you will need a second GPU (even the CPU’s integrated one) to connect your display(s).
The AI bubble doesn’t mean AI/LLMs aren’t useful. It means datacenter speculation can’t make money.
those GPUs are headed to the landfill.
They’ll just have a similar discount to the Ethereum switch.
Also the AI GPUS probably won’t be great for gaming. And cheap could mean anything when they go for 20k a piece.
The Internet has already been mostly destroyed, drowned in AI slop. Is all that shit gonna be taken down? Are search engines going to go back to working again?
Dude this. Looking up how to pull off pci passthrough on an SBC I have as well as answer a few lingering filesystem questions I get nothing but slop. The useful shit isn’t even visible anymore. And if I ask chatGPT to sift through it all, it can’t do it either, instead regurgitating all the slop it can’t make sense of either.
We are looking at the destruction of the greatest library in mankind’s history. Because NVIDIA’s line must go up.
I was going to reply "at least the burning of Alexandria was an accident," and then I thought to look that up. Seems egotists destroying public collections of knowledge is just baked into humanity. We'll never be free of its scourge.
I have a conspiracy theory this was intentional, about the greatest library. The system that happened was intentionally built to end like this.
The mechanisms that led it to this point were simple and easily predictable (which is why they were not present in previous concepts, like NLS and Xanadu and such dream systems), and follow from the fundamental structure. Mechanisms solving these flaws also emerged early enough - siloed services and search engines. Companies providing the main offerings to solve these flaws followed in a few years. And they are still here.
See, this has been built up in like 30 years, right? Then surely much of the material will enter a better built system (reverse links, transparent identities, delay-tolerant, versioned, global and message-oriented, not connection-oriented, and so on)?
Yes, but less because of reliance on the wrong system. It was a trap to siphon the most effort. There will be no similar explosion of enthusiasm in a global networked system. Just like there will be no similar explosion of enthusiasm in communism as there was during 20s’ USSR.
It’s what secret services do, among other things - encourage underground activities to control those and detect participants and make the effort go in a predictable direction. Similar to preventive activation of mines.
Some things’ only good media would be preserved in the main medium used for their reading and reproduction, but the main medium became, say, some scan stored in some Internet service not caring about it. So they will vanish.
At the same time - the road from first printed Bibles to the French revolution to printing millions of student books on math, for example, took a long time. But also, with the speed information travels, we might expect new wonderful things in the following decades which won’t all be dystopian. Of course we should also prepare for bloodshed.
nope, its useful for propaganda still, especially dimwits like conservatives that cant tell the difference.
They will ruin it, and then move onto the next thing to consume and destroy forever.
I suspect a lot of the slop will disappear. Why host it when nobody is interacting with it?
I can strongly recommend the arricle from the OP blog post about marker dynamics and use of what is essentially accounting fraud by major companies involved in AI:
Lifespan of AI Chips: The $300 Billion Question
I am looking forward to reading the research paper they are working on.
While the author takes a relatively neutral tone, the analysis is brutal in its portrayal of major market players (Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google); they come of more as oligopolists who are happy to engage in what is de facto in an attempt to undermine true market competition.
OP’s post is largely right, but it doesn’t require that link to be true. Also, whether these $3m+ systems are warrantied is a relevant question. It’s hard to know exact lifespan from one person saying their gpu failed quickly. Paper still stands well.
Because of power constraints, I’d expect they replace GPUs every 2 years with new generations, and so there will be big write offs.
A 6 year depreciation schedule seems unrealistically long for a GPU.
Even in gaming terms (I know this is completely different use case), a 2080S from 2019, a high end SKU, would struggle with many modern games at 1440p and higher. A profession streamer would be unlikely to use a 2080S.
Then there is the question of incentives. An objective look at American technology and VC suggests they are far closer to criminal organizations than their treatment by media and US institutions would imply. They very much can be expected to engage in what is essentially accounting fraud.
Hmm and what about the everyday user who needs to ask AI how long to cook potatoes? What will they do after the pop?
completely uncharted territory. No one tried to cook a potato until Sam Altman graced us plebs with ChatGPT
Local models are actually pretty great! They are not great at everything… but for what most people are using LLMs for they do a fine job.
Thats from llama3.1:8b and the answer is decent, it took about 20seconds to generate my answer and used no more power than if I were to play a video game for the same amount of time.
Boiling time isn’t related to original potato size, it’s related to the size of pieces you cut. So the first half is irrelevant and the second half is overly verbose.
They’ll ask their parents, or look up cooking instructions on actual websites.
Cue 8 paragraphs of “I first learned to cook potatoes with my grandfather back in…” and every reader screaming “Oh my god just get to the recipe…”
the same way they did in 2021
Oh, fuck þat noise. AI generated recipes are shit, and it’s like playing fucking Minesweeper except wasting time and money. I’m about to go back to buying cookbooks. My culinary bullshit detector has gotten much better, but I’m no chef. It can be hard to tell if some AI bullshit hallucinates e.g. too much liquid-to-dry ingredients and you get a slushy or inedible mess.
Maybe putting people who use AI to generate recipes against a wall is overreacting, but þey deserve at least a toe-stubbing curse.
It’s a waste of perfectly good food, and a legitimate crime.
Oh, there are still thorn-users trying to "poison" AI? It doesn't work and only annoys human readers.
Oh yeah, maybe using indexing website with fraction of the compute power needed where the answer will be first result anyway.
What arcane magics doest thou speak of?
How will I remember to put avocado in my BBQ sauce, without AI?
Datacenters and GPUs will be sold for pennies on the dollar, both due to an incalculable used supply, as well as plummeting demand due to the inevitable economic depression.
will NVIDIA suffer from the pop, if they invested 100bn they expect ROI TWICE AT LEAST BACK.
Only in such a way that their profits eventually decrease back to “normal” levels.
One thing I worry about is that there‘s going to be a fire sale on the polluting crap that are powering these GPU farms. It’ll likely end up in poorer countries because it’ll be cheaper than new renewables.
The sad thing is those GPUs are in specialized boards with specialized servers and cooling, and not really good at the kind of work consumers would want it for, assuming you could even get drivers. So all of those GPUs will realistically get scrapped if the bubble pops.
Maybe we’ll see the EPYC CPUs get sold secondhand at least, those are socketed.
There are plenty of these, yes. But there are also plenty of consumer-grade GPUs being used for it too.
I understand the failure rates for the GPUs is huge. The duty cycles tend to be high, with power and cooling issues.
(Actually the power issues are wild and can destroy power distribution and generation equipment. “Power Stabilization for AI Training Datacenters” 21 Aug 2025 arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14318)
I mean AI has been doing what its been doing without much porn so far. Im pretty sure it will shift to that. Its what has pushed every technology before forward.
Admission time: I actually used a porn AI chatbot.
To defend myself, what I was trying to do is experiment with high-protocol BDSM ideas. This is when there’s a more formal hierarchy and rules. Often, the rules are deliberately unfair to the subs so that they can be “punished” for breaking them.
Problem was that chatbots would straight up hallucinate one rule or another all the time. The idea isn’t for the subs to fuck up every time. Then it’s nothing but punishment, and that doesn’t work. There needs to be times when they’re successful so they can be “praised”, and the chatbots simply couldn’t do that.
The future is AI powered uncensoring of JAV. It’s already started anyway.
You just aren’t going to the right websites.
oh I know there is some but many of the official ones don’t do it but they will. oh yes they will. thats right. you know what I like. you need the money.
You’re right about commercial ai.
Open weight visuals models ? Wan, Qwen, Flux and Stable Diffusion before, most of their usages is for NSFW.
Someone think of the “prompt engineers”!
I’m all fine already with my RX 6400.
db2@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Please let the pop take the tech bros with it.
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
They’ll move on to the next big thing, just like they did after bitcoin.
oxysis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
And after NFTs, blockchain, the metaverse and so on
FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
How dare those awful people keep trying new things. The Internet was perfect in the 1950s and we should stick with it being exactly the same way forever.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
What if we were pro-active, and trapped them by creating some bullshit “next big thing” and then just pocketing all of their cash when they invest
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’m visualising that scene from IT Crowd with the boss stepping out the window…
bursaar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I wish. I suspect the mega-billionaires will be absolutely fine.