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Comment by bigbuppo | Hacker News Reader

The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.

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I don't see what the big worry is unless you're heavily invested. Plenty of investments go bust.

Because of the huge amounts involved.

As people have pointed out - this also happened during the DotCom bust. Eventually all that infra got used.

Fun fact!

During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared.

NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.

Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.

And I suspect those GPUs don't even have video outputs so cannot be used as video cards.

The data centers are the reusable infra. Not the servers.

Sure, the data centers can be used as hay barns.

Did you see the news about the shennanigans of the SpaceXaiXsocialmediasite IPO and the consequences of that?

Sounds like that other great destroyer of lives and capital - war.

> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?

Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.

When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.

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