When the AI bubble pops, what will remain? Cheap GPUs at firesale prices, skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and open source models that already do impressive things, but will grow far more impressive after being optimized:
When the AI bubble pops, what will remain? Cheap GPUs at firesale prices, skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and open source models that already do impressive things, but will grow far more impressive after being optimized:
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.
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)
There are plenty of these, yes. But there are also plenty of consumer-grade GPUs being used for it too.