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Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by noosphr on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:40PM (#50421133)
The difference is that all those things needed physical infrastructure to be linearly build out.

AI models can be deployed on the same datacenter as the old one and be either orders of magnitude cheaper to run, or orders of magnitude more capable.

The only thing that can pop this bubble is if we're not smart enough.

Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by justinator on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:48PM (#50421185)
And data centers are practically free to build, are welcomed everywhere, cost little to run, and never need to have their infrastructure upgraded!
Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by anamax on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:35AM (#50421457)
Google hasn't retired any of its now ten-year-old V1 TPUs or any of the subsequent generations so it's unclear that AI infrastructure "needs" upgrades.

Of course, Google could be wrong about the economics of running old AI processors. Or maybe TPUs are special.

Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by appplication on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:40AM (#50421485)
I do wonder how much of their inference is running on 10-year old TPUs. I’d imagine not much, if only because 10 years ago the justification for massive compute was quite different than today.
Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by robotresearcher on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:54AM (#50421569)
They were selling targeted ads then, and they do now. That’s their actual business.
Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by raddan on Monday November 09, 2026 @07:13AM (#50424536)
Citation needed.
Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by easterncalculus on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:05PM (#50429134)
> are welcomed everywhere

This is a perfect circle of reasoning. The bubble exists because people say the bubble exists and reject data centers, therefore creating the bubble?

Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by charcircuit on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:49PM (#50421188)
>AI models can be deployed on the same datacenter as the old one

This hasn't historically been true. The clusters have been getting bigger along with the models over time.

Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by ZenoArrows on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:53AM (#50421561)
> AI models can be deployed on the same datacenter as the old one

Not if the datacenters are in space, you can upgrade the models for a little while but once you need to upgrade the silicon you need to launch new hardware.

Re:I'm Not Convinced the AI Bubble Exists by TheOtherHobbes on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:45AM (#50425520)
That's not the difference. The difference is the distinction between core infra, B2B services, and B2C services.

The companies that sold core infra during dot com mostly died, because they invested in fiber etc far too quickly. Likewise with server factories like Sun.

The B2B and B2C survivors were patchy. A few did extremely well but there were a lot of casualties.

The biggest winners offered B2G - business to government - disguised as search and social media. They were actually selling individual user profiling and targeted ads, and that turned out to be the biggest money maker.

The reason Anthropic and OpenAI appear wildly overvalued is because their offering isn't AI in some abstract sense, it's the next generation of surveillance and persuasion technology. But now with corporate surveillance in addition to the traditional profiling and targeting.

You can tell a lot about what someone is doing - and the industry is doing in general - by looking at everyone's code bases. You don't need to train on them or steal keys to extract immense value.

Potentially there's also the option to eventually make claims on corporate IP developed with AI tech.

Anyone who thinks the companies who pulped and torrented whole libraries of books for their training data would never, ever, pinky promise, try to extract value from the code they're generating is being very naive.