Free GPUs for everyone! Bring a truck!

I honestly can't wait to use used gpus as lego bricks similar to what kids in Weimar republic did with cash

My self-training robot army is poised to conquer all. It's merely waiting for parts.

Never gonna happen. Cash has no intrinsic value exccept maybe for use in fire / toiler paper. GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value. Their price might go down 50-75% but never 99%

I've got an S3 VGA adapter to sell you at 25% of list price

They're taking about shorter time scales, the effect on top of the normal obsolescence treadmill.

> GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value.

What is the instrinsic value of one of millions of GPUs, if the world only needs 15-20% of them?

About fifty teraflops.

That's the meaning of intrinsic calor - the device can do what it can do, regardless of market conditions. Today it has the value of fifty teraflops, and tomorrow it still does, unless it breaks. However, intrinsic value cannot be measured in dollars.

"calor" was a typo of "value" obviously.

And yet we're talking about electronics here, they don't have sentimental value and just because compute capacity is unused there are no guarantees that it will be used, even at a per unit cost approaching €0.

I'm sure that farmers during the Great Depression were also consoling themselves with the "intrisinsic caloric value" of their corn.

As I said, the intrinsic value of a GPU is not measured in €. In fact, the lower the sale price gets, the better a deal it is, not worse - you get the same intrinsic value for less extrinsic cost.

There are also intrinsic costs, mostly power consumption.

Demand for GPU power is much more elastic than demand for food calories.

Food calories are cheaper to convert into something useful. It's not like GPUs, once bought for peanuts, turn into perpetual motion machines. They need power, cooling, a whole infrastructure built around them.

GPUs would have taken the world by storm already in the roughly 30 years since they've been around.

Even for GenAI it's likely ASICs take over at some point if we really care about performance.

GPUs have taken the world by storm. There's one in almost every computer, and they make up the bulk of supercomputers!

If you put a 75% discount on these powerful GPUs there will be a long line of non-AI-company purchasers.

GPUs used to cost 20% of what they cost know and Intel and AMD make perfectly serviceable GPUs for most PCs. NVIDIA top of the line GPUs won't suddenly be plugged in to lowly laptops.

Yes, lots of companies will buy them for cheap, but these AI beasts also have OpEx costs. Not every alternative use is worth the money and there are 0 guarantees that the alternative costs cover the gap. NVIDIA sell 80% of GPUs for AI now.

I think people don't realize just how big this bubble is.

The most likely outcome is kids in third world countries extracting the valuable metals from piles of discarded GPUs.

After GPU crypto mining became unprofitable Chinese manufacturers took "mining only" cards, desoldered the GPU and built new graphics cards using the chips. So at least the lower end stuff (RTX6000) could be repurposed like that.

Soon you will bring a wheelbarrow of GPUs to buy a loaf of bread.