Posted by greatgib 4 days ago
So far, the circular financing from Nvidia has been peanuts for the company. It's roughly equal to giving 5% discount on hardware, not a big deal when the profit margin is 70%. Trying to prop up new neoclouds and competition is a good idea.
As I understand it, the OpenAI investment was much bigger effective discount but still safe because Nvidia invests gradually in installments only when OpenAI invests in data centers: tit for tat. Maybe OpenAI wanted to get the money now and invest it later, as they seem to be running out of cash.
Nvidia might have wanted more exclusivity/attachment. And OpenAI still seems to have no problem raising money. So maybe there was just a commitment mismatch
Pure speculation though
How do we know it wasn't? OpenAI isn't a publicly traded company, and I guess no one who dares writing anything here actually knows how the numbers look on the inside, so for what we know, it could very well have been worse for OpenAI than Nvidia.
OpenAI is going to be competing for third or fourth place with Anthropic unless one of them pulls off a big capabilities or efficiency leap while remaining believably as good as the other top models. Google and xAI have advantages that the others don't, and are capitalizing on them like crazy. It remains to be seen whether xAI can compete with the Google hardware advantage, but they have economies of scale, differences in mission, and Elon's billions on their side, so it's turning out to be a very interesting race.
Sama could also finagle a funding rabbit or strategic partnership out of his hat and also have the next top tier model, amazing everyone again and keeping a plausible "best in class" lead for a while; OpenAI would have to be down for at least a year before I counted it out completely. It's not looking very pretty for them right now, though.
Genuine question.
But I’m not sure we can say they the big US companies aren’t doing foundational research anymore. I suspect a lot of it is just kept unpublished as a result of the intense competitive pressure, which is disappointing.
I guess there is one thing that Gemini is objectively better at than either, which is long context, and it does seem to be by an order of magnitude. What boggles my mind is why Gemini is still not as good as the open weight frontier models yet. If they got just to parity with that along with their existing long context and strong token pricing, they'd be able to take over the coding market. Are they just biding their time to make their move? Hard to discern.
Enron thought the same thing. Until they had a closer look at what their middle managers were actually doing to the books.
using your numbers, Nvidia didn't drop 70%, it's more on the order of the 5% so at least from that angle, the news narrative holds together superficially.
I saw reports attributing it to a miss on earnings from Azure but they were off by 0.4% on 39% growth. That's 39% instead of 39.4%. And the company stock dropped 10%. This is all of Microsoft - 10% down (!).
It has to tell you there are a LOT of people primed to sell in a hurry on bad news. The "bubble" talk subsided a lot after nVidia smashed earnings last quarter, but largely overlooked how much their whole situation is based on pent up demand. It completely masks the fundamentals.
I still feel like we're sitting on a volcano and seeing puffs of smoke and feeling earth tremors.
https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
Also a portion of their Azure spend was some clever accounting they did if memory serves me
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsofts-historic-plunge-why...
Did Oracle spin off Cerner yet?
Microslop CEO begging for AI $$$ because astronomical overprovisioning is becoming obvious, all big spenders frantically trying to hide CapEx from their books and hallucinate revenue projections like its Enron reloaded and Oracle is already getting sued by bondholders over AI spend [0].
It will be worse than the dot com bust.
0: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://ts2.tech/en/coreweave-stock-slips-as-class-action-no...
90% of their stock is being used as collateral against 33 banks for 18 billion stargate loan to OpenAI.
Given Japanese bond markets right now, 30% circular financing, if the AI narrative falls, ARM is gonna blow up.
Right we have a loop where AI is so expensive (because it's priced to feast on B2B margins) that the best consumer experiences aren't affordable, and they're not affordable so they don't go mainstream, and they're not mainstream so no one is willing to take less money and bank on the incredible volume that would emerge if it went mainstream.
If we can get model pricing cheaper AI entertainment alone will probably carry things (I'm 99% sure NovelAI is already one of their largest customers outside of major AI labs)
If anything I'm more worried about the consumers than the companies.
You should really crunch the numbers on buying and then running enough compute to run a leading edge model. The economics of buying it (never mind running it) just dont add up.
You still haven't factored in "training", the major problem right now that every one remains head in sand about.
I dont need a model to know who Tom Cruise is or how to write SQL if I am asking it "set up my amazon refund" or "cancel xyz service". The moment someone figures out how to build targeted and small it will take off.
And as for training, well having to make ongoing investment into re-training is what killed expert systems, it's what killed all past AI efforts. Just because it's much more "automated" doesn't mean it isnt the same "problem". Till a model learns (and can become a useful digital twin) the consumer market is going to remain "out of reach".
That doesn't mean we dont have an amazing tool at hand, because we do. But the way it's being sold is only going to lead to confusion and disappointment.
> I dont need a model to know who Tom Cruise is or how to write SQL if I am asking it "set up my amazon refund" or "cancel xyz service". The moment someone figures out how to build targeted and small it will take off.
I think people got a lot of ideas when dense models were in vogue that don't hold up today. Kimi K2.5 maybe be a "1T parameter model" but it only has 32B active parameters and still easily trounces any prior dense model, including Llama 405B...
Small models need to make sense in terms of actual UX since beating these higher sparsity MoEs on raw efficiency is harder than people realize.
It will be worse than the dot com bust.
But you're more likely to just cash out early, lose a bunch of gains, then buy back in later at higher prices.
If you can time the crash you can make a shitload of money. But you can't, so you'll come out better if you just keep buying in every paycheck and ride it out just like you have been.
You're right that selling everything and 'going to cash' would be a mistake, but diversifying away from US large cap growth absolutely wouldn't. I'm 60/40 stocks/bonds. My stocks and bonds are 50/50 us/intl. ~ 10% of my us portfolio is small cap value.
What's funny to me is that nobody learns from the past. This is far from the first tech bubble we've had even before the .com crash (canals, railroads, radio...). The answer, every time was diversification.
https://www.investopedia.com/your-s-and-p-500-index-fund-mig...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/your-portfolio-may-be-more-t...
Also, during a crash there is the so called "flight for quality" where people cash out from risky assets and invest in stable ones that can weather the storm. So, try to invest in assets that are A or above (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_Global_Ratings). The chart is for countries, but analysts grade companies as well in case you want to stay away from treasuries/national bonds.
Also diversify geographically. US will likely take the biggest hit if the bubble pops, so perhaps European markets that lagged behind in adopting the technology are safer (IMHO).
Personally, I am preparing by moving money from growth items to stable ones a bit at the time. To diversify even further I am using ETFs that, in addition to what mentioned above
1) pay dividends (whether these distributed or reinvested doesn't really matter) 2) are denominated in or hedged in safer currencies (CHF especially, but also Euro)
You definitely get smaller returns, but the name of the game is to maintain what you have, not to make heaps of money.
Finally, I am not a financial advisor, so do your own valuations/risk assessment analysis.
Current US debt to gdp is 124%, 38.6 trillion. Japan too at 230-240%.
Bond markets in both are looking seriously unhealthy (Japan going via a Liz Truss moment at present).
If the AI bubble falls over, the US government is going to have to print 5 trillion to cover the bubble at least. The only option there is inflate away anyone holding cash.
If hte AI succeeds and people are replaced, the US government faces a massive fiscal cliff of a loss of tax receipts. They won't be able to service the debt and again will be forced to inflate away.
To service current debt projects, AI growth needs to return some 3.2-3.5%, it is currently 0.5%.
Bonds, equities, USD, and housing are all risk assets right now.
And whose fault is that?
However, the consequences are always applied to everyone but the executives and board.
Primarily the fault of our governments not using anti-trust laws for real in, like, decades.
Governments actually do have the power to regulate the economy and to prevent catastrophic crashes from occurring. The warning signs for the AI bubble have been visible for well over a year now, when the entity relationship map between the major players began to resemble a Habsburg family tree... and yet, nothing was done.
The reality is even worse than this. It's not that the government is asleep at the wheel, it's that all financial crises were caused by government intervention to begin with (2009 subprime government backed mortgages, 2020 covid money printing, etc). The big banks, corporations and wall street were only taking advantage of the situation the government helped create in order to enrich themselves.
Average people would have also loved to have taken advantage of it to enrich themselves, if they could understand the system well enough to game it, and some do, so it's not like the blame is only on one participant, but pretty much everyone is to blame:
- the government for creating asset bubbles and closing an eye as it is inflating
- corporations and super wealthy for being greedy and exploiting the system created and run by the government
- the voters for being uneducated and stupid and not seeing the government rob the blind, or for being greedy and complicit on the asset bubble for personal gain, and not holding the government accountable
I never meant such a thing.
>assuming the people in government positions have the actual best interests of the country in mind
They don't. They care about themselves and the lobbyists paying them, and sometimes they throw you a bone to win an election.
>Deregulation specifically led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the current situation, not the existence of regulations itself.
Deregulation is also a form of regulation because the government is the one that removes the previous safeguards put in place via new regulations. And Clinton was the one responsible for the sub-prime mortgage deregulation.
???
Literally all the cloud providers have been reporting severe capacity crunches for the past few quarters -- to the tune of backlogs of triple-digit billions each. As a reminder, a backlog or "Remaining Performance Obligation" (RPO) is money their customers have committed to them but they could not realize because they didn't have enough capacity to serve their workloads. Which is why they are all committing to double-digit billions each in AI CapEx spend over the next few quarters.
And most of them (aside from Oracle, which is trying to borrow its way into this gold rush) are investing money from their double digit billions in profit (per quarter!) into this spend... money that they could have otherwise comfortably held on to for something more palatable to share-holders.
Revenue and return on investment is a valid concern to bring up in this whole GenAI shebang; demand is not.
> Nvidia is likely set to make its “largest ever investment” in ChatGPT firm OpenAI, despite reports that the deal may be under threat in recent weeks. The chip giant’s CEO, Jensen Huang, didn’t say exactly how big the investment would be, but said it would be “nothing like” the $100 billion figure mentioned in the September partnership agreement.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-ceo-well-make-our-largest-...
AI still isnt just hype tho and remains the greatest digital tool ever made by people.
The reality remains that if you adopt AI into your workforce, not replace your workforce with AI, use AI to help with your work - you can do a lot more and faster too.
I just downloaded deepseek on my Win 11 PC - Copilot is obviously more integrated but its not that bad at all. Copilot is very limited in the boxes Microsoft built into it but it is a great tool for average people that only need to interact with AI occasionally to search the internet.
1. Clueless: AI is the future, grant it access to everything and let it do everything, from management to execution. These engineers will be unemployed and companies go bankrupt. This is the majority of the market right now, look what is happening to them from companies to the products themselves.
2. Smart: AI is a tool to improve my work so I can spend less time doing the boring stuff and more time learning and doing cool stuff. This is the minority and the only companies thriving right now.
(Something concrete)