[Mo3]

> I doubt we will see unused GPU capacity

I'd argue we very certainly will. Companies are gobbling up GPUs like there's no tomorrow, assuming demand will remain stable and continue growing indefinitely. Meanwhile LLM fatigue has started to set in, models are getting smaller and smaller and consumer hardware is getting better and better. There's no way this won't end up with a lot of idle GPUs.

[Workaccount2]

>Meanwhile LLM fatigue has started to set in

Has it?

I think there is this compulsion to think that LLMs are made for senior devs, and if devs are getting wary of LLMs, the experiment is over.

I'm not a programmer, my day job isn't tech, and the only people I know who express discontent with LLMs are a few of programmer friends I have. Which I get, but everyone else is using them gleefully for all manner of stuff. And now I am seeing the very first inklings of completely non-technical people making bespoke applets for themselves.

From OpenAI, programming is ~4% of chatGPTs usage. That's 96% being used for other stuff.

I don't see any realistic or grounded forecast that includes a diminishing demand for compute. We're still at the tip of adoption...

[Mistletoe]

You should get on Reddit, people hate AI with a passion there. People I meet in real life hate it also. I think the public actually hates AI more than it should now.

[pessimizer]

> From OpenAI, programming is ~4% of chatGPTs usage. That's 96% being used for other stuff.

I think it's important to remember that a good bunch of this is going to be people using it as an artificial friend, which is not really productive. Really that's destructive, because in that time you could be creating a relationship with an actual person instead of a context soon to be deleted.

But on the other hand, some people are using it as an artificial smart friend, asking it questions that they would be embarrassed to ask to other people, and learning. That could be a very good thing, but it's only as good as the people who own and tune the LLMs are. Sadly, they seem to be a bunch of oligarchs who are half sociopaths and half holy warriors.

As for compute, people using it as an artificial friend are either going to have a low price ceiling, or in an even worse case scenario they are not and it's going to be like gambling addiction.

[xadhominemx]

Test time compute has made consumption highly elastic. More compute = better results. Marginal cost of running these GPUs when they would otherwise be idle is relatively very low. It will be utilized.

[delusional]

> There's no way this won't end up with a lot of idle GPUs.

Nvidia is betting the farm on reinventing GPU compute every 2 years. The GPUs wont end up idle, because they will end up in landfills.

Do I believe that's likely, no, but it is what I believe Nvidia is aiming for.

[goalieca]

What’s the lifetime of these things once they’ve been running hot for 2-3 years

[brazukadev]

This. I just found out that for my MCP needs, Qwen3 4B running local is good enough! So I just stopped using Gemini API.

[idiotsecant]

Your bet is that people will simply use less compute, for the first time in the history of the human race?

[Mo3]

No, mostly less external compute

[mg]

Look at the human body.

2% of it is dedicated to thinking.

My guess is that as a species, we will turn a similar percentage of our environment into thinking matter.

If there are a billion houses on planet earth, 2% of it are 20 million datacenters we still have to build.

[wussboy]

An analogy is not proof. It is not even evidence.