37 weeks is an entirely normal lead time in the semiconductors world. There are many sub-$10 components with similar lead time.

It makes me grateful that given that kind of supply chain, I can as a consumer more or less go buy anything I want on demand at a personal scale without a 37 week commitment / lead time.

Yes the prices are eye popping at times, but with money in hand newegg claims delivery by about dec 8.

LLM models are proving math theorems no humans could in ways no humans could. These GPUs can literally run that intelligence level and as humans we have an endless set of problems we need to work on.

Many people are deploying and using this new technology for very productive ways. That’s why Anthropic revenue is so impressive.

There is a very large cohort of reasonable educated and articulate humans how are having problems processing this situation in some deep way that has them insisting there is a bubble or something fraudulent or broken, of course there probably will be to a certain extent and they will claim “see we were right” but even if that happens there is incredible rapid progress that is real, tangible, backed by real money and spending, and real productivity.

Anyway, going back to my desk now and steering LLMs on a code base created in 36 hours that is equivalent to 10-20 man years of work just 4 years ago, but sure “it’s all a bubble”, and like you said tell that to everyone in-line around the block who knows what’s really happening.

Yes, AI and LLMs are useful tech.

Yes, there is massive fraud and circular financing happening around it, and the above is just one of three ways it’s happening.

Is it "circular financing" when american Honda finance corporation gives you a loan on your new civic?

Probably not but if they granted buyers with no income 0% interest for 20 years then yeah? Sales would grow through the roof. iow it can be essentially fraudulent, depending on the quality of the loans.

If they’re doing it at the scale of subsidizing or offering favorable credit to businesses, like rental car fleets?

Sure, that’s a comparison.

Right, the snag is not that OpenAI and friends haven’t delivered the moon: it’s that they need to deliver at least another ten moons or so to in order to fulfil all of their promises and commitments.

Right! The bear case should be that in the long run, matmul gets commoditized and nobody will pay a premium for Nvidia.

To argue that demand for their chips & systems now is fraudulent is coo coo Cocoa Puffs.

I am concerned about the long term impacts on the economy when more and more people lose their jobs from Ai and automation. What happens when the middle class disappears completely and no one has money to buy anything? Who are all these companies spending all this money on Ai compute going to sell to? Demand dries up, then demand for Ai dries up, and then pop.

Why wouldn’t the middle class have any money to buy anything?

World War? Investments wiped out by speculative financing on data centers and inference deals? Global financial restructuring?

They lose their ok paying jobs and are forced into minimum wage jobs because Ai automated away their job. There is already massive inflation and regular people are struggling. This is why some people spout on about minimum basic income but the reality is that our politicians are too captured by business and special interests to implement the needed taxation to implement a program like that.

[delayed]

I’ve started thinking naturally more in hours of autonomous work in implementation situations. You’re correct in that it’s not a full measure because it took a lot of iterations in design work before kicking off a specific goal pursuit for implementation only succeeded because the LLMs had clear instructions they could work autonomously on incrementally. The end result is still a work product that was produced in 36 hours, so less than a couple of days, and is of high quality and while hard to be precise I’m confident 4 years ago probably would have taken a team of 10 average developers at least a year of development time.

+1 for "steering LLMs on a code base"

The fact that the tech is useful doesn’t mean there’s no bubble. The web was and is useful too but there was nevertheless definitely a bubble around that at the turn of the century.

For companies like Anthropic a big risk is commoditization—the risk that open weight models get good enough that a lot of people don’t need an expensive subscription.

> There is a very large cohort of reasonably well educated and articulate humans who are having problems processing this situation in some deep way that has them in denial and constantly insisting there is a massive bubble or something fraudulent or broken, of course there probably will be to a certain extent, some overshooting. and they will claim “see we were right” but even if that happens there is incredible rapid progress that is real, tangible, backed by real money and spending, and real productivity.

While you are right, I think the elephant in the room is that they are rightly concerned about the ethical issues, namely the ecological and economic impacts.