Circular financing and various forms of booking sales ahead of or for future delivery are things that have caught up with other companies in the past and/or were straight-up SEC violations. Enron is an example.
Does Jensen's replacement have the industry connections, clout (or bully factor depending on perspective) and appetite to continue the circular financing? Its the CFO I think that is replacing him and they may have objected to these things all along and might have been over-ruled.
>Circular financing and various forms of booking sales ahead of or for future delivery are things that have caught up with other companies in the past and/or were straight-up SEC violations. Enron is an example.
But circular financing isn't illegal, unlike all the other things you listed
HN has been talking about a crash for almost as long as Dario has been saying white collar jobs will be gone in 6 months and Sam has been saying they’re 6 months away from AGI.
At this point we may literally get commercial nuclear fusion power (which has been “30 years away” for the last 60 years) before any of the other things happen.
People should put money at stake on their idle speculations instead of being another doomer posting consequence-free wishful bias confirmations, hoping AI will fail and leave them be at their now-pointless jobs. This is also why prediction markets are useful signal, which I'm sure is another topic that rustles your jimmies. https://polymarket.com/event/ai-bubble-burst-by
It is going to break the back of SaaS. We can't outspend AI on infrastructure. We've had a global application deployed on GCP then AWS and I've never seen a stockout until this year, and now we get them so often we are being forced to reserve capacity. I also can't wrap my head around the basic economics. If you spend 10x yearly global gross revenue sales on building out infrastructure, software can only get more expensive to make.
Well, now the CFO is in charge of nVidia we may see some problems.
Because while a founder CEO can play fast and loose with gray finance rules, I don't expect an appointed CFO can do the same. At least not one that expects to work again if they are found liable for it. It is kind of interesting in this way that the board has made this choice. It almost says they are looking to insulate against some liability here.
The more cynical framing, especially on this site, is that the "Founder CEO" has a presumptive immunity from prosecution for banal stuff like bookeeping. They aren't perceived as beholden to the shareholders in the same way, because we in the peanut gallery think they "own" the company more than mere investors do.
But obviously no, in the real world fraud is fraud and if you get caught cooking books with other people's money you go to jail.
It’s no longer smart to predict an AI bubble pop. The question is only when. Any article trying to sound smart without giving dates and justification for those dates isn’t saying anything.
I wake up, I read articles about how the AI crash is coming. I figure that it's not actually coming because everyone is talking about it, so it's priced in.
And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop, so I figure that the crash must be coming because there's too much optimism.
> decide that it's not coming because everyone is expecting it and pricing it in.
I'm in the same boat. I'm hoping that the crashing is moving slowly enough that it can unwind carefully, and that not enough data centers got started that things can't simply be cancelled without much harm.
A bunch of fake money borrowed on commitments over data centers never built and plowed back into the ouroboros rather than escaping into the larger economy seems like it could be unwound with only a few people going broke. The only wasted real production would be in all of the chips - and they might be able to go somewhere, somehow. The data centers currently built will certainly be well-utilized - the overcapacity hasn't actually, physically been done, right?
If a bunch of circular financing went into doing something that never fully happened, is that a crash or a lifting of a mask over a real economy that has continued its previous slide?
And if capacity ends up fully utilized and prices do go up, won't there be dozens of viable half-done projects, the best of which that could be dusted off and rolled out again?
It’s made so many people so much money chasing this future that feels just over the next hill. I think being a downer about it is short-sighted, but it’s equally short-sighted to assume that the go-go crazy run that we’ve had will continue forever.
My experience with this has been insane, companies like Nvidia and Micron have made me pretty rich. But you can’t be emo about it. Take advantage of your gains and be a good steward of your resources.
I’m also old enough to remember 1996, and the amazing future as chronicled in Wired magazine. Come 2000, the wipeout was humbling, but many aspects of the web visionaries was correct.
AI hype organizations like Latent Space (+ others) ban people who disrespect any aspect of AI today, and articles like this get buried.
Does Jensen's replacement have the industry connections, clout (or bully factor depending on perspective) and appetite to continue the circular financing? Its the CFO I think that is replacing him and they may have objected to these things all along and might have been over-ruled.
But circular financing isn't illegal, unlike all the other things you listed
A crash (or at least notable correction) is coming but I sure as hell couldn’t time when.
As they say, when you’ve won the game, it’s best to stop playing.
At this point we may literally get commercial nuclear fusion power (which has been “30 years away” for the last 60 years) before any of the other things happen.
(...The design hack to make the geocentric models work. Maybe it's also a metaphor...)
Nobody seems to be able to read the article.
that certainly doesn't stop people from downplaying it!
This link is inaccessible, locked behind a very effective paywall.
Because while a founder CEO can play fast and loose with gray finance rules, I don't expect an appointed CFO can do the same. At least not one that expects to work again if they are found liable for it. It is kind of interesting in this way that the board has made this choice. It almost says they are looking to insulate against some liability here.
But obviously no, in the real world fraud is fraud and if you get caught cooking books with other people's money you go to jail.
And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop, so I figure that the crash must be coming because there's too much optimism.
I go to sleep. Then I wake up and read...
I'm in the same boat. I'm hoping that the crashing is moving slowly enough that it can unwind carefully, and that not enough data centers got started that things can't simply be cancelled without much harm.
A bunch of fake money borrowed on commitments over data centers never built and plowed back into the ouroboros rather than escaping into the larger economy seems like it could be unwound with only a few people going broke. The only wasted real production would be in all of the chips - and they might be able to go somewhere, somehow. The data centers currently built will certainly be well-utilized - the overcapacity hasn't actually, physically been done, right?
If a bunch of circular financing went into doing something that never fully happened, is that a crash or a lifting of a mask over a real economy that has continued its previous slide?
And if capacity ends up fully utilized and prices do go up, won't there be dozens of viable half-done projects, the best of which that could be dusted off and rolled out again?
It’s made so many people so much money chasing this future that feels just over the next hill. I think being a downer about it is short-sighted, but it’s equally short-sighted to assume that the go-go crazy run that we’ve had will continue forever.
My experience with this has been insane, companies like Nvidia and Micron have made me pretty rich. But you can’t be emo about it. Take advantage of your gains and be a good steward of your resources.
I’m also old enough to remember 1996, and the amazing future as chronicled in Wired magazine. Come 2000, the wipeout was humbling, but many aspects of the web visionaries was correct.
Really? It feels like most people are talking about an AI bubble, with a vocal minority in opposition.