Hi, On 8/3/26 4:12 AM, Theodore Tso wrote:
But the wierd floating point format shouldn't be the argument which gets used.
The floating point format is the reason that the specialized hardware goes into the landfill when the bubble bursts instead of being repurposed.
People have tried using TPUs for EM field simulations and found them to be largely useless because 16 bit floats aren't all that great.
You should *never* try to use LLM's to do math, and in fact, that's not how it gets used when it is used properly.
No, the idea is to use the tensor processing units for math that requires working with large sparse matrices, like simulating transmission lines or antennas.
This is where the floating point format becomes important: this hardware does not work for anything that requires exact results.
Everyone points at the dark fiber post Internet-bubble which took ten years to eventually light up as the analog to the AI bubble. But what most people forget was that after the dot.COM bubble, there were $100k+ USD Sunfire servers that were selling for pennies on the dollar, and Sun servers ten years later don't hold value the same way dark fiber did. So that might be the closer analog for the portion of the AI bubble which comes from people buying Nvidia GPU's.
Exactly my point: there is very little being built that will last, the GPUs that were used in a datacenter are losing value even faster than a ten years old Sun server, and most of the other hardware is special-purpose.
The RAM being produced these days is HBM with higher latency, I don't even know if you could turn it into (slow) system RAM with a standard DRAM controller.
Instead of cheap servers making e-commerce possible, servers have now become so much more expensive that e-commerce is becoming centralized on very few platforms, and there is a noticeable decline in quality (Amazon fulfillment mixing stock from different sellers, support is an AI chatbot, consumer protection through credit card companies is gone because a chargeback means your "everything" account gets suspended).
So this has the potential to turn the wheel back on the things we got out of the dot com bubble.
Simon
