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Christopher Mims 🤌 Profile picture
Christopher Mims 🤌
@mims
WSJ tech columnist and author of Arriving Today, about the insane, around-the-world journey all the stuff you ordered takes on its way to your front door.
Oct 17 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
THREAD

The AI bubble will continue to inflate, and will reach a scale few can comprehend. This increases the downside risk that will follow in the wake of it popping. It's being fueled by two things.

1/🧵 The first is insatiable demand for AI compute. This is the consequence of incomprehensibly compute-hungry new applications -- video generation, yes, but also new systems that spawn multiple "agentic" AIs that can run for minutes -- or even days -- seeking and processing information

2/🧵
Aug 30 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
You've probably seen the posts about how AI is becoming more expensive than ever for a lot of applications -- even as cost per token falls.

So I said, OK, I'm going to dig into this. What I found was interesting!

And it's more complicated than you've heard.

🧵/1 First off, is the entire AI boom threatened by the rising cost of smarter-than-ever AI that burns tokens like they're Papiermark in Weimar Germany?

It... doesn't seem like it? Lots of levers for companies to pull. And experience of code-writing startups seems atypical.

🧵/2
Aug 1 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/

The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone*

1/🧵 chart: capital expenditures, quarterly - shows meta, Google Microsoft and Amazon collectively spending nearly $100 billion on capex in the past quarter As @pkedrosky has written, as a % of GDP, spending on AI infra has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing.

One explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength is that this spending is so big it’s acting as a sort of private-sector stimulus program.

2/🧵

paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex…
Mar 4, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Something quietly revolutionary has happened in the auto industry and too few people have noticed:

Many EVs now cost the same or less than gas-powered vehicles.

Really! Even though their list prices remain higher.

Here's how that works.

1/
wsj.com/articles/elect… Lots of people look at the list price of an EV and think "meh, can't afford the premium"

But 85% of people finance the purchase of a new vehicle.

Which means what matters to most people is their *monthly* cost to own / operate that vehicle.

2/