Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.

[...] Nvidia ... "invest[s]" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The the same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).

investing back and forth, forever

Well Nvidia's the one laughing to the bank here; they've offloaded their GPUs for cash and stakes, and Microsoft/OpenAI/'AI' providers are the ones holding the bag (and GPUs).

Picks and shovels. The profiteers of the gold rush were the suppliers... I mean, Nvidia wants the grift to keep going, of course, but still.

I feel like he missed a key opportunity to tell the kid asking “what do we do?” “You need to unionize. Collective effort and mutual aid will serve you better in life than most things.”

Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job.

I've been reading David Graeber. How many of these jobs are bullshit jobs that don't need doing in the first place?

We need a better tool than that old, easily-manipulated "stock market" to track value. Value needs to become real again, not always inflated, because "shareholders".

It's a pyramid scheme, always has been... every decade for the last 30yrs there's been a few of them... The dot.com boom and bust of the 90's was the start, in the 2000's everything went 'digital' which was the same old shit with an LCD added to it and a doubling of the price, digital services for games/music/movies where they could take away what you bought... then they got even more serious in the 2010's where the real enshitification of the internet started... the 'cloud' where you were no longer allowed to own your own data, subscription fees for everything... 'smart' appliances that just tracked you and stole your privacy for the enrichment of a few billionaires... Crypotocurrency, the biggest scam and pyramid scheme to date... and now in the 2020's, crypto as a means to launder money and bribe politicians, massive corruption, fraud and consolidation of power by evil people and their corporate paymasters... and of course... the newest and worst pyramid scheme of them all... AI...

The only way to win is not to play... don't use it, disable it, remove it... every time you use it you are encouraging them to invade you life, take away your rights and exert control over what you can do and think... I know some of you will think that's an over reaction, you will learn one day that I and others were right to warn you as I have been doing for years now... But by then it will be too late, the climate is burning and these billionaires are trying to make it happen quicker, they value their wealth more than your very existence and they will hide away in their bunkers and private islands as the rest of humanity burns.

Anyone have any historical data on the dotcom bubble and what stocks benefited from the crash?

The fall is going to be epic.

AI may not be profitable right now, but there's a lot more to "the magnificent 7" than AI that keeps them profitable. Even if the AI bubble popped, people would still be wasting their time on Facebook and Microsoft teams.

My whale oil investments are looking pretty good now

Don't forget a similar amount is tied up real estate and that bubble is already popping, starting in the SE

I love how with the previous schemes like crypto, communities like this would have thought they were in on it, now with AI it's like nope not falling for that Spanish prisoner BS again.

Absolute bubble for the datacenter middlemen and the AI software behemoth models that need data centers. The hardware companies though, and AI/LLMs overall, are here to stay and even if they waste some of their profits on investing in middlemen/datacenter/software customers, they can be profitable by inflating costs of their GPUs/hardware.

GPU depreciation matters, but tends to be relatively slow due to controlled incrementalism in hardware. Still, the high end faces the most risk, and Huawei/Alibaba won't be satisfied with small share gains over Nvidia to keep pricing gains. Even AMD is improving software stack fast enough to make affordable private AI. The low end has signficant disruption potential to the fossil powered datacenter/Skynet model.

It's not just an overall stock market bubble, it is a US GDP bubble. Where datacenter growth $ is larger than consumer spending growth $. Skynet for Israel control spending is an unstoppable corruption vector, and yes the champions of Israel must be financed and supported as geniuses by all media or "China and Iran will win."

they would have to sell us $800 billion worth of services over the life of today's data centers

$100 for a yearly AI subscription for each human is possible. The problem is, which jobs do the people have to pay for it?

Why is Cory Doctorow a CW?