I… actually disagree with this even though I don’t want to.
Yes, fuck OpenAI and Meta.
But the problem is that the government has been 500% enabling this “bubble”. Basically any governent grant for the past five or six years has more or less required “AI” to be front and center. The more senior folk have generally been good about “I am doing Machine Learning enhanced construction of that office building, sure, whatever” but this, in turn, has more or less gutted academia as more and more programs have essentially been built around providing what funding is literally asking for. Flipping NOBODY thinks “I am a prompt engineer” is worth anything but scorn and mockery. But when those grants and CFPs basically require a prompt engineer on the proposal to have any chance of being accepted…
It’s easy to say “you should have known better and not lied to us” but… they were telling the lies that were demanded of them. And just cutting them free and letting capitalism sort it out is going to mean pretty much an entire generation lost and countless companies down the drain as well. Which… also won’t be all that useful for getting people healthcare.
Similarly, Jensen is a prick (and always has been but…). But if the rug gets pulled and the “bubble pops”? nVidia is not a US company but it is essential to the US economy and capabilities. We can’t afford to let that go the way of Intel.
Do I think giant checks should be written? No. But we need a LOT of transition grants and programs and possibly outright stimulus checks so that the entire tech and research and science industries can pivot to what is being asked of them now.
Why does anyone need NVIDIA? If they go busy, they sell their assets to pay their debts. Including IP.
I don’t think NVIDIA will go bust. They have a product people want even without ai and have been profitable for years.
However, they will have a giant correction.
I don’t think you’ll like the orgs that buy nVidia IP. I’ll give you a hint: it will be jared and the saudis.
But yes. nVidia is in a really good position to pivot. But that pivot IS important. And it is important that there are companies to actually buy those cards while they shift towards “our flagship is data center and HPC cards” rather than “our flagship is machine learning cards”. Since the nVidia model is very much to manufacture as many flagships as they can and sell the factory seconds and fourths to the rest of the market.
I think the point is that the people should be “bailed out” before the shareholders should be. There should be a safety net in place robust enough that stupid risks like this can be allowed to fail without essentials and ordinary people being caught in the fallout.
The US in particular has embraced 401ks over pensions. The advantage is that you don’t lose the past 20 years of your life if you change jobs. The bad news is that you kinda need the economy to function.
But, regardless: how would you help “the people” without “the companies”? You can give someone 2 grand but that is worth jack all when it comes to paying rent for more than a few months (or one month…) and so forth.
And it still has the fundamental problem of a complete brain and capability drain.
You can help the people by funding social programs like social security, healthcare (medicare, medicaid, and ACA subsidies or better yet a full single-payer healthcare program), food assistance, housing assistance, education, childcare, direct monetary assistance for the working class (such as tax breaks or UBI), etc.
You can put the people before the companies by not bailing out the shareholders of stupid investments like AI, by cracking down on labor violations and monopolies, and by seriously increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals in order to fund the social safety net. Reducing spending on the military industrial complex would probably help too.
Neither 401ks or corporate pensions are a good solution. They place a burden that should be caught by a social safety net on each individual, and further pressure each individual to engage in capitalism in order to secure their retirement, giving more power to the employers. Retirement should not be tied to employment, same as healthcare.
Okay. If we can get all of that infrastructure in place, sure.
Otherwise: A LOT of people in a LOT of industries will be suffering in the medium/long term without some form of offramp.
Okay, but hear me out.
Take the amount of money that would be spent on a bailout. If you go ahead with the bailout, then the majority of that money goes to the wealthy because they are the ones who can afford most of those shares. Some working-class people get aided, but most of the money goes to maintain or even increase the power of the wealthy.
Now, take that same amount of money, and put it towards ACA subsidies, or any other social program that aids the working class. Now the vast majority of that money goes to those who really need it, and it lessens the pain which the working class would be burdened with following the crash.
You can put some of that money directly into useful research grants that aren’t AI related as well.
Whatever your concern is, you can spend the money directly addressing that concern with much more efficiency than a corporate bailout that benefits mostly the wealthy.
Yes. Which is why I specifically mentioned the need for grants and incentive programs to allow those companies and research groups/universities to pivot.
Because, yes, we very much need better social programs. But there are going to be a LOT of people out of jobs. And a LOT of early career/new grads who just spent the past 4-8 years of their life literally training themselves to do what the government et al demanded of them. And they’ll be shit out of luck.
All of which will very much overwhelm whatever half-assed social programs we rapidly implement.
Like… to be blunt, what you are suggesting is very comparable to the “trump healthcare plan” of giving every 2 grand and telling them to figure it out themselves. On the surface, maybe that sounds nice. But that is not much of an insurance premium and would get cleaned out the first time someone gets sick. It is not a solution.
The reality is that we desperately need actual social safety nets and we have needed them for decades at this point. But “We’ll figure something out in a few years, for real this time” doesn’t help people in even the medium term.
