[DrewADesign]

And you imagine these incredibly expensive-to-operate, environmentally damaging, highly specialized, years-outdated GPUs will trigger some sort of technological revolution that won’t be infinitely better served by the shiny new GPUs of the day that will not only be dramatically more powerful, but offer a ton more compute for the amount of electricity used?

The AI use of GPUs didn’t stem from a glut of outdated, discarded units with nearly no market value. All of those old discarded GPUs were, and still are, worthless digital refuse.

The closest analog i can think of to what you’re referring to is cluster computing with old commodity PCs that got companies like Google and Hotmail off the ground… for a few years until they could afford big boy servers and now all of those, and most current PCs on the verge of obsolescence, are also worthless digital refuse.

The big difference is that Google et al chose those PC clusters because they were cheap, commodity pieces right off-the-bat, not because they were narrowly scoped specialty hardware pieces that collectively cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Your supposition fails to account for our history with hardware in any reasonable way.

[rfv6723]

Focusing exclusively on the physical decay and replacement cycle of hardware is a classic case of tunnel vision. It ignores the fact that the semiconductor industry’s true value lies in the evolution of manufacturing processes and architectural design rather than the lifespan of a specific unit. While individual chips eventually become obsolete, the compounding breakthroughs in logic and efficiency are what actually drive the technological revolution you are discounting.

[DrewADesign]

Tunnel vision is ignoring the astonishing amount of money and environmental resources our society is dumping into these very physical, very temporally useful chips and their housing because… of what we learn by doing that. We should have dumped 1/100th of that money into research and we’d have been further along.

This isn’t a normal tech expenditure— the scale of this threatens the economy in a serious way if they get it wrong. That’s 401ks, IRAs, pension plans, houses foreclosed on, jobs lost, surgeries skipped… if we took a tiny fraction of this race-to-hypeland and put towards childhood food insecurity, we could be living in a fundamentally different looking society. The big takeaway from this whole ordeal has nothing to do with semiconductors — it is that rich guys playing with other people’s money singularly focused on becoming king of the hill are still terrible stewards of our financial system.