AI 붐이 다른 모든 곳의 부족 현상을 초래하고 있습니다
The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else
댓글 (692)
If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, then AI buying up all the electricians and network engineers is a (correct) signal. People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. Same with those memory chips that they are gobbling up, it just tells everyone where to make a living.
If it's a flash in a pan, and it turns out to be empty promises, then all those people are wasting their time.
What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or manufacturing capacity.
Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things
I can’t speak to the economy as a whole, but the tech economy has a long history of bubbles and scams. Some huge successes, too—but gets it wrong more often than it gets it right.
Thing is, I am still waiting to see where it increases productivity aside from some extremely small niches like speech to text and summarizing some small text very fast.
> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
We've so far found two ways in recent memory that our economy massively fails when it comes to externalities.
Global Warming continues to get worse, and we cannot globally coordinate to stop it when the markets keep saying "no, produce more oil, make more CO2, it makes _our_ stock go up until the planet eventually dies, but our current stock value is more important than the nebulous entire planet's CO2".
Ads and addiction to gambling games, tiktok, etc also are a negative externality where the company doing the advertising or making the gambling game gains profit, but at the expense of effectively robbing money from those with worse impulse control and gambling problems.
Even if the market votes that AI will successfully extract enough money to be "here to stay", I think that doesn't necessarily mean the market is getting things right nor that it necessarily increases productivity.
Gambling doesn't increase productivity, but the market around kalshi and sports betting sure indicates it's on the rise lately.
The problem is boom-bust cycles. Electricians will always be in demand but it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician - add easily 2-3 years on top to work on the really nasty stuff aka 50 kV and above.
No matter what, the growth of AI is too rapid and cannot be sustained. Even if the supposed benefits of AI all come true - the level of growth cannot be upheld because everything else suffers.
The answer to this is two part:
1. Have we seen an increase in capability over the last couple of years? The answer here is clearly yes.
2. Do we think that this increase will continue? This is unknown. It seems so, but we don't know and these firms are clearly betting that it will.
1a. Do we think that with existing capability that there is tremendous latent demand? If so the buildout is still rational if progress stops.
That's why it can't just be a market signal "go become an electrician" when the feedback loop is so slow. It's a social/governmental issue. If you make careers require expensive up-front investment largely shouldered by the individuals, you not only will be slow to react but you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the signals right up until the signals went away.
It's a loop of captcha which never ends
Singapore is an IQ shredder. It is an economically productive metropolis that
sucks in bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at the
cost of having a demographically unsustainable family unit.
Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.
Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.
And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
Or put more plainly, being a big fish in a small pond is not better than being a small fish.
What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?
If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are American or ethnic Americans.
Heh, I've just realized about 2 years ago that it's worse.
Cities are people shredders. Based on the information I've found, cities have lower fertility rates than rural areas and this has been the case ever since they were created.
I absolutely love cities, but with ever increasing urbanization and unless we make HUGE changes to facilitate people easily having kids in cities (and I'm talking HUGE, stuff like having stay at home parents for the first 6-7 years of their childhood, free access to communal areas that offer all the services required to take care of kids of any age, free education, etc), humanity will probably not be able to sustain a population of more than say, 1 billion people. Probably much fewer.
Which I guess, could work, but we will be in totally uncharted territory.
And then AI comes in and things become... very interesting.
The people who are angry are the ones who had their cheese moved.
Think of the PC gamers, who first dealt with COVID supply shocks, followed by crypto making GPUs scarce and untenable, then GPU makers raising prices and narrowing inventory to only the highest-end SKUs, only to outright abandon them entirely for AI - which then also consumed their RAM and SSDs. A hobby that used to be enjoyed by folks on even a modest budget is now a theft risk given the insane resale priced of parts on the second-hand market due to scarcity.
And that extends to others as well. The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission artistry work through Patreons and conventions and the like are suddenly struggling as customers and companies spew out AI slop using their work and without compensation. Tech workers, previously the wealthy patron of artisans and communities, are now being laid off en masse for AI CapEx buildouts and share pumps as investors get cold feet about what these systems are actually doing to the economy at large (definite bad, questionable good, uncertain futures).
Late stage capitalism’s sole respite was consumerism, and we can’t even do that anymore thanks to AI gobbling up all the resources and capital. It’s no wonder people are pissed at AI boosters trying to say this is a miracle technology that’ll lift everyone up: it’s already kicking people down, and nobody actually wants to admit or address that lest their investments be disrupted to protect humans.
But when everyone has access to recordings of the world's best musicians at all times, why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play? Why sing Christmas songs together when you can put on the Sinatra Christmas jazz playlist on Spotify?
The battlecry of the new revolution?
Your whole post is a bit vague and naive. If people enjoyed real art more than AI art, then the market will decide it. If they don’t then we should not be making people enjoy what they don’t.
There's a pretty deep back catalog of PC games that will run on integrated GPUs.
> The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission artistry...
Those are people turning their hobby into a side hustle. If it's a hustle they depend on, this sucks. If it's actually a hobby, meh. You're drawing for you. Who cares if AI can also do it.
Every week in 2026 Google will pay for the cost of a Burj Khalifa. Amazon for a Wembley Stadium.
Facebook will spend a France-England tunnel every month.
So they couldn't really build any of these projects weekly since the cost of construction materials / design engineers / construction workers would inflate rapidly.
Worth keeping in mind when people say "we could have built 52 hospitals instead!" or similar. Yes, but not really... since the other constraints would quickly reveal themselves
It'll be the next automobile, every well-to-do household will want one eventually. Every hospital, to assist/replace nurses. Every retirement home for the same reason.
Japan and China alone, with their ageing populations in dire need of nursing, will easily pay for the investment with that one use-case.
I see a future where most people will buy tablets to save money and the desktop will be for only a few, a very few, just when self-hosting is becoming trendy and people are saying "it's time for GNU/Linux to take Windows' place"...
Now if the LLMs could modify their own nets, and improve themselves, then that would be immensely valuable for the world.
But as of now, its a billionaires wet dream to threaten all workers as a way to replace labor.
Not sure :)
I expect different things, don't think Wall Street allows good things to happen to ordinary people
So would you rather stop billionaires from doing it?
If false, I'm thinking - there's me, thinking I'm doing my bit to help . . .
It's amazing how South Park has better economic sense than HN (or maybe not actually)
The AI boom is just like a conference- where new and shiny seems to do wonders, but when you come back to workplace, none of that seem to work or fit in!
Unfortunately, though it has left mostly the Europeans, but all American vassals in an even worse position as the vampiric fake American ruling class, devours America like Saturn devouring his son, as famously depicted by Goya. The parasitic American empire is in a bit of a panic and it is pulling out all the stops to make everyone else pay for its failures, evil, and detrimental activities. That comes in the form of extracting value from Europe and damaging their economy in order to make them even more dependent vassals who still think they can rebel like a toddler threading to run away from home, and dominating the Americas that are effectively helpless in the face of Americas overwhelming position over them.
The anxiety and panic among the American ruling class is palpable among the clubhouse chatter. The empire is in a bit of a panic to sustain itself, just as much as it is also trying to devour what little value is left among the American pension funds and people to save itself; Saturn devouring his son for fear of the prophesy that his child would overthrow him.
Unless your rolling out dumb reactionary regulation like forbid AI or crypto coins, etc.
It's annoying right now, but on a timescale of 5-10 years ram/gpu prices will be back to normal.
Could we regulate investors reduce risk of bubbles maybe, but it's hard. Probably easier to limit the impact of bubbles on humans with a social safety net.
"Smart" phones have ceased to be smart years ago. They are now instruments of mass surveillance, and the tech industry has convinced people that 1) you need one not to be a social outcast, 2) you need to upgrade it every year, 3) not having root access is for your own good.
I'll stick to my Pixel 9a running Graphene for the forseeable future.
- bigger TV, my "old" not even 4K video projector is enough
- faster phone with more memory or better camera, my current one as "just" 5G, is enough
- faster laptop/desktop, I can work on the laptop, game on desktop
- higher resolution VR headsets (but I'll still get a Steam Frame because it's more free)
- denser smart watch, I'm not even using the ones I have
... so, the situation is bad, yes, and yet I don't really care. The hardware I have is good enough and in fact regardless of AI I've been arguing we've reached "peak" IT few years ago already. Of course I wouldn't mind "better" everything (higher resolution, faster refresh rate, faster CPU/GPU, more memory, more risk, etc). What I'm arguing for though is that most "normal" users (please, don't tell me you're a video editor for National Geographic who MUST edit 360 videos in 8K! That's great for you, honestly, love that, but that's NOT a "normal" user!) who bough high end hardware during the last few year matches most of their capabilities.
All that being said, yes, pop that damn bubble, still invest in AI R&D and datacenters, still invest in AI public research for energy, medicine, etc BUT not the LLM/GenAI tulip commercial craze.
Remember, its not just about "O, X big brands sells less, they can deal with it". But a lot of brands have suppliers who feed that system. Or PC component makers like ... heatsinks, Fans, Cases ... seeing a 20% less sales because people buy less new PCs.
People do not realize how much is linked in the industry. Smaller GPU card makers are literally saying that they may be forced to leave the industry because of drops in sales and the memory prices making the products too expensive.
We can live a long time on old hardware but hardware also limits. Hey, the wife's laptop is from 2019, just before Covid (2020 when a lot of people bought new laptops). The battery is barely holding on. Replacement? None (reputable) ... So in a year that laptop is dead.
How about phones? Same issue ... battery is the build in obsolete maker.
You see the issue. It goes beyond what what most people realize.
Wait when a recession hits when the whole AI bubble bursts and cascades down the already weakened industry. Unlike previous bubbles, the hardware being build is so specialized, that little will hit the normal consumer market. So there will not be a flood of cheap GPUs or memory being dumped on the market.
My local (urban) residential electricians aren't even busy -- they are booking less than a week out. By contrast, just last year they were booking six weeks out. The fall in EV infrastructure demand due to eliminated incentives might be impacting them more than additional data center demand.
I miss reading about that kind of “AI”
Gen pop can diversify its skillset, become more independently self sufficient as a result, rely on/require less money overall, and realize they don't really need to listen to rich tech CEOs which will implode their value politically.
SaaS jobs were about little more than agency control and now they're losing that control.
That pretty much tells you how this will end, right there.
I only have a meme to describe what we are facing https://imgur.com/a/xYbhzTj
The really stupid bubbles end up getting themselves metastasized into the public retirement system, I'm just waiting for that to start any day now.
I find it funny that Microsoft is scaling compute like crazy and their own products like Copilot are being dwarfed by the very models they wish to serve on that compute.
With these assumptions:
– Big 4 keep spending at current pace for 3 more years
– Returns only start showing after aprox 2 years
– Heavy competition with around 20% operating margin on AI and Cloud
– Use of 9% cost of capital
This is the current reality:
AWS aprox $142B/yr
Azure aprox $132B/yr
Google Cloud around $71B/yr
Combined its about $330B to $340B annual cloud revenue today
And lets says Global public cloud market of $700B total today.
To justify the current capex trajectory under those assumptions, by year 3 the big hyperscalers would need roughly $800B to $900B in new annual revenue just to earn a normal return on the capital being deployed.
That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))
In other words...Cloud would need to roughly do 4× in a very short window, and the incremental revenue alone would exceed the entire current global cloud market.
So for the investment wave to make financial sense, at least one of these must be true:
1 Cloud/AI spending globally explodes far beyond all prior forecasts
2 AI massively increases revenue/profit in ads, software, commerce and not just cloud
3 A winner takes all outcome where only 1 or 2 players earn real returns
4 Or a large share of this capex never earns an economic return and is defensive
People keep modeling this like normal cloud growth. But what we have is insanity
Meanwhile Apple is only spending 1 billion a year to use Google's models.
The numbers actually work really well, (un)fortunately.
If you take half the software engineers in the US and replace them with AI, you're halfway there. And why stop with software?
There's a reason for the fervor and excitement of these companies.
The positive outlook is that you don't fire folks - they have even more work to do. But we'll see how it pans out in practice.
It seems so blatantly obvious, yet nobody wants to listen, and practically everyone knows better. We live in interesting times.
The economics are not all in profit.
x=www.washingtonpost.com
{
printf 'GET /technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/ HTTP/1.1\r\n'
printf 'Host: '$x'\r\n'
printf 'User-Agent: Chrome/115.0.5790.171 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible ; Googlebot/2.1 ; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)\r\n'
printf 'X-Forwarded-For: 66.249.66.1\r\n\r\n'
}|busybox ssl_client -n $x $x > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmThe other tld have been kinder to me (no captcha).
Someone recently noticed an apparent DDOS attempt on some blogger using Javascript fetch function
The site used to include a tracking pixel containing the visitor's IP address
Also used to ping mail.ru
Would need to look at the page source again to see what it contains today
It's a crowd favorite
People love it
Where's the "boom?" Doesn't that imply a bunch of people are getting rich off of new business?
Where are those?
It implies that expectations and capital allocation have significantly outpaced realistic returns, leading to painful corrections for bulls.
And with AI, a classic bubble signal is emerging: widespread exit-timing instead of deep, long-term conviction.
$500+bn in one year capex from largest and most profitable companies ever known to mankind seems like a deep and long-term conviction, no? you and I may not have conviction, the largest and most profitable companies on earth that have been carrying most of global economy do
*written by AI, of course
The big loser is the modern university.
This is just like communism. The software industry has been like this for over a decade and the effect started spreading to other industries. I've been warning of this for years.
It has been a very painful decade for some. At least now millions of others are starting to feel the pain. More broadly distributed pain creates incentives for change which did not exist before. Pain is hope. Being on the frontline has been an excruciating and isolating experience.
One being:
>Generative AI is a product of VC-funding enabled hype, enormous subsidies and fraudulent results. No AI code "really" works or contributes to productivity, and soon the bubble will burst, returning Real Software Engineers to their former peerless ascendency.
And the other perspective:
>The AI boom will be the last chance to make money, after which point your socioeconomic status circa 2028 will be the permanent station of all your progeny, who will enjoy a heavenly post-scarcity experience with luxury amenities scaled by your PageRank equivalent of social connections to employees at leading AI labs.
All IT companies will go red
The US economy will go red because IT companies will go red
Banks will follow because their investments depended on the IT market
Gold pumped but is falling now (maybe a good time to buy?)
Crypto is crypto so no one knows (although we are close to the pump season where everything 10x in value, but it's still a bet)
Europe is detaching itself from the US, so maybe there's something there?
Maybe we can just buy non perishable essencial products now, because everything is going to blow up in prices? Still if I buy a 2£ can of beans, later sell it at 10£ because its market value increased to 15, I'm still losing. Not losing as much, but still losing, not to mention I need to find a buyer.
I could buy a house and sell it, but the housing market is a micro bubble where I live that it might pop as well by the time I sell.
So where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?
So where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?
Then you deploy the cash into equities if/when it does crash so you can buy at an inevitable discount.
Personally, I think we are just at the beginning of the boom.
I started getting concerned about the US stock market being overvalued in about 2019. If I'd followed my gut and ditched the US entirely I'd have missed out enormously.
Unfortunately the "guys, it's getting a bit frothy" stage can last for years and years. If you pull out of the stock market whenever everything's looking irrationally overvalued you're probably going to fall behind the unthinking approach of continually investing the same amount every month.
Although I don't think investments are easy to "bubble-proof" I feel like your career choices can make you more resistant to catastrophe. The strongest strategy of all (if it's practical in your lifestyle) is to be nationally and internationally mobile so that your job search can cover the entire world, and you pick whichever employer is most desperate to find someone. After that, you can sometimes transfer internally to teams that are more robust (in my industry we have teams that design new facilities and teams that run existing facilities - the ones that design new facilities are far more vulnerable to ups and downs as projects get cancelled). Finally, you can make lots of casual contacts in your industry (we sometimes get together for coffee or beer with other people in our city who do a similar job at other companies) - then when you're made redundant, you've got the inside information of where new roles might come from.
On the cost side of the equation, your choices of "how big a house & car can I afford?" should learn towards being more pessimistic, but often there's not huge scope for choice there in the short term.
Long story short, the glib answer to your question "where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?" is "leave it in the S&P 500 and be aware that one day it will blow up"
Replacing more and more jobs as it goes?
Even the real estate bubble in 2008. If you bought a home in 2005 and sold in 2009, sure you lost a lot, but if you just invested in real estate from mid 2000s and kept it for 10 years, you prob did pretty well. Even the great depression had a sharp readjustment, but look at pretty much any 10‑year windows, including great depression, you'll see ~10% nominal and ~5–7% real annualized equity returns.
I think AI will be similar. It's a paradigm shift. Some of todays companies will go under and stocks will crash but over 10+ years, I think it will be a great investment and the industry will flourish, much like the tech or real estate bubble.
Now, all this new hardware we're building is powering AI that is only proven to improve the quality of our software, and will likely displace many of the middle class "white collar" jobs we have left. Buckle up boys, we are in for a bumpy ride.