If you are talking about GPUs being only a small share of the overall total sum, bad news that the supporting infrastructure is also to a large extend tailor made for that very narrow use case. No one else will need such huge data center facilities designed specifically for GPUs, that includes also the non GPU components. And the infrastructure is the only thing of substance of this bubble. The models aren’t it. Open weight models are on the heels of the closed models. As soon as they are good enough for common applications, the business case for charging billions is slowly evaporating.

You are also mistaken, I am not worried about GPUs. I am merely stating that they and their server infrastructure (which is tailor made for them) are rapidly getting obsolete equipment by their nature and while the clock is ticking they are largely not even being used. This is fundamentally different from the dotcom and railway bubble.

Both rail and communication infrastructure lead to some useless connections but much of it was no useless, in both cases. GPUs are not bolted to the ground but they do become obsolete no matter if you deny it or not. The issue is that the real costs is in using GPUs is very different from these previous bubbles. Those obsolete GPUs will cause much higher operating costs than newer generations, to the point where they won’t be interesting to use even if you gave them away for free. To make matters worse, other infrastructure is much more flexible in its use, one can transport all sorts of things on railways, one can send all sorts of data on communication infrastructure. Those specialised GPUs aren’t very useful for anything other than a fairly narrow use case.

I think you do not fully appreciate the crazy amounts of GPUs we are talking about here. China has no massive real shortage of GPUs. They managed to get black market GPUs more or less directly from Nvidia just fine. Nor are European universities IT wastelands without compute capabilities. But even if they’d go crazy on expandig compute infrastructure with outdated power hungry GPUs, that would be barely more than a drop in the ocean. Nvidia does have to resort to circular financing to keep the boom cycle accelerating, with GPUs going just to some storage facility if they exist at all. That is not how healthy demand looks like.

France is really serious about it. That is great for the entire EU. Even if most EU countries are still far too complacent, France is currently creating alternatives, doing the hard work, so that alternatives and real world expertise will exist in a few years, when the rest suddenly figures out that the roof is burning.

I don’t claim I know when the correction will happen but I wonder what massive alternative demand you see for the mountains of highly specialised server gpus in storage that will be obsolete in maybe 3 years time? For many of them that means likely before they will ever be turned on. The dotcom bubble created infrastructure that was, largely, not obsolete when the bubble bursted and made a lot of sense to salvage. That is a fundamental difference to inference infrastructure.

It is almost as if Iran had written the vaccination guidelines for the US air force.

If you want to be better than that, look for cars with LFP battery. They tend to be used in the less expensive cars and in lower capacity configurations. Their carbon footprint is roughly half of the regular NMC batteries and the only mined metal they need is iron and no zink, mangan or cobalt are needed in their chemistry.

That and try to use renewable energy, eg with home owned photovoltaic. If you do all of that, the break even is way before even 2 years and life cycle CO2 footprint is only a fraction of an ICE vehicle.

Pretty insane how well that disinformation works. If you are worried about nickel, mangan and cobalt, just get a car with an LFP battery, which doesn’t need those heavy metals (it is based on lithium and iron phosphate). The only other critical resource in appreciable amounts is neodynium for permanent magnets. We are talking about 1-3 kg per car.

If you think that makes EVs worse for climate or environment than ICE vehicles, think again.

Mistral has recently shown a good trajectory of improvement. It is already an important thing that there is a European mid range open weight model that can compete. (Frontier models need a lot more resources, it is important to compare apples with apples) This is good enough for many applications were data security and sovereignity are prime concerns. Of course, it would be good to have a frontier model, lets see how Large 4 will perform when we get there.

Mistral Medium 3.5 isn’t that far behind comparable current open weight models.

Who knows? That is either just an excuse to protect that illegal facility of an oligarch or they are really using that facility to target girl schools in Iran.

No.

It is generally thought that official token price is breaking even, at best. Maybe it is not even doing that. The worth of the AI usage has nothing to do with those costs and is likely much lower. So far there is very little done on understanding actual value of AI use though.

I am not saying you are wrong, just that the above statement can be correct at the same time.

Yes, but what good is that if 100 USD more is still losing tons of money.

You can export your contacts and settings and import them in another browser with a few clicks. I am not sure what energy is needed for that but use whatever you prefer.

True, that’s why I did not even bother to mention it ;)

You are using a derogatory term for cars that are great choices for many. Even if those cars are not suitable for your requirements it just puts you in a certain light.

There are indeed not a lot of MPV EVs on offer, I guess, car producers really want to push people into more profitable, less useful SUVs instead. But then VW has been killing the Sharan also among ICE vehicles. So this isn’t even an EV problem.

The best best for your requirement is maybe still the Toyota Proace City Verso L2 50 kWh. AT 40000 EUR it is also somewhat reasonably priced for a van with 5-7 seats. It has a central screen but it is rather conservative as far as modern cars go. Yes, it is a full Van rather than a compact Van but like I said, producers really don’t want to produce those anymore.

Golf carts don’t come even close to the feeling. It is more like driving an go-cart racer, from the drive feeling, but without the noise of course. Different, but hardly lame. When you look at the Renault 5 or the ID.Polo, they don’t feel that different on the inside from ICE cars. Yes they have some central screen nowadays but so do modern ICE cars. Other than that, real buttons, real handles and controls and one does not have to use one pedal drive if one prefers more traditional controls. Of course gear shifting isn’t a thing anymore and that is still strongly rooted among most European drivers.

Ah, someone who makes fun of practicable cars that are suitable in reality for the majority of urban and suburban users. Let me guess you are looking for one of those child-crushers?

It is happening right now in Europe I think. Renault started it with bringing back cars with emotion, for a more reasonable price tag. The Renault 5 at first, now coming the new Renault Twingo (starting at 20k EUR), the VW ID.Polo with some other brands based on that same basis. etc. Compact, not oversized and overweight cars, built to a price but interestingly still not coming across as flimsy and cheap as a Tesla interior and with real buttons and largely with real door handles. There are also options from abroad, like the Hyundai Inster for example but also some from China with BYD, GM etc.

This is what kept EV adoption back in Europe, the lack of options in that segment at a reasonable price. But this is changing as we speak.

Sadly, the privacy won’t come back in general with new cars but if I look at the coming ID.Polo, VW is throwing out most of the Tesla trash, the previous CEO has brought in (terrible and extremely cheap interior, no real buttons, no reall door handles etc). It is a really good VW again.