There is AI data center overcapacity already. The KOSPI crashed last week, and it's a leading indicator for the cyclical hardware industry. It already had been that indicator in the 2000 bubble.
I don't know what possessed Ellison to ruin a functioning company, but it will be interesting if he gets a margin call for ORCL's other debt exposures, which are Ellison's massive loans against his ORCL stock.
The KOSPI went up already 125% in the past year, so some sort of correction was inevitable, even if the underlying companies are healthy. The crash has been exacerbated by South Koreans levering up heavily in the past few months and now getting wiped out.
I remember one thing that struck me when skim reading that the first time:
it only "works" if the government actively does everything in its power to support the boom. No restrictions on new power sources, on pylons and transformers, on new factories to make power sources and compute, on data centres.
This was never going to be the world we live in.
Still surprised by the admin actively punishing politically incorrect power supplies (renewables) and then starting a stupid war with Iran, but even without that nonsense, we were never going to see the US do a command economy pivot, and even if we had something would've broken like it usually does with noobs (and even most politicians are noobs) trying a command economy pivot.
This AGI silliness is predicated on a flawed "Platonic" view of epistemology. The notion that there is some well-defined "idea space" and therefore superintelligence can explore that space faster than any human. In fact, there is no such space. There is a "token space" that can be explored, but that has only fleeting overlaps with reality.
It also completely ignores what we know about evolution. Our brains are the result of billions of years of natural selection. The amount of “training data” that resulted in our neural structures is on a completely different scale than the training data used for today’s LLMs. And this isn’t even up for debate.
The assumption that this process can be “distilled” from written word is completely insane. I’m not sure how people trick themselves into thinking it’s even remotely possible.
The ability of Silicon Valley to hype itself up into a frenzy is unparalleled. Apparently nothing was learned from "blockchain for everything" and "we're going to live in the metaverse".
I don't know what possessed Ellison to ruin a functioning company, but it will be interesting if he gets a margin call for ORCL's other debt exposures, which are Ellison's massive loans against his ORCL stock.