First the obvious, NVIDIA is selling shovels in a gold rush. They are going to talk up AI and make it super important to everything. But I think the lede being buried is that AI will allow capital to multiply their extraction of surplus value.

They revealed multi-frame generation for video games. They take a normally generated frame, double it using AI. That’s normal framegen. The new product uses more AI to generate several other frames from the one it generated before. You increase your frame rate using AI generated frames.

The reason they do that at all is because it’s incredibly hard to generate extra frames through normal rendering techniques. Native 60fps at native 1080p is extremely expensive. Trying to push that to 120fps on commercial hardware would be expensive for everyone. So instead they just generate 20 480p frames and use AI to scale it up and to generate more frames.

It’s a little shaky, but think about that in terms of production. They are able to take a frame honestly produced, apply AI, and get more out of it.

Food analogy/Imagine Burger: For every 1 hamburger a frycook produces, AI instantly makes it a double and makes 3 more of them. You’ve taken the $5 that the worker produced and making it into $20. Except you don’t give the frycook any credit and pay a small fee for computing power.

I know it’s computers and it’s not analogous to markets. But the bad analogy got me thinking about what if they could apply AI to certain productive areas and extract more surplus. It’s bionic workers, except they don’t get the benefits. So it’s not about replacing jobs with AI. That’s a red herring. It’s about taking the jobs that exist and using tech to get more out of it.

That’s nothing new. But I think the new part is less of a reliance of workers and somehow even more of an ownership of production. These things can’t exist without workers, people feeding them. But at the same time the math doesn’t work out. You can’t have one worker making a hamburger and 3 other people paying for copies. Because those other people are workers too and they need to get their money from somewhere. You’re basically inflating demand using AI, not with real people.

Like Moore’s law, maybe the space between horrible new configuration of capital and revolution will grow increasingly shorter. This may be the age of undead capital, dead capital that lives again because they use AI animate it.