GhostOnTheHalfShell4h ago

Ed Zitron continues to journal just how psychotic investment in AI is and how much of it is pure kabuki. We have concepts of capacity and actual use…

The math does not math

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/

1/n

The AI Industry Is Lying To You

Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5000 to 18,000 words, including

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Show threadWulfy—Speaker to the machines3h ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

Ed Zitron (Wanker) found genuinely interesting data center construction numbers, then buried them under:

- conspiracy ("the press is in on it")
- innuendo (Jensen definitely knew but I can't say that)
- 3 anecdotes = "biblical plague"
- Cory Doctorow's homework with the serial numbers filed off

The infrastructure analysis is good. Everything else is a guy who found out PR firms exist and decided that meant everyone was lying.

Show threadGhostOnTheHalfShell3h ago

@n_dimension

I can see you know your take that Zitron is a wanker and sure, but I don’t recall Cory going into the nitty-gritty details anywhere near the level and keeping on top of it as well. He deals with a wider spectrum of issues so I don’t expect somebody like him to dig down the silo.

But if we hold strictly to the idea that out of 200+ GW supposedly under construction, where the reality is somewhere around five, is a disconnect that far outstrips the last set of bubbles

Show threadWulfy—Speaker to the machines3h ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

10k words, wrong thesis.

He's banging on about GPUs in boxes. The actual scandal is GPUs as financial instruments. CoreWeave has $30B in debt collateralised against physical chips in SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicle), depreciated over 6 years based on projected inference revenue that doesn't exist. NVIDIA sells the GPUs, then rents some back, and that rental income services the debt used to buy them.

Nobody knows what an H100 is worth in 2028. Billions of dollars of structured finance assumes the answer is "enough."

Not asbestos in the walls, Ed. CDOs. Read a balance sheet instead of Pluralistic for once.

Zitron found the right neighbourhood and broke into the wrong house.

#AIBubble #GPU #CoreWeave #NVIDIA #StructuredFinance #TechDebt #Securitisation #WheresYourEdAt

Show threadGhostOnTheHalfShell

@n_dimension

I read very quickly, but yes, he is quite capable of how shall I put it, epic levels of output.

To your point, it’s prolly outside of his area of expertise. His claim is going after the low hanging fruit that the financials, the basic financials do not make any sense.

And what you’re saying is layered on top of this, is the same derivative bullshit that gave us the GFC.

I love it. It’s a two fer.

6:52pmWeb
Show threadGhostOnTheHalfShell3h ago

@n_dimension

And now the entire global supply chain is enjoying a disruption that I think easily equals the deliberate shutdown of the economy over Covid.

And we’re dealing with climate whiplash.

🤪 everything is fine

Show threadGhostOnTheHalfShell3h ago

@n_dimension

And I want to ask you a question it seems like there’s a a layer cake of absolute productive capacity destruction, coupled with gigantic amounts of leverage, coupled with the dissolution of dollar dominance. It’s hard to imagine that the global economy is going to survive this if only because the financial sector seems to be destined to complete collapse. Pick your poison insurance risk, destruction of institutional credibility. The net worth of billionaires built a top market cap

Show threadWulfy—Speaker to the machines2h ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

You will not like my thesis.
Communism died in 1980 with the collapse of the wall.
Capitalism died in September 2008, when liquidity stopped for 3 days, globally.
It was only "saved" by 13 Trillion dollars of dirty socialism (peoples) money.
None of the fundamental causes of the GFC were ever addressed.

Capitalism is dead.
Modern monetary theory is a scam.
Everyone with a hand in the cookie jar knows this.
The entire global "economy" is a Frankenstein monster lurching until it's going to fall on its face and the folks with money are building bunkers and planning how to turn the people who saved theirs arses into fertiliser and biodiesel.

#mmt #economy #communism #capitalism #crapitalism

Show threadGhostOnTheHalfShell2h ago

@n_dimension

Actually, with the exception about modern monetary theory because it simply describes how money is created, and too many people try to inflect a moral outcome because of it, I agree with everything you’re saying

Show threadGhostOnTheHalfShell2h ago

@n_dimension

I can’t qualify Frankenstein monster because I don’t think we have the words and the idiom to properly capture what’s happening right now.

I take solace in the fact that 90% of humanity’s existence predated transition to a stable environment 12,000 years ago. This is tempered with the reality that pure climactic collapse could make most vertebrate and vegetative species unfit for purpose.