My first thought is they read Ben Stancil's post here, where he advocates one of the Big 3 buying Allbirds as a foundation model training gym for running a real business, complete with a decade of real business data:
The only caveat I’d have to this is that as I understand it, a lot of the traditional deprecation calculations aren’t actually applying to GPUs in the same way. This is the analysis that Michael Bury made that predicted a huge crash because AI companies were massively overestimating the deprecation rate of the hardware, but as I understand it this isn’t actually the case - in many cases years old TPU and GPUs are still at high utilisation rates and making money because the demand for tokens is so high. If that’s right, maybe investing in GPUs as a store of value makes sense?
When we say "old" what do we mean? I just did a quick Claude search, looks like the oldest GPUs being offered by AWS and GCP are the p100 series from ~10 years ago. It's in legacy only mode on AWS rn. So ~10 years for ~enough depreciation for it to not be used anymore. As a store of value probably not ideal, but perhaps viable for long enough for all birds to do something with it? Unclear
Hilarious!
My first thought is they read Ben Stancil's post here, where he advocates one of the Big 3 buying Allbirds as a foundation model training gym for running a real business, complete with a decade of real business data:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/193090779
Clearly this AI pivot is just a Straussian a head fake on their road to a Big 3 acquisition! 😂
The only caveat I’d have to this is that as I understand it, a lot of the traditional deprecation calculations aren’t actually applying to GPUs in the same way. This is the analysis that Michael Bury made that predicted a huge crash because AI companies were massively overestimating the deprecation rate of the hardware, but as I understand it this isn’t actually the case - in many cases years old TPU and GPUs are still at high utilisation rates and making money because the demand for tokens is so high. If that’s right, maybe investing in GPUs as a store of value makes sense?
When we say "old" what do we mean? I just did a quick Claude search, looks like the oldest GPUs being offered by AWS and GCP are the p100 series from ~10 years ago. It's in legacy only mode on AWS rn. So ~10 years for ~enough depreciation for it to not be used anymore. As a store of value probably not ideal, but perhaps viable for long enough for all birds to do something with it? Unclear