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Firm that lets you rent out your idle Mac for AI inference workloads warns of plummeting token costs — Darkbloom network sees earnings drop to $1.23 a day as Anthropic tokens fall 77%. (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 28 points 1 week ago (11 children)

And nVidia is now selling hardware for local models specifically. For cheap.

There is a clear winner in the AI race and its hardware makers. To me, its almost like Jensen Huang calculated this outcome quitea while ago, and fed into the bubble with the loans to the software companies.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    During a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling shovels.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    You do, however Nvidia got greedy and started to circular invest in the billions if not trillions into those buying the shovels. Now, when the bubble bursts, Nvidia will be hit massively as well.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Eh somewhat. I think they were careful enough to just have the loans not actually be in their name if you follow it as deeply as Ed Zitron has. But Nvidia is screwed from a different angle as they've set up expectations of selling more GPUs to data center builders each quarter in order to justify their share price.

    That's still much better than holding the actual bag though.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Nvidia did a massive share buyback with a portion of the ridiculous profits they made last year. That serves to temper expectations, as they're signaling that they're not going to be investing all their profit in yet more production (which is difficult anyway given they don't have their own fabs and TSMC seems to be running at full capacity).

    Likely they'll be doing another one next year and shareholders will be happy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    If they can refinance their own customers to buy their own products without getting caught in the middle that would be even more scandalous than the circular financing itself but then, the financial system has been completely broken for a good while.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    They're basically operating as a kinda/sorta backstop on the loans by saying they'll rent them back if everything falls through and be a guaranteed customer...but I think they did so in snaky legalese that lets them ultimately get away without actually renting them. I think it's through like subsidiaries and shit. Oracle is one of the actual bag holders and I think there are several others. They set up shell companies for each specific data center project and shit. It's quite the fucking racket and should pretty obviously be illegal from multiple angles.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Which hardware is for running local models that is cheap? I was not looking at GPU market for around two years, because I thought everything got expensive through the roof.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Nothing consumer grade - I'm talking about nVidia DGX.

    $6k for the cheapest might seem expensive to a lot of people, but for an engineer with stupid amounts of data and a 1.2kW power draw, it's insanely affordable from corporate perspectives.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Depending on what you're looking at, a Mac Studio might be the most bang for your buck. They have much higher memory bandwidth than the DGX Spark

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    I'd have to look way more into it, but from what we were looking at, DGX spark is made with the intent of scaling from local development to datacenter execution. From memory the Mac Studio was an extremely beefy workstation.

    Both serve the purpose better than whatever my laptop's RTX ADA 2000 can produce lol

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