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.
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.
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).
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.
Please let the pop take the tech bros with it.
They'll move on to the next big thing, just like they did after bitcoin.
And after NFTs, blockchain, the metaverse and so on
I'd love a gang of nerds doing the real metaverse, like Gibson showed us.
Yea but it comes with all the other stuff in Gibsons books
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.
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.
They will ruin it, and then move onto the next thing to subsume and destroy forever.
Hmm and what about the everyday user who needs to ask AI how long to cook potatoes? What will they do after the pop?
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.
completely uncharted territory. No one tried to cook a potato until Sam Altman graced us plebs with ChatGPT
the same way they did in 2021
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..."
Another advantage of cookbooks. (There are good ones, but a lot are junk.)
Oh yeah, maybe using indexing website with fraction of the compute power needed where the answer will be first result anyway.
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 he knows. But this lets him feel edgy and different
It's just this person from what I can tell.
He don't care. People have tried to engage him in conversation on this and he just ducks any attempt to get him to explain his rationale for being annoying.
He's just a snowflake trying to validate himself by forcing a social media trend. It's pretty cringe.
What does it take to pop this bubble? So many people are calling it a bubble but what actually makes it pop?
Venture capital drying up.
Here's the thing... No LLM provider's business is making a profit. None of them. Not OpenAI. Not Anthropic. Not even Google (they're profitable in other areas, obviously). OpenAI optimistically believes it might start being profitable in 2029.
What's keeping them afloat? Venture capital. And what happens when those investors decide to stop throwing good money after bad?
BOOM.
This is a great question. Eventually the companies must run out of gullible investors, right?
🎼You can't stop, techno pop 🎷🎹
As stupid as it is: Faith is what keeps bubbles afloat. Faith can go a long way towards forcing reality to what you want it to be, and if you have the wealth, you can play nearly endless money-games to make it seem like you're ahead when you're actually losing your shorts.
The reason there is so much faith is because this is a make it or break it moment for late stage capitalism. The businesses (including non-AI businesses) viscerally need it to work so they can get rid of human workers. If they can't make humans slaves, they will make digital slaves. This may be a last gasp for the old order if it fails because so many entrenched companies from automobile makers like GM and Ford to airframe makers like Boeing to general electronics like General Electric have finances that are literally upside down because they have been using stock buybacks to fake growth for the better part of two decades now absolutely need it to happen to stay afloat.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
This quote by Upton Sinclair is usually used to describe lower level employees who don't understand how unionization could be good for them, but it applies here as well. The faith persists because this is their "salaries" that depend on this working so the bottom doesn't fall out from under them. They have to believe it will work and as such will keep dumping money into it as long as humanly possible.
AI is like Theranos but bigger and affecting numerous industries who are all betting the future of their companies on this all working out. For their livelihoods and their plan to continue ignoring all the little people in the world, there is no losing state they can or will accept until they are on the edge and about to leap from the top of their buildings to avoid the consequences.
Once the faith breaks, it will be like a dam breaking and flooding out too fast to escape.
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 most 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 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14318)
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.
Someone think of the "prompt engineers"!
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.
You just aren’t going to the right websites.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
