That's sort of a random heading put on reports of Q3 earnings.
The big news is "Alphabet shares record their worst day ever, shedding $500 billion in value"[1] Google ad revenue has dropped. AI results from search engines don't generate the click-through revenue that search ads did. That's scary for Google management.
Roblox reports user counts are down. Reddit traffic is down and management blames AI search not referring users to Reddit. None of this seems to be closely related to AI costs.
That's losing the competition for attention.
Intel reports PC sales are down. That's likely related to RAM costs, which made price/performance of new PCs drop.
There are issues with AI costs, but they don't seem to be the cause of these reported Q3 earnings drops.
Intel's finance chief David Zinsner said the firm did not expect to
bring in more cash than it spent this year, and forecast
lower-than-expected revenue for its fourth quarter.
You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand. Going forward, you could manufacture solutions to bring local LLM options closer to affordability.
If you're into manufacturing stuff people really want, that is.
This company has been run so far into the ground over the last 15 years. Such a fall from grace, with so many decisions that just seem to never be correct.
The 15 year comment was moreso a reflection of how they've been running, broadly.
Intel pioneered dram, but that was a long time ago, agreed.
Their more recent exit from 3d xpoint was very unfortunate in timing, though. I think that could have been a very cool technology to use in the current age.
It would be a terrible idea for Intel to return to DRAM. Just like it was a terrible idea to enter the flash market. They are commodity technologies subject to massive supply and demand shocks. Intel made the most money by leading the process node race and shipping the best silicon for servers, and they lost their way through short-sighted financialization games, long bets on losing technology like 3D XPoint, and forcing out their best engineering talent.
If Intel were capable of building more chips they would. I don't think their lagging TSMC is a diabolical attempt to inflate their profit margins. Although I only really know what I read on the news.
Thank you. We've already seen what the future looks like, and it's models on a chip. It's several orders of magnitude faster at inference than anything else:
For the record, "the future" you are describing is running a tiny LLM from 2 years ago.
Those on-device weights are horribly outdated, underperform for their size, and cannot be updated to use a different model. I don't think Nvidia is afraid of Taalas.
That's a proof of concept created by a small startup. Obviously Intel or NVIDIA could do better. Given that it's ~50k tokens per second, even a lesser model opens up an entire universe of use-cases that we currently don't have access to, and that's locally.
I don't think it's obvious. The 8B model that the Taalas cards run aren't any larger than what a modern smartphone can inference with GPU compute shaders. Users don't need SRAM or dedicated hardware to get interactive tok/s at that scale.
To push beyond the envelope of what a mobile GPU can do, you'd have to build gigantic coprocessors for 30-100B models, which would probably cost more than the phone/laptop itself to integrate on-die. Nevermind the fact that SRAM is several times more expensive than DRAM gig-for-gig.
Isn't the current economic scenario unsolvable from the supply side in a 20 year time span? Like is ASML going to magically start mass manufacturing EUL machines, the universities magically gonna spit out 10K more PhD grade level people to work new foundries, and some country magically going to make all the infrastructure investments to build entire cities of compute manufacturing?
Maybe I am wrong but the supply side of this equation seems completely hosed from a fundamental perspective.
That sort of thing did happen in the past though. Complicated engineering operations scaled up in months and years. Immediate post war era saw massive buildout of university engineering departments, more PhDs minted than ever before.
The fact we have so much latent demand and aren't getting these benefits right now is depressing. Where is our silico-industrial buildout? Why is our federal government cutting unversity research funding, and not expanding it to train more PhDs to run in demand fabs? We are being led by short thinking greedy assholes is why.
Their 24GB GPU took a year to reach Europe and the 48GB one is nowhere to be found. I mean even if you want to give Intel a second chance in the GPU market they’re so fucking incompetent.
Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and Intel fumbles trends. I'm sure they might cancel the ARC division next for fun and go develop optical chips or something, who knows.
The upcoming cards for local inference use LPDDR (which is also not immune to the shortage) - but maybe it's time Intel gets back to its roots and produce some memory chips. CXL Optane would also shine as a KV cache store.
This guy is seriously evil. He has just absolutely speedran becoming a POS. No surprise him and Musk fight.. they're fighting to see who can hurt humanity the quickest.
No. Capitalism is supposed to be a rejection of this kind of central planning attitude, where someone sits in an armchair thinking about what kinds of products people should or should not have from a "global allocation perspective". I understand the market dynamics he's pointing towards, but it's not the kind of thing a CEO ought to be saying.
How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US? With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.
And the oddest fear is precisely what will happen if we start trying to ramp up a bit of what used to be normal accountability?
>How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US?
Would you like to posit a theory? The article says nothing about this, and states entirely different causes. This concern seems rather tangential to recent market activity
Yeah this has to be some of it. No coincidence certain industries in the market always shifts up or down significantly just before and after each election, as people try to read the tea leaves of how a shift in political power will affect them.
Some of it is also just political fighting making it inconvenient to sign contracts and do work specifically right now. Even places that have favorable build out plans for data centers have strong fears on moving forward with them with how much political ads are using them as a focus.
Good news on that front is that political fighting typically evaporates with the campaigns. Bad news, of course, is that it typically comes back with them. So contracts have to be executed stupid quick.
Which flat out makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration to give a good faith attempt at executing and honoring what came before.
> makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration
Bidens CHIPS Act is still largely intact though isn't it? The next admin changed some things, renegotiated some implementation details, and even expanded parts of the subsidies. But I believe it is still moving forward at basically the same scale as was originally envisioned.
> How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US?
Uncertainty that just developed overnight?
> With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.
What does that have to do with Intel, Amazon, and Google's financial results?
And where did you get the impression that no one can "discuss" any of this? A minute doesn't go by that someone isn't talking about Trump. Including you, regarding a completely unrelated topic.
How come I never see these threads when Nasdaq has a banger of a day? Stocks fall faster than they rise - it's not useful discourse to panic every time there's a correction. Give it a few days and we'll be back where we were.
Windows will soon lose the normie consumer market, and all that's left for them will be gamers (of which they will make zero dollars from) and enterprise (of which their successes will broadly match laptop job employment figures)
This seems backwards to me. Linux is in a lot of ways more appealing to gamers than ever (proton/wine/etc is amazing), with the only thing really holding back being anticheat solutions that block Linux. But for the normie market the problems are the same as they've ever been - libreoffice is a poor MS office substitute, and despite one million AI clones the Adobe suite and similar software remains table stakes for many industries.
Tim Sweeny being "one of the people who dooms Windows" was the least likely thing on my multiverse bingo card - but he's eroding that too. EAC v2 will have kernel mode (eBPF) anti-cheat. Microsoft has lost their moat at the throne of AI.
Probably a mix of both. There's a gigantic amount of costs (and debt) piling up for many companies without anything to show for it when it comes to generating revenue.
But for sure a lot of businesses are getting disrupted - Adobe and now Google are good examples. Just that Google has quite a lot of areas where it shouldn't be so bad - Android, Youtube, mail & storage, cloud. And AI lets them reduce headcounts which is a very big cost.
It's truly bizarre for there to be widespread hope and excitement for a bubble burst. It's arguably stupid, and I'm one of the stupid people because I find myself hoping for it too.
My hope for such an event is mostly to bring tech leadership types back down to planet earth and to get them to shut up for a few minutes. There are a lot of AI charlatans who need to be humbled by the markets so the serious folks among us can get back to doing real work.
ETA: I also guess I sort of hope for it because this whole cycle has felt so incredibly irrational that I desire a small return to sanity, even if it comes at the cost of some of my retirement.
I’m not sure whether AI companies can keep going with these low costs. My workflow is already completely merged into AI. I don’t want to go back to digging through Stack Overflow and spending an hour writing 100 lines of code like before.
Google's AI search is abysmal and is almost always, at least, 30% wrong (outdated, wrong info) ime. I find that I just use the chat interface to save tokens on basic things so I don't want to waste my real AI subscription tokens on basics.
In theory I understand their change to make search -> AI search instead, but I have a hard time believing that this was benchmarked in any way and not rushed to desperately remain relevant in the AI race.
Disagree. In my experience particularly over the last few weeks, Gemini has gotten very good at understanding what i'm asking for and giving a relevant response that 9 times out of 10 just answers my question without me having to go further into the relevant wiki link etc.
Try asking it about a sporting event or score. It literally just makes shit up. I asked it Tuesday if there was a world series game; it told me with complete confidence there wasn't and that Milwaukee was leading the series 2-1 after losing the night before.
Agreed. I have no doubt I could throw curveballs at it, but it has been getting things mostly correct for a while. And the fact that I can follow up with a direct challenge is kind of nice.
People say this a lot, and part of me wants it to be true and hates this AI search stuff being shoved in my face, but this really hasn't been my experience.
Unless I'm searching for something very niche, I'm often quite surprised by how 'directionally right' Google's AI overview is, even if I retain a lot of the skepticism I had towards it.
Honestly, AI search(Google or ChatGPT etc) has been fresh breeze of air because the web itself has been stinky pile of garbage with some forgotten gems in it since the last 15 years. Younger people never seen non-garbage website.
Like the sibling, I can't really agree with this. Google is now quite good at answering general queries and doing simple calculations, which is a big step up from its capabilities a few years ago. For example, you can ask
> What is the equivalent focal length on APS-C of 80mm on full frame?
and get the correct answer. It's not good compared to frontier AI models, but that's to be expected, given that you don't pay for it.
> Google's AI search is abysmal and is almost always, at least, 30% wrong
Different experience for me, IMO AI mode saved Google search. The classic search became pretty much worthless due to decades of SEO winning over good results. But AI mode made Google search far more useful for me and gives me what I'm looking for 99.9% of the time.
I do understand some people (website operators who used to rely on SEO or google stockholders after the recent earnings report) being upset about AI mode, but as a search user I find it much more effective than where search was just prior to AI mode.
The big news is "Alphabet shares record their worst day ever, shedding $500 billion in value"[1] Google ad revenue has dropped. AI results from search engines don't generate the click-through revenue that search ads did. That's scary for Google management.
Roblox reports user counts are down. Reddit traffic is down and management blames AI search not referring users to Reddit. None of this seems to be closely related to AI costs. That's losing the competition for attention.
Intel reports PC sales are down. That's likely related to RAM costs, which made price/performance of new PCs drop.
There are issues with AI costs, but they don't seem to be the cause of these reported Q3 earnings drops.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/alphabet-google-sto...
Couldn't have anything to do with management's decision to require logins to access the site.
A sort of cost, but like other externalities never paid by those who incur them on others. Well, except for Google I guess.
If you're into manufacturing stuff people really want, that is.
Doesn't manufacture anymore*.
This company has been run so far into the ground over the last 15 years. Such a fall from grace, with so many decisions that just seem to never be correct.
Intel pioneered dram, but that was a long time ago, agreed.
Their more recent exit from 3d xpoint was very unfortunate in timing, though. I think that could have been a very cool technology to use in the current age.
https://chatjimmy.ai
AMD acquired this company, and I hope they start releasing consumer hardware based on their tech.
Your move Intel and NVIDIA, give us what we want and stop hording GPUs in data centers.
Those on-device weights are horribly outdated, underperform for their size, and cannot be updated to use a different model. I don't think Nvidia is afraid of Taalas.
To push beyond the envelope of what a mobile GPU can do, you'd have to build gigantic coprocessors for 30-100B models, which would probably cost more than the phone/laptop itself to integrate on-die. Nevermind the fact that SRAM is several times more expensive than DRAM gig-for-gig.
Maybe I am wrong but the supply side of this equation seems completely hosed from a fundamental perspective.
The fact we have so much latent demand and aren't getting these benefits right now is depressing. Where is our silico-industrial buildout? Why is our federal government cutting unversity research funding, and not expanding it to train more PhDs to run in demand fabs? We are being led by short thinking greedy assholes is why.
I don't know if anyone told you, but GDDR is included in the current RAM shortage.
/s
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/open...
And the oddest fear is precisely what will happen if we start trying to ramp up a bit of what used to be normal accountability?
Would you like to posit a theory? The article says nothing about this, and states entirely different causes. This concern seems rather tangential to recent market activity
In general it’s an earnings story though I agree.
Good news on that front is that political fighting typically evaporates with the campaigns. Bad news, of course, is that it typically comes back with them. So contracts have to be executed stupid quick.
Which flat out makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration to give a good faith attempt at executing and honoring what came before.
Bidens CHIPS Act is still largely intact though isn't it? The next admin changed some things, renegotiated some implementation details, and even expanded parts of the subsidies. But I believe it is still moving forward at basically the same scale as was originally envisioned.
Uncertainty that just developed overnight?
> With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.
What does that have to do with Intel, Amazon, and Google's financial results?
And where did you get the impression that no one can "discuss" any of this? A minute doesn't go by that someone isn't talking about Trump. Including you, regarding a completely unrelated topic.
> Give it a few days and we'll be back where we were
Perhaps, though I think today is the lowest in 6 weeks.
Tim Sweeny being "one of the people who dooms Windows" was the least likely thing on my multiverse bingo card - but he's eroding that too. EAC v2 will have kernel mode (eBPF) anti-cheat. Microsoft has lost their moat at the throne of AI.
More agents browsing the web and people relying on AI summaries -> less revenue for Google Search and Reddit
AI drastically reducing the barrier to game dev -> less users on Roblox
But for sure a lot of businesses are getting disrupted - Adobe and now Google are good examples. Just that Google has quite a lot of areas where it shouldn't be so bad - Android, Youtube, mail & storage, cloud. And AI lets them reduce headcounts which is a very big cost.
ETA: I also guess I sort of hope for it because this whole cycle has felt so incredibly irrational that I desire a small return to sanity, even if it comes at the cost of some of my retirement.
In theory I understand their change to make search -> AI search instead, but I have a hard time believing that this was benchmarked in any way and not rushed to desperately remain relevant in the AI race.
Unless I'm searching for something very niche, I'm often quite surprised by how 'directionally right' Google's AI overview is, even if I retain a lot of the skepticism I had towards it.
> What is the equivalent focal length on APS-C of 80mm on full frame?
and get the correct answer. It's not good compared to frontier AI models, but that's to be expected, given that you don't pay for it.
Different experience for me, IMO AI mode saved Google search. The classic search became pretty much worthless due to decades of SEO winning over good results. But AI mode made Google search far more useful for me and gives me what I'm looking for 99.9% of the time.
I do understand some people (website operators who used to rely on SEO or google stockholders after the recent earnings report) being upset about AI mode, but as a search user I find it much more effective than where search was just prior to AI mode.