The grim conclusion:

What’s funny about the comparison to the subprime mortgage crisis is that there are, in all honesty, multiple different versions of The Stripper With Five Houses from The Big Short:

• The AI companies that only have customers because they spend $3 to $10 for every dollar of revenue.
• The venture capitalists that are ultra-rich on paper, heavily leveraging their firms in companies like Harvey (worth “$11 billion”) and Cursor (worth “$29.3 billion”) that burn hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and are now both too large to sell to another company and too shitty a company to take public.
• The AI labs that have built massive businesses on selling heavily-subsidized subscriptions to customers who don’t want to pay for them and API calls to AI startups that can only pay them if infinite resources exist.
• The AI data center companies that, thanks to readily-available debt, have started 200GW of projects (and only started building 5GW of them) for AI demand that doesn’t exist, entirely based on the theoretical sense that maybe it will in the future.
• Oracle, who is building hundreds of billions of dollars of data centers for OpenAI (which needs infinite resources to be able to pay its compute costs), is taking on equally-large amounts of debt, all because it assumes that nothing bad will ever happen.
• The customers of AI startups that are building lifestyles, identities and workflows around them believing that we’re “just at the beginning” on top of unsustainable AI subscriptions.

All of these entities are acting based on a misplaced belief that the world will cater to them, and that nothing will ever change. While there might be different levels of cynicism — people that know there’re subsidies but assume they’ll be fine once they arrive, or people like Sam Altman that are already rich and don’t give a shit — I think everybody in the AI industry has deluded themselves into believing they have the mandate of Heaven.

So let's for a moment assume that this is all there is to it. What's the hedge to enable oneself to keep capabilities? Ordered by cost estimate.

• 4 M5 Max MBPs clustered, with a 4-bit GLM-5 quant? (~$40k)
• Gamble that between OpenAI and Anthropic, one winner takes it all and then we have no choice but to pay 20x current cost for inference? (~ $5k a month)
• Buy 8x H200 so you can hot-ish swap between GLM-5 and Kimi K2.5? (~$400k)
• Group-buy a Vera Rubin / Groq 3 rack with 12 people so everyone can run their own finetune (not sure how you're going to do the tune fwiw) (~$750k (*12))

Isn't it amazing how the "pleb solution" costs $40k?