So, I have another race to the bottom cringefest for you. In one corner, we have Vaush, deranged luddite going on another unhinged rant about AI being bad, and in the other, we have Jensen Huang, tech bro, and head of Nvidia, a company that, as a PC gamer, I currently despise. Who ends up losing this race to the bottom? Let's find out.
So, this all started with Jensen Huang, nvidia CEO, basically saying we shouldnt teach kids to code because AI will do it in the future, and Vaush, the jobist who believes humans should do things that he is, went on a huge rant about this, because, again, he's a luddite who hates AI. And he's wrong here...to some extent.
Like, here's the thing. We often teach kids to go into fields that by the time they end up being trained in them, they arent relevant. We millennials had a bit of a crapshow of an education. We were the generation that learned cursive only to never use it outside of signing things, and we were always told we needed to know math because we'll never walk around with calculators in our pockets, even though we actually do just that.
We also ended up being told GO TO COLLEGE GO TO COLLEGE GO TO COLLEGE GO TO COLLEGE, and sold higher education as a path to success, only to enter the crapshow of an economy during the worst recession in 80 years, and most of us couldn't find jobs. As such, we are the first generation poorer than our parents, and a generation that is largely screwed by society. Gen Z actually learned from us NOT to go to college, to go into stem, and also...to learn to code.
But, let's face it, generative AI and other tech advances are ground breaking, and we should, unlike vaush's approach, celebrate it. We should LOVE it when AI comes for our jobs, and puts us out of work, because it's not joblessness that's inherently bad, its our economic system that forces people to find jobs in order to meet their basic needs in a world in which labor seems increasingly irrelevant and unncessary but we keep insisting that people do it because that's how we always did it and how dare you question it. And perhaps teaching kids to code now, will, in 10-15 years, when they become adults in the job market, come back around to bite them. Maybe we are creating another college graduate type crisis with the next generation like we did with us millennials.
At the same time, let's be honest, Jensen Huang is a blowhard. I HATE this guy. He is literally the kind of tech bro who WOULD oversell AI, because it's his job to market it, and I've been listening to this guy's marketing BS about his "this" is the future, and "that" is the future, and honestly, UGH, F THIS GUY, F THIS GUY, F THIS GUY, F THIS GUY. And Vaush kinda has a points. Nvidia is betting big on AI, and they're trying to make this the next big thing, as is microsoft. They're pushing hard in a direction of planned obsolescence and creating needs that dont currently exist so we have to buy their overpriced hardware to stay relevant.
And honestly? Nvidia has had a DISASTROUS effect on the GPU market over the past decade. They basically attained near monopoly status and they basically are conditioning users to pay more for worse graphics cards. Like, the 4000 series, there was some discussion recently based on things like die sizes and power usage, that the $300 4060 is what the "50" card should've been. 50 cards USED to cost like $100 back in the day, and even with inflation, we're talking, at most, $140-150. Their "60" cards are actually the 70 cards, which now cost $500-600. The "80" cards used to cost $500-700, now they're over $1k. It's INSANE. GPU prices are bordering on unaffordable. Hardware demands are increasing, and performance is barely going up. We can now get 2x the performance after 8 years, compared to what we got in 2016, and Nvidia's response is that traditional raster performance metrics are outdated, because ray tracing and DLSS are the future.
Ray tracing is overly expensive tech to basically "trace rays" like real light, it's very costly to do, both in dollars and performance wise, and nvidia put specialized hardware on GPUs to do it. Which has, in and of itself, greatly increased the price of GPUs. Nvidia, to compensate for this, has introduced DLSS, an upscaling feature based in AI, to take small low res images and to blow them up into bigger images. While AMD and intel have alternatives on their cards, they arent as good as they lack the dedicated hardware. To get the best results, you need to buy nvidia cards. And as system requirements go up, games are starting to use DLSS and FSR (AMD's tech) far more to compensate for native resolution. "Native resolution is dead" is a common nvidia talking point, with the desire to use these upscaling techs to replace actually rendering things at full resolution, which....tends to lock people into needing to buy nvidia cards to use this tech. Because if you buy AMD, guess what, you can upscale but it looks worse. So Vaush is right when he mentioned us having these tiny blurry pictures upscaled into higher res ones and that being the future and it being crappy, because nvidia is literally conditioning the market into that, because it benefits their bottom line. it makes people more reliant on their cards and eco system where they cant go to the competition even if they try, and it raises the price of GPUs significantly because where else are you gonna go? if you want the best performance with the best features, you need nvidia.
This is monumentally bad for the GPU market, and i myself bought AMD to resist what nvidia is doing. I like my card, but let's face it, even the AMD cards are kinda overpriced and underpowered, and theyre merely selling their cards a bit cheaper than nvidia because they cant wield these features to bully people into buying their stuff, so you get better performance but a worse feature set. For now, I think AMD is viable, but in the future, nvidia might just crowd the market out with their proprietary bullcrap, or AMD will be forced to compete with nvidia on nvidia's terms, meaning they too will have to raise the prices of GPUs because they have to put all of this ray tracing and generative AI bull#### on their cards and that itself means cards will be more expensive. None of this is actually good for the consumer. Especially since upscaling just doesnt produce images as good as native resolution, especially at lower resolutions. DLSS and FSR are used ideally with at least a 1080p base resolution and upscaled to 1440p or 4k. But for lower end buyers, which are most people with nvidia and AMD's insane new pricing structure where the sub $200 market is basically destroyed and no longer exists in a meaningful way and the $200-300 market is now the bottom rung, we might need to run stuff at 720p or even 540p just to be able to run games at 1080p. It's INSANE. And new games are like that too sometimes. My card is only like a year old and it's already aging like milk because of this crap. The market is literally going full on "let's make a $300 card run games at low settings 720p even though that's currently what we're selling on the market". Dont believe me? Look at crap like alan wake 2 and ark survival ascended. Or even something like starfield. It's insane. As we leave the venerated 1000 series behind it's like overnight the cards were buying to replace those old cards are quickly becoming just as obsolete very quickly. This is BAD for the market.
And of course, Jensen Huang is gonna light a couple benjamins on fire to light a cigarette while telling us about the joys of generative AI that he's putting in his cards and how this stuff is the future and how we need to get on baord with it. God I hate that guy. I hate to say it but Vaush does have a point here.
However, let's not agree too much with vaush, because he clearly is an anti technology luddite who takes things too far. He romanticizes a world in which humans work and do things and the very suggestion that AI puts people out of the job seems to send him into a flying rage, and that's just as cringe. I mean, neither one of these guys are really in the right. One guy is a raging luddite and the other is a tech bro trying to sell people products they dont need and trap them in an eco system where he creates a demand for something that only they can fill, and much like a drug dealer giving away "free samples", he's not doing it out of the good of his heart, but in order to create a new class of customer dependent on them for an artificial need.
Neither one of these guys are good guys. So much like with Clinton vs the cease fire now, unstoppable object bounces off of the immovable force, where the unstoppable object cant stop and the immovable force can't move, so the unstoppable object just ricochets somewhere else instead, leaving this battle a tie.
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