Well, case in point, I did. When I read the title I thought – "IIRC these were going for thousands, could they have really dropped so hard? Well, sometimes companies, cars, real estate properties cost $1, but there's always of course a catch. Let's see what the catch is here... <click> ah, it's a 4x reduction of rental price, boring"
"Who are you talking to? Me? You haven't specified who you're interacting with. Which morning? Today? What metric are you measuring by good? This is too confusing for me."
"Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
There's option 3: current capacity is enough for our AI needs and so GPUs now the market is flooded.
I think AI is not gonna die even in its current stocastic parrot incarnation. It is a useful tool for some tasks and, albeit not transformative like some CEOs, I believe it's gonna stay.
At most I believe we will enter another AI winter until there's the next algorithmic breakthrough.
Current stochastic parrots do not have to be transformative, they have to appear smart enough for a critical mass of dumb enough people. And judging anecdotally from scanning social media - they already do.
Even here, on HN, you find numerous comments of the shape: "${my favorite gpt} says this: <insert some gibberish>"
Agreed, and I doubt we’ll see one retail at that price even on the secondhand market anytime soon.
That said, could I see them being offloaded in bulk for pennies on the dollar if the (presumed) AI bubble pops? Quite possibly, if it collapses into a black hole of misery and bad investments. In that case, it’s entirely plausible that some enterprising homelabs could snatch one up for a few grand and experiment with model training on top-shelf (if a generation old) kit. The SXMs are going for ~$26-$40k already, which is cheaper than the (worse performing) H100 Add-In Card when brand new; that’s not the pricing you’d expect from a “red hot” marketplace unless some folk are already cutting their losses and exiting positions.
Regardless, interesting times ahead. We either get AI replacing workers en masse, or a bust of the tech industry not seen since the dot-com bubble. Either way, it feels like we all lose.
You don't need an HDMI port, you just need a driver to support running the right graphics calculations and producing image to funnel to another output port. The GPU may lack some features, may have an architecture that is bad for rendering, and may be suboptimal in delivering the performance per watt. Exactly like how a CPU doesn't have a display port.
