The AI Ouroboros
https://insider-gaming.com/dlss-5-gamers-are-wrong/ With this article and the absolute rabid responses from NVIDIA and all these companies to the failed DLSS 5 tech demo, I wanted to highlight something that's been on the back of my mind through this whole conversation on the tech. Something that's been very obviously boiling under the surface for the longest time, but never with this huge and glaring a spotlight on it. (In this case, VERY literally. Good God it's like someone taking overexposed video in a world caked in Homer's Makeup Gun from The Simpsons.) Throughout everything that's happened, not once, not one single time, have NVIDIA, Oracle, et al ever explained where they expect money to come from in any of these scenarios. Now, with this push now by AAA game publishers, and the immediate response to the backlash, this really reeks of a desperation move by all involved.
Let's just put aside all the "the Internet is a minority of consumers", "lol lmao gaming boycotts" stuff and AI doomerism for a second. Let's just ask, from a basic economic standpoint: who is their market for this product?
And for every argument I've seen, none of it makes sense.
"It's other AI companies!" - They're currently facing massive layoffs (Oracle being the biggest most recent one, with Meta being a close second, Amazon third) as the money to build data centers keeps getting higher and higher, investors are starting to ask how this is supposed to turn a profit, and deals that were meant to last over several years and make them hundreds of billions (NVIDIA and OpenAI) had to be reduced to 30 billion, within 1 year, with exit plans. The bubble is bursting as we speak; none of that speaks to a healthy market.
"It's the data centers themselves: NVIDIA sells the hardware - the rest are software!" - To who? Where? How? You can't just magically sell to enterprise markets and just expect an infinite cash flow, that's not how money works. And even to that end, the prices they're currently charging now for those data centers and software, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, are not nearly enough on their own to make back what they spent.
"It's the US government" - As we already saw with Anthropic getting cut off, the Pentagon of all places amending their deal for OpenAI to not use AI for mass surveillance, and again this Administration, of all Administrations saying they won't bail them out if they go under, getting backed means jack and shit. That money's not free. All of these are government loans that, just like with the investors, they need to pay back and pay back real fuckin' soon. It's why we've started to see a push from these AI companies to infiltrate already existing infrastructure, as that faucet's been trying up. Which, speaking of...
"It's the publishers! In fact devs should just get used to it, cuz YOU won't be able to tell either so what does it matter!" - Let's just put aside the IT sector, hospital stuff, all that, and focus on games. Cool, you've got the publishers in...where's the money coming from? Once again, they can give them all that money, but those publishers, their boards, their investors, etc also still expect ROI. If you're using these big companies' stuff without their permission (which these companies have been wont to do given the nature of the beast; name literally any big corpo ongoing lawsuit right now with AI), they're not gonna wanna buy more stuff from you and go somewhere else. But okay, let's just pretend that doesn't matter. Let's assume they're all doing what Epic/Activision is currently doing right now and ALSO ignore the massive player drop off and how the majority of users aren't buying in and only using the AI if it's free or comes attached to something else. Let's go full fantasy world. ...We're already seeing that this isn't working in real-time. The consumers are getting price gouged even more, less revenue is coming in meaning companies are needing to be bought out, merged, or become government subsidized non-independent husks in order to continue operating, and the entire industry has been facing mass layoffs and brain drain as a result. Brains that are needed in order to operate the machines in the first place! The more they've attempted to obfuscate it to the consumers, the harder we've either seen corporations either clamp down in response, or going all-in. I'll give you a guess as to which has been having much more visible financial trouble.
And now with this DLSS 5 shit, they've finally, finally, conceded and decided to now say:
"It's for the consumer!" - lol lmao even
First off: Joe Schmoe's not buying two GPUs at $6,000 to play the new CoD are you insane? In THIS economy?
Second: because it's so prohibitively expensive, they're very obviously trying to move this to a cloud based subscription service. Having games require this moving forward - while removing stuff like PhysX or other tech that's actually helpful to a marketing team or developer pipeline - so as to force you to not actually own your games and provide them a revenue stream for the newest product. Which again: lol lmao even, do I even need to tell all of you guys how that went for the likes of Amazon, Google, Meta, and goddamn Microsoft!?
And thirdly, the most important thing I've noticed IRL, even disregarding every other point thus far: the only people I've seen use AI in any capacity is if it was free. From content slop factories made to push this out en masse to pump up those numbers. The literal second a paywall comes up, they're out. You can ignore that when it's one placeholder texture in a game, but placeholders aren't what brings in the money. The end goal, with the entire product being AI, is what they want, and what will bring in money.
And that's what's being rejected bad right now.
Everything else might as well be play money, for all it matters in this discussion; the customers are the one endpoint of all of this. Always have been. And if they don't adopt or pay in, they're fucked.
This is why the AI bubble's gonna burst. This is why there's such a manic push right now and why we're seeing such a fervent swift denial and vocal developer pushback like in the article.
Yassified Grace is THE canary in the coalmine for NVIDIA, in a sea of dead canaries.
