My thought exactly. "May guarantee" is meaningless nonsense.
> Nvidia has revised its plans to support a proposed OpenAI data center project in Ohio and is now expected to initially guarantee less than $120 billion
There is no actual information in this article. "Plan", "proposed", "expected", "initially", "less than". It's just a report on the thoughts of some people.
I think they just mean "is expected to guarantee". Since the deal hasn't been signed, Reuters is hedging, but "may guarantee" is definitely awkward wording for something whose entire purpose is certainty...
Except once again Ed Zitron is right, and as he mentioned, there is no guarantee or contract signed, there is only a memorandum of understanding...
NVIDIA keeps showing the smarts acting like a bank, while having none of the liabilities and deferring them to Goldman...
"...Memorandums of understanding signed with six of the world’s premier financial institutions to create these partnerships aim to establish the first compute financing platforms of their kind at global scale to enable the AI infrastructure buildout across NVIDIA’s ecosystem..."
I mean, you can get quotes from four people convinced the earth is flat and that the earth is 6000 years old.
Ed Zitron is bearish on everything to do with AI.
I also don't believe the ROI is great investing in OpenAI and other similar corporations. But unlike Ed, I see the value in the technology. It's just the valuations that are wrong.
Would that be the most expensive single thing ever built? The ISS cost around $150B and is commonly said to be the most expensive single item, but that does include running costs.
Yes, if this thing ever gets built, it will set a whole bunch of new records.
If it doesn't get built, it will still set a bunch of records; some of them probably quite infamous.
It is hard to describe the ridiculous scale they are trying to do there. For comparison, typical electrical demand is 17 GW and peaking to 25, with total generation capacity being 30 GW. That includes us-east-2, which is not a small data centre (consumes probably right around 2 GW, so represents about 10% of the state's power demand).
So they're talking about a project that would increase total power consumption in the state over 50%... in addition to building multiple nuclear power plants to fund it. Predicting 2,500 permanent jobs in a county of 27,000 total people, so that's a lot of people moving in.
The permanent jobs number really puts it in perspective. You're not just dropping a giant data center into an existing community at that point, you're potentially reshaping the county around it
The loans will just take longer to repay. There is a market for Anthropic & OpenAI, it just likely doesn't have the 200B profit each year required for the maths to make sense.
If shit hits the fan, the companies collapse, then Nvidia gets their money from the investors anyways.
Buying the team and then actually making the models open is an interesting avenue for driving hardware demand (basically making openai models the new nemotron).
it'll be a rack based GPU without video ports. The only thing getting sick GPU's will be landfill when they all burn out and the data center rationalization happens.
More like rack-sized GPU that takes in half-megawatt of power as 800 volts DC, and requires 10 gallons per second of liquid cooling or it'll catch fire.
Totally agree these won’t go to consumers but even after a crash I’d home they are able to be sold for parts and not just to landfills. If this all goes into the trash that would be even more tragic than it already is.
> Totally agree these won’t go to consumers but even after a crash I’d home they are able to be sold for parts and not just to landfills. If this all goes into the trash that would be even more tragic than it already is.
So I kinda wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these GPUs go in the dump, given that it sounds like they'd be extremely power-hungry and difficult to use outside a hyperscale data center setting.
The proper server AI chips come on a board that isn't compatible with consumer pcie lanes and have no built-in fans. Completely different ball game in the ultra dense server world.
Nope. The scientific community is eagerly waiting for prices to drop.
Single 5090, single H100, a few 4090s, a few Blackwell PRO 6000... that's all there often is as dedicated devices for a faculty (apart from the oversubscribed bigger clusters with big stuff).
Apart from the chairs doing vision, most of them use them headless.
So, landfill will be highly unlikely, if things get sold fast enough.
I think a more likely scenario is that GPU time in the cloud will be very cheap. If LLM use/profitability doesn't follow the expected path, new deep learning applications could be heavily subsidised.
That’s broadly known and at least they clearly account for it in their numbers, without all the “special financing vehicle” off balance sheet stuff that’s become common in the AI bubble era.
If Nvidia sells hardware for $100B with 75% cross margin, and provides $50 billion in backstop for that same hardware, it would be still be nicely profitable deal ($25B) if the backstop capacity would be a total write-off recovering $0. Reselling that capacity in some large discount below already low backstop price would increase the profits.
It's all those pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and Softbank getting into that $500 billion deal that will be hurt.
Businesses aim to make the most profit possible with their resources. If they can make a 25% margin that is good, but if they can turn around sell thr same thing for a 50% margin, that is much better.
Basically what i am saying is maybe there is a better buyer than openai.
Pretty much, I have said it for a while now, Softbank and Oracle are the ones I would be worried about. Both of them have put their companies wealth behind this, if it goes down so will they.
Others have played it fairly smart in terms of insulating potential issues.
SoftBank has always managed to squeeze by after every mistake selling some early huge wins Alibaba, Nvidia, arm. Wonder if they still have any of those left in the back pocket.
Uh no, NVDIA helping startups get financing so they can buy NVDIA chips is inherently damaging because eventually the debtors will not help with the financing and startups will not be able to buy chips.
A Toyota dealership arranges a loan for you. Through a bank for a used vehicle, sometimes through Toyota itself for new cars.
A house builder will routinely take on part of the loan providing burden to get some of the interest.
Even someone selling you their thirty year old house will often provide seller financing.
You may have ideological opinions against this, which is fine. There are billions of people, for example that are fundamentally opposed to the idea of interest. But like it or not, this is how it has worked for the last ~500ish years.
No, I get this; it is not a problem. It becomes one when they cannot pay back this financing, in the event that they cannot build a sustainable business, which they cannot, because the capital cycle leads to overinvestment, meaning the financiers cannot meet their returns.
H100, almost a five year old GPU, costs more to buy used now than it was to buy brand new at release.
Of course, everything has a lifespan.
Consider a simple arithmetic problem, and this mania will start making sense.
An H100 costs approximately 30k. You can run a decent latest open model on it at 1000 tokens per second batched. Cost on open router is 4$ per 1m tokens.
That's about 120k revenue per year if there's demand. So far, there's unlimited demand.
You, as one person, can likely not make the logistics of this work. But this really works with the economies of scale.
Now, because of that everyone wants to buy GPUs and we don't have enough.
The math works much better with a newer GPU that produces more tokens per second and consumes less energy to do so, even if it costs double. So why would anyone buy an old one? Because demand is orders of magnitude more than supply.
Taking a multi-decade perspective, I wonder if our general analysis is focused too much on the initial wave of LLM tech and current gen GPUs.
Owning a massive data center connected to water and power and network that can be targeted or converted to developing needs seems like a decent problem to have for the big cloud companies. We have compute hungry companies and media, in addition to cryptocurrencies etc, and we’ll have more of them in 2045.
I don’t know if I’m underestimating how purpose-built these datacenters are, or overestimating the accountants in the corporate vehicles building them, but the broader situation doesn’t seem as fragile as 1929 or 2008 (even if the businesses are overvalued and LLMs fall totally out of fashion).
It is strained analogy, heavily. I am not paid by Toyota. I am vetted for my ability to pay the loan. Me buying a car with borrowed money is not circular financing.
If most of Toyota earnings went from money they borrowed to me, it would be an issue. But, in fact, that is not how Toyota business works.
This is probably a lot more related to the fact they want to make GPUs an asset class. Nvidia is banking on the fact there will be an entire market that will guarantee whatever anyone needs.
His numbers might be off or he might not have all of them.
But still I can not escape that he is most likely correct. All of this equipment needs to be paid. With interest and profit. With the usual overheads that the companies run. And if more is being bought each year. It doesn't seem like one and done deal. And then just asking where will all that money come from is very good one. And one we should be very honest about.
If you have someone walking on tightrope over the grand canyon in stormy weather, you don't need the exact wind speed to make educated guess that the winner will be gravity.
I think he is too emotional and overly sensational though.
What would happen to Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, if tomorrow someone released an open weights model on HuggingFace that matched performance and accuracy of Opus 5 running locally on an RTX 5070? That won’t happen tomorrow, but it will likely happen someday… what’s the plan beyond “don’t be the one holding the bags?”
It seems very very unlikely that an Opus 5 matching local model that runs on a 5070 will be released within the next 5 years (I don't want to say "ever").
If it does happen then NVidia will sell a lot of 5070s though!
Nothing would really change IMO? 99% of users don't have anything like a RTX5070 (mobile especially).
Even if it did, it still doesn't make much economic sense running a model locally vs on a datacentre.
For example, I managed to just about squeeze a Q2 quant of Qwen 3.7 27b on my 9070XT. I get around 60tps decode (slightly faster prefill). _but_ it uses 300W of power to do so. At UK electricity rates of 30c/kWh this works out at something like 42c/MTok. I can get far far better models on openrouter cheaper than that, plus I'm not horrendously constrained on context length.
I dunno a lot of things said about AI economics sound like an IBM executive making reassuring statements about their terminal/mainframe business before the personal computer took off.
Like even if you run it in a datacenter in this scenario, you could do it on a cheap GPU instance in Azure, you still wouldnt need OpenAI or Anthropic specific clouds.
>uses 300W of power to do so.
There are plenty of people with phat electricity pipes in their on prem server rooms that have been vacated for cloud. Companies who want the benefits of AI but dont want the risk of sending their data to foreign API endpoints.
You're suggesting that if a very good and cheap AI model came out tomorrow everyone would rush out to rent Azure instances to run batch size 1 inference on their model?
Those companies will be quick to copy the tech, inference cost would plummet and there is a greater chance that these companies could make it to solvency. At least in the short term. Long term it might not be so great as consume hardware catches up.
There’s no reason to assume frontier-level intelligence eventually collapses all the way onto a midrange consumer GPU. In fact, there are quite a few reasons not to assume that (information-theoretic constraints, etc).
But, it could happen for a coding-focused model, or an accounting-focused model, etc. most tasks only need a subset of the total model to be done effectively.
I'm pointing out that there's no known information theoretic constraint about the impossibility of frontier AI models being improved to fit/run on a small GPU.
Please do not make up plausible sounding science facts.
I will not claim a 5070, but there is already evidence in nature that you can get very good general intelligence with an order of magnitude less wattage.
There are constraints of course- training takes way longer.
Could you not say the exact same of image gen models? For those that haven't kept up with that domain, you can now efficiently run high quality image gen models on any plain old video card, with phenomenal results.
Workloads will inflate just as they have been. Remember when llm assisted development used to be good only for a function, then a whole file, then a handful of files, then a code base, then a full stack, etc etc etc.
People will claim to have “enough” even though they already have the equivalent of last years capabilities locally.
probably not all that much... the market would dip, just like every time a new open weights model gets announced. but hundreds of millions of people aren't going to immediately self-hosting their own models.
the biggest winner in that scenario would be ai providers, who suddenly have a capable model that they can serve much more efficiently. and the incumbents have a whole lot of compute. wouldn't anthropic and openAI just start offering that open weights model at prices that nobody else could compete with?
They could but then their valuation is no longer justifiable, which breaks a lot of things downstream (loans being the biggie). They'd rather lose money than start making money in a non defensible way.
If I could have shown up somewhere in 2022 with a Mac Studio M1 Max w/ 64GB of RAM running Qwen-3.6-27B or 35B-A3B, I would have pretty much been a demigod - to a degree far more impressive than being able to run Opus 5 locally today.
So yes, I think your scenario is likely to eventually happen, but there will be a much more powerful, capable frontier model then.
"eventually" is actually a function of frontier model capabilities. You only get Qwen6-27B when you have Opus 7 producing extremely high quality tokens for them to train on. So the market for local models is always significantly behind the frontier, by definition.
'May guarantee' is an oxymoron I've never come across before. Mangled headline.
The article title is "Nvidia scales back funding guarantee for Ohio OpenAI data center, WSJ reports".
My thought exactly. "May guarantee" is meaningless nonsense.
> Nvidia has revised its plans to support a proposed OpenAI data center project in Ohio and is now expected to initially guarantee less than $120 billion
There is no actual information in this article. "Plan", "proposed", "expected", "initially", "less than". It's just a report on the thoughts of some people.
I think they just mean "is expected to guarantee". Since the deal hasn't been signed, Reuters is hedging, but "may guarantee" is definitely awkward wording for something whose entire purpose is certainty...
Except once again Ed Zitron is right, and as he mentioned, there is no guarantee or contract signed, there is only a memorandum of understanding...
NVIDIA keeps showing the smarts acting like a bank, while having none of the liabilities and deferring them to Goldman...
"...Memorandums of understanding signed with six of the world’s premier financial institutions to create these partnerships aim to establish the first compute financing platforms of their kind at global scale to enable the AI infrastructure buildout across NVIDIA’s ecosystem..."
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-partners-with-apol...
Ed Zitron is clueless. He’s the Jim Cramer of AI.
A broken clock…
He hasn't been right on everything, but he definitely has been right repeatedly when it comes to the MOUs. Clueless is a bit strong.
Three more voices who agree with Zitron:
"Aswath Damodaran: Big Tech Has No Idea How AI Pays Off" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229981
"Why Wall Street is Ignoring Big Tech's Debt" - https://youtu.be/NufJ7g63KSY
"Just how big is the hidden leverage of AI hyperscalers?" - https://archive.is/iLeYs
Lots a broken clocks would you say?
I mean, you can get quotes from four people convinced the earth is flat and that the earth is 6000 years old.
Ed Zitron is bearish on everything to do with AI.
I also don't believe the ROI is great investing in OpenAI and other similar corporations. But unlike Ed, I see the value in the technology. It's just the valuations that are wrong.
>> It's just the valuations that are wrong.
Now dont you go around quoting Ed Zitron :-) not fair...
It's worth noting that this is deal that has never been signed previously.
There's a release from DoE about it: https://www.energy.gov/articles/fact-sheet-department-energy...
That's a horrible amount of gas energy generation.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-in-talks-t... has more details. The whole campus build could be as much as $500B.
Would that be the most expensive single thing ever built? The ISS cost around $150B and is commonly said to be the most expensive single item, but that does include running costs.
Yes, if this thing ever gets built, it will set a whole bunch of new records.
If it doesn't get built, it will still set a bunch of records; some of them probably quite infamous.
It is hard to describe the ridiculous scale they are trying to do there. For comparison, typical electrical demand is 17 GW and peaking to 25, with total generation capacity being 30 GW. That includes us-east-2, which is not a small data centre (consumes probably right around 2 GW, so represents about 10% of the state's power demand).
So they're talking about a project that would increase total power consumption in the state over 50%... in addition to building multiple nuclear power plants to fund it. Predicting 2,500 permanent jobs in a county of 27,000 total people, so that's a lot of people moving in.
The permanent jobs number really puts it in perspective. You're not just dropping a giant data center into an existing community at that point, you're potentially reshaping the county around it
The $500B number is hard to even contextualize. Calling it a "data center" almost undersells what is being proposed
Nvidia is turning into a savings and loan company that happens to design computer chips on the side. What could possibly go wrong.
The loans will just take longer to repay. There is a market for Anthropic & OpenAI, it just likely doesn't have the 200B profit each year required for the maths to make sense.
If shit hits the fan, the companies collapse, then Nvidia gets their money from the investors anyways.
NV might end up owning them.
Buying the team and then actually making the models open is an interesting avenue for driving hardware demand (basically making openai models the new nemotron).
Unlikely but quite interesting.
I'm hoping when the shit hits the fan, you can get a sick GPU for cheap.
it'll be a rack based GPU without video ports. The only thing getting sick GPU's will be landfill when they all burn out and the data center rationalization happens.
More like rack-sized GPU that takes in half-megawatt of power as 800 volts DC, and requires 10 gallons per second of liquid cooling or it'll catch fire.
Looks like I'll have to get back into casemodding then
Totally agree these won’t go to consumers but even after a crash I’d home they are able to be sold for parts and not just to landfills. If this all goes into the trash that would be even more tragic than it already is.
> Totally agree these won’t go to consumers but even after a crash I’d home they are able to be sold for parts and not just to landfills. If this all goes into the trash that would be even more tragic than it already is.
I'm not an accountant (so I could be wrong), but I'm vaguely under the impression it's sometimes financially beneficial to "write off" inventory, and to do that you have to destroy the items (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial, https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/05/30/apples-lisa-entom...).
So I kinda wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these GPUs go in the dump, given that it sounds like they'd be extremely power-hungry and difficult to use outside a hyperscale data center setting.
I went down a rabbit hole of refurbing burnt out crypto gpus. It’s really not too complicated but can be hit or miss. Need to get a box full.
The proper server AI chips come on a board that isn't compatible with consumer pcie lanes and have no built-in fans. Completely different ball game in the ultra dense server world.
> rack based GPU without video ports
Still fine for running APL with the dfns compiler, Futhark or other array languages directly hosted on the GPU itself!
Nope. The scientific community is eagerly waiting for prices to drop.
Single 5090, single H100, a few 4090s, a few Blackwell PRO 6000... that's all there often is as dedicated devices for a faculty (apart from the oversubscribed bigger clusters with big stuff).
Apart from the chairs doing vision, most of them use them headless. So, landfill will be highly unlikely, if things get sold fast enough.
[delayed]
More likely is communities will end up with a bunch of half-built abandoned datacenter projects.
Isn't that what they said?
I think a more likely scenario is that GPU time in the cloud will be very cheap. If LLM use/profitability doesn't follow the expected path, new deep learning applications could be heavily subsidised.
> If shit hits the fan, the companies collapse, then Nvidia gets their money from the investors anyways.
Is Nvidia guaranteeing the financing because OpenAI doesn’t have investor cash to pay the costs outright?
As it's said... "Every company eventually becomes a bank."
Soon the GPUs will just be the promotional gift you get for opening a sufficiently large Nvidia financing account
Wait until you hear about how airlines work, you'll start babbling about the rewards-points bubble
That’s broadly known and at least they clearly account for it in their numbers, without all the “special financing vehicle” off balance sheet stuff that’s become common in the AI bubble era.
I would like to see the numbers.
If Nvidia sells hardware for $100B with 75% cross margin, and provides $50 billion in backstop for that same hardware, it would be still be nicely profitable deal ($25B) if the backstop capacity would be a total write-off recovering $0. Reselling that capacity in some large discount below already low backstop price would increase the profits.
It's all those pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and Softbank getting into that $500 billion deal that will be hurt.
Businesses aim to make the most profit possible with their resources. If they can make a 25% margin that is good, but if they can turn around sell thr same thing for a 50% margin, that is much better.
Basically what i am saying is maybe there is a better buyer than openai.
Pretty much, I have said it for a while now, Softbank and Oracle are the ones I would be worried about. Both of them have put their companies wealth behind this, if it goes down so will they.
Others have played it fairly smart in terms of insulating potential issues.
A better world is just a few steps away
SoftBank has always managed to squeeze by after every mistake selling some early huge wins Alibaba, Nvidia, arm. Wonder if they still have any of those left in the back pocket.
Indeed, Masa has more lives than a cat.
Have you seen his investor presentations? He is no longer building his war chest and is now executing on SoftBank’s 400 year plan
Goose value 71 here: https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/investor...
That shit looks like something that they’d show in a Netflix cult documentary.
That was terrifying. This is representative of who's funding all of this?
As soon as you said Goose, I knew exactly what this was going to be.
We need more Artificial Goose Intelligence
The golden egg factory section drawing made it all very clear.
Is Softbank making any money or just dissipating Alibaba gains?
no quack
This cannot possibly be a real thing, it has to be an elaborate 4chan shitpost
This is meaningless in the long run; the broader problem is the constant circular financing and "Fake profits".
It is not the first time, either; the capital cycle will prevail.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-capital-cycle-theory/
All economics is circular financing, that's how it works.
You pay Apple for a MacBook, Apple uses it to develop a better MacBook.
What goes wrong is leverage. We haven't seen much hint of the 10x leverage kind of deals that brought down the house in 2008.
Uh no, NVDIA helping startups get financing so they can buy NVDIA chips is inherently damaging because eventually the debtors will not help with the financing and startups will not be able to buy chips.
Again, this is how all of economics works.
A Toyota dealership arranges a loan for you. Through a bank for a used vehicle, sometimes through Toyota itself for new cars.
A house builder will routinely take on part of the loan providing burden to get some of the interest.
Even someone selling you their thirty year old house will often provide seller financing.
You may have ideological opinions against this, which is fine. There are billions of people, for example that are fundamentally opposed to the idea of interest. But like it or not, this is how it has worked for the last ~500ish years.
No, I get this; it is not a problem. It becomes one when they cannot pay back this financing, in the event that they cannot build a sustainable business, which they cannot, because the capital cycle leads to overinvestment, meaning the financiers cannot meet their returns.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-capital-cycle-theory/
It's a problem when there's 10x leverage AND the underlying asset massively deprecates in value.
Neither of those look likely yet.
You don’t think GPUs depreciate massively in value? I think they are written off to zero in less than 5 years.
And if you look at the ARR of the companies “buying” them, I think we can see there’s some significant leverage going on.
H100, almost a five year old GPU, costs more to buy used now than it was to buy brand new at release.
Of course, everything has a lifespan.
Consider a simple arithmetic problem, and this mania will start making sense.
An H100 costs approximately 30k. You can run a decent latest open model on it at 1000 tokens per second batched. Cost on open router is 4$ per 1m tokens.
That's about 120k revenue per year if there's demand. So far, there's unlimited demand.
You, as one person, can likely not make the logistics of this work. But this really works with the economies of scale.
Now, because of that everyone wants to buy GPUs and we don't have enough.
The math works much better with a newer GPU that produces more tokens per second and consumes less energy to do so, even if it costs double. So why would anyone buy an old one? Because demand is orders of magnitude more than supply.
Taking a multi-decade perspective, I wonder if our general analysis is focused too much on the initial wave of LLM tech and current gen GPUs.
Owning a massive data center connected to water and power and network that can be targeted or converted to developing needs seems like a decent problem to have for the big cloud companies. We have compute hungry companies and media, in addition to cryptocurrencies etc, and we’ll have more of them in 2045.
I don’t know if I’m underestimating how purpose-built these datacenters are, or overestimating the accountants in the corporate vehicles building them, but the broader situation doesn’t seem as fragile as 1929 or 2008 (even if the businesses are overvalued and LLMs fall totally out of fashion).
It turns out what’s fine for companies to do with individuals at relatively small scales is not fine for companies to do at massive scale and leverage
Our currently accepted models of macroeconomics are based on exactly the opposite assumption - that scale reduces issues.
It could be wrong, sure. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
For what it's worth, I agree with you on the leverage part, just not the scale part.
It is strained analogy, heavily. I am not paid by Toyota. I am vetted for my ability to pay the loan. Me buying a car with borrowed money is not circular financing.
If most of Toyota earnings went from money they borrowed to me, it would be an issue. But, in fact, that is not how Toyota business works.
Shouldn’t the analogy be “Apple lends you money to buy a MacBook. You pay Apple for a MacBook…”
This happens as well, no? If you pay for anything in instalments that is effectively a loan.
Typically not a loan on the seller’s books and typically not for the lion’s share of the seller’s annual revenue, no?
Great you brought that up, if you look at Apple's website you can now 'lease' a MacBook for 30-60$ per month :)
Yeah but the lease is provided by Klarna, not Apple.
Yeah but Apple pays Klarna to provide that service. Circular financing!
This is probably a lot more related to the fact they want to make GPUs an asset class. Nvidia is banking on the fact there will be an entire market that will guarantee whatever anyone needs.
A rapidly depreciating asset class of something that loses almost all its value in a few years and can't be repaired?
I’m just the messenger.
The numbers have become so large that normal corporate risk management starts looking quaint
Ed Zitron might be right
His numbers might be off or he might not have all of them.
But still I can not escape that he is most likely correct. All of this equipment needs to be paid. With interest and profit. With the usual overheads that the companies run. And if more is being bought each year. It doesn't seem like one and done deal. And then just asking where will all that money come from is very good one. And one we should be very honest about.
If you have someone walking on tightrope over the grand canyon in stormy weather, you don't need the exact wind speed to make educated guess that the winner will be gravity.
I think he is too emotional and overly sensational though.
I think he is wrong on the overall usefulness of AI but I have yet to see someone actually refuting his economic arguments.
Ed Zitron has not yet made a single correct prediction about AI :)
In other words: the investments that were never going to happen are not going to happen.
While it is true they haven't lost anything, it does signal to shareholders, potential share holders and current VC's the direction of things.
The Möbius strip of AI financing continues…
it seems much more like Relativity by M. C. Escher where no one is quite sure how to exit without bringing everything down with them?
What would happen to Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, if tomorrow someone released an open weights model on HuggingFace that matched performance and accuracy of Opus 5 running locally on an RTX 5070? That won’t happen tomorrow, but it will likely happen someday… what’s the plan beyond “don’t be the one holding the bags?”
I guess I'd like to understand the technical reasoning on how you think an how an Opus 5 could over time fit on an RTX 5070.
It seems very very unlikely that an Opus 5 matching local model that runs on a 5070 will be released within the next 5 years (I don't want to say "ever").
If it does happen then NVidia will sell a lot of 5070s though!
Nothing would really change IMO? 99% of users don't have anything like a RTX5070 (mobile especially).
Even if it did, it still doesn't make much economic sense running a model locally vs on a datacentre.
For example, I managed to just about squeeze a Q2 quant of Qwen 3.7 27b on my 9070XT. I get around 60tps decode (slightly faster prefill). _but_ it uses 300W of power to do so. At UK electricity rates of 30c/kWh this works out at something like 42c/MTok. I can get far far better models on openrouter cheaper than that, plus I'm not horrendously constrained on context length.
I dunno a lot of things said about AI economics sound like an IBM executive making reassuring statements about their terminal/mainframe business before the personal computer took off.
Like even if you run it in a datacenter in this scenario, you could do it on a cheap GPU instance in Azure, you still wouldnt need OpenAI or Anthropic specific clouds.
>uses 300W of power to do so.
There are plenty of people with phat electricity pipes in their on prem server rooms that have been vacated for cloud. Companies who want the benefits of AI but dont want the risk of sending their data to foreign API endpoints.
You're suggesting that if a very good and cheap AI model came out tomorrow everyone would rush out to rent Azure instances to run batch size 1 inference on their model?
inference is the cheap part; training is expensive. what compute infrastructure would train this mythical magic model?
Exactly. If OpenAI and Anthropic didn't have to train new models, they'd (probably) be instantly profitable and with good margins.
Those companies will be quick to copy the tech, inference cost would plummet and there is a greater chance that these companies could make it to solvency. At least in the short term. Long term it might not be so great as consume hardware catches up.
Inference time scaling means whoever had the most compute has the highest intelligence model.
If you could run Opus 5 on a 5070 then the labs must have achieved RSI at that point
There’s no reason to assume frontier-level intelligence eventually collapses all the way onto a midrange consumer GPU. In fact, there are quite a few reasons not to assume that (information-theoretic constraints, etc).
But, it could happen for a coding-focused model, or an accounting-focused model, etc. most tasks only need a subset of the total model to be done effectively.
There's no information theoretic constraint we know of that prevents this. You will almost surely win a Turing award if you can prove this.
It's almost a given that whatever is frontier intelligence today will run on a potato in a few years.
Kinda silly to follow your “prove it” challenge with an absurd claim you most certainly cannot prove, much less support with evidence.
It was not a "prove it" challenge.
I'm pointing out that there's no known information theoretic constraint about the impossibility of frontier AI models being improved to fit/run on a small GPU.
Please do not make up plausible sounding science facts.
I will not claim a 5070, but there is already evidence in nature that you can get very good general intelligence with an order of magnitude less wattage.
There are constraints of course- training takes way longer.
Could you not say the exact same of image gen models? For those that haven't kept up with that domain, you can now efficiently run high quality image gen models on any plain old video card, with phenomenal results.
We could very well reach a point where models don't get better anymore, or where consumer models are good enough for 95% of the use-cases.
> on an RTX 5070
RTX 5070 prices go up ~N times. Nvidia makes more money because it's easier to make these things than it's to make a GB300.
Workloads will inflate just as they have been. Remember when llm assisted development used to be good only for a function, then a whole file, then a handful of files, then a code base, then a full stack, etc etc etc.
People will claim to have “enough” even though they already have the equivalent of last years capabilities locally.
probably not all that much... the market would dip, just like every time a new open weights model gets announced. but hundreds of millions of people aren't going to immediately self-hosting their own models.
the biggest winner in that scenario would be ai providers, who suddenly have a capable model that they can serve much more efficiently. and the incumbents have a whole lot of compute. wouldn't anthropic and openAI just start offering that open weights model at prices that nobody else could compete with?
They could but then their valuation is no longer justifiable, which breaks a lot of things downstream (loans being the biggie). They'd rather lose money than start making money in a non defensible way.
I think this might be the core signal that it’s a bubble.
If I could have shown up somewhere in 2022 with a Mac Studio M1 Max w/ 64GB of RAM running Qwen-3.6-27B or 35B-A3B, I would have pretty much been a demigod - to a degree far more impressive than being able to run Opus 5 locally today.
So yes, I think your scenario is likely to eventually happen, but there will be a much more powerful, capable frontier model then.
"eventually" is actually a function of frontier model capabilities. You only get Qwen6-27B when you have Opus 7 producing extremely high quality tokens for them to train on. So the market for local models is always significantly behind the frontier, by definition.
wobble wobble