Post
This privacy-preserving, cheap-like-borscht component adds a voice-activated, conversational assistant to a device, sipping power like the clock on your microwave, running on a processor that costs less than a pack of AA batteries. It's *seriously* fucking cool.
There's going to be a lot of this AI, after the AI goes away - just like there was a lot of the web after the dotcom crash, when, overnight, San Francisco had infinity office-space, servers, and techies going begging.
22/
The AI bubble companies are scams. They've spend most of a trillion dollars in capital expenditures, and by their own (very cooked and dishonest) numbers, they are *grossing* a total of $45b/year, industry-wide:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbles-impossible-promises/
At $45b/year (an inflated number, remember!) it's going to take them a *long* time to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars they've spent so far.
2/
But they don't have a long time: the massive GPUs that power AI's "foundation models" and cost six- or seven-figures *each* burn out remarkably quickly. The companies that buy these GPUs claim they'll last five years (and depreciate them over that schedule); however, this is accounting fraud, because in reality, these GPUs have a duty-cycle that's more like *two to three years*:
https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2025/10/15/lifespan-of-ai-chips-the-300-billion-question/
3/
And when the companies run their GPUs *really* hard, they burn out in just *54 days*:
To recoup their existing and announced investments, AI companies will have to bring in *$2 trillion*, more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and Meta:
And they have to bring in that $2 trillion before all those GPUs burn out...which is, again, about 2-3 years.
Or sometimes just 54 days.
4/
AI companies' purchases and R&D expenditures aren't guided by the need to make products that will bring in $2 trillion dollars. AI companies spend money in order to put on a show for investors, to demonstrate that they are *very serious about AI*. Think of all those GPU-stuffed data-centers as akin to a peacock's tailfeathers: an expensive way to attract mates (or, in this case, investors), by emitting costly signals that demonstrate your power:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
5/
Of course, it's far cheaper to *pretend* to be spending a lot of money than it is to actually spend it, and they're doing plenty of that, too. Meta has promised to spend $72b next year on data-centers. However, Meta's annual free cash flow is $52.1b. OpenAI says it will spend $60b/year on data-centers, which is five times its annual revenue of $12.7b (and the company is losing $9b/year).
6/
As *The American Prospect*'s Brian McMahon writes, "How can OpenAI plan to spend *five times* what it brought in?"
https://prospect.org/power/2025-10-15-nvidia-openai-ai-oracle-chips/
I don't know how many of these giant "foundation models" will still be online after the crash, but I would not be surprised if that number is zero.
So the big question is, what comes next? What will the AI bubble leave behind?
7/
This is a small personal instance of Bonfire in the Fediverse.
