212
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
212 points (97.3% liked)
News
39029 readers
2469 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
At least it will be shorter lived there.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. 25% seems like a pretty high uptake, I don't understand the attraction but that's a lot of people. Will that higher number mean that they will end up not seeing any worth in paying for it sooner than folks in USA?
You got it. LLMs cost lots of money, waste lots of power, unemploy swaths of people, causes psychosis, and produce terrible outputs with liability tacked on. The more of it they use the more they'll realize how useless it is and move on. You see it happening all the time on smaller scales, for an example: Taco Bell goes all in on AI order kiosks and drive through, people order 9999 waters, CEO realizes the AI isn't cheaper at all and cuts the whole program. That actually happened.
This also speaks a lot to the state of humanity. I may well be immature or uncreative, but if presented with an AI ordering interface, I would never think about this! I do deal with the public a great deal through the course of my job, and am frequently disappointed at the level of (my) perceived narcissism. Folks are butts.
Only an absolute concaveman would look at the failures of AI and assume humanity is the issue.
"you're holding it wrong"
fair haha. I am older and avoid AI at all costs. Sounds like I need to learn a bigger picture! Also curious what you mean by concaveman... Same as caveman?
i presume it means their economy will crash sooner than USA’s.
Is that a thing that is being considered? I have to admit I do not know a lot about South Korea's economy, but based on automotive and (I think) tech sectors, they sell things world-wide. At this point, it seems like USA has an economy crash risk. IMO
they have the same problems we see in other advanced economies:
They do have well known global industries but workers generally-speaking aren’t paid enough / have limited free time outside of their work. To add more pressure I believe the government increased the pension which is typically paid by the working population who are already financially stretched as it is.
They’re on track for destabilisation in the next 20-30 years.
Plus most of their high tech have been stolen by China in recent years, such as competition from CXMT.
Wow, these are challenging things. It sounds like they are in a tight spot, even if I do not understand where AI subscription fits in. 20-30 years in essentially tomorrow. It must be on their minds, and maybe explains using AI for what, I don't know, but something.
I’m no expert so take what I say with a grain of salt.
LLMs are prohibitively expensive to run.
If I wanted to make a basic rollerball pen, the cost would be high because I would have to gather the resources just to make a single unit. Mass manufacturing drops the price considerably to make it affordable for me to buy a pen.
But tokens aren’t the same as a factory line. If it’s $1 for me to use an LLM then it’s $100 for 100 people. It scales poorly.
LLM availability over cloud infrastructure requires resources that are expensive to build and depreciate quickly to the point that ROI is untenable (ie. Nvidia’s GPUs).
Now imagine a stock market that hinges around a handful of companies that are involved in that infrastructure component (eg. SK hynix). If many retail investors have dumped their savings into those stocks which can’t provide an expected return then the value of people’s savings will inevitably fluctuate on the whims of the AI industry.
You can imagine what will happen the next time a Chinese company releases a free and efficient LLM that can run on an 8GB RAM personal laptop. The panic selling will reverberate through the markets and a lot of people’s savings will evaporate overnight.
They still scale to some degree. There's a certain amount of VRAM you need to even load a model (frontier models likely over a terabyte now), but once you're there, adding extra users is less cost since you only need to accommodate their KV caches on top of the model of itself. You'll need to add more GPUs once you've saturated what you have, but it's nothing compared to the ~5 B300s for the first user (they actually come in servers containing 8 GPUs that cost about 500k EUR each, so realistically you'd buy one DGX B300 server to start with). Once you've loaded the model itself which has a fixed size, all the extra capacity you add is free to use for KV cache (which means more users).
It's true, but the reason they depreciate so quickly is that there's a new generation out every 2-3 years that does more using less energy. You could actually run old GPUs, it's just cheaper to buy new ones if you're a hyperscaler.
on the point of depreciation. would a hyperscaler be able to make a profitable return on a per GPU basis before they’ve maxed out its use?
genuine question not a rhetorical.
I have to admit that I do not understand most of what you said :(
But, I can see that (I think) you are saying that many people in South Korea invested in AI, and that is problematic. I do know that, as you said, LLMs are resource intensive and do not really work financially. If many people there invested in AI companies, I could see them also subscribing to them. I think.
My avoidance of AI has lead to me not knowing enough about it. I don't know what you mean by token... This is a common theme for me today! I won't be able to avoid this if I don't educate myself.
LLMs ingest tokens as input. It is a core component of natural language processing. When entering a query into an LLM the text will be parsed as tokens.
I don’t know if the investing is inherently problematic. I do believe that the current situation is the culmination of many intersecting societal issues.
This helps a lot! Thanks! It fits in well with your ball point pen comparison. I see why it scales poorly.
As for your second part, I really have nothing to say. I do not know much about investing, but your earlier comment said a lot about the societal side of things. Thanks for helping through this!