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.

  • HakFooEnglish
    19·
    4 months ago

    I’m not sure frame generation has much of a future in mainstream PC gaming.

    The selling point tended to be “do more with less hardware”-- that $150 GPU might not be quite enough to deliver 1080p/60, but with frame-generation, we can fake it.

    But we’re approaching a fixed target:

    • Resolutions are stagnating. Very few people are going much over 4k resolutions, or maybe slightly higher ultrawidescreen resolutions

    • The air is running out of the AAA game market to drive hardware demand. If they’re losing money on games that put 5 million triangles on the screen, who’s going to bankroll the next game with 10 million? We’re near or at the level where if a game looks ugly, it’s not because we lacked the hardware to render the vision.

    So in a few years, when the Geforce RTX 8060 and Radeon RX12600XT are offering 5080-class performance for 1200 yuan, will there be enough software demanding enough to need frame generation? Or will it be a transient hack like “hybrid” disc drives that were 500GB of spinning rust with a 5GB SSD cache in front?

    But going back to the original thesis-- even if they find a way to make AI a real productivity multiplier, thry’re covering their ears about the economic timebomb of “who buys the products you can make with less and less labour?”

    … ramble: eventually they’ll have to switch to AI-generated Veblen goods for the rich, as pretty much everything else will have a saturated or declining market. I wonder if that is how AI eats itself in the end-- once you’ve paid a fortune to build robo-Van Gogh to paint your portrait, you have to destroy it so nobody else can make one like it.

  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    4 months ago

    That might be what they’re selling, but how does that analagy apply to frames in the real world? Can 1 dev produce a game that runs at 20 FPS as easily as 3 devs can produce a game that runs at 60 FPS?

  • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    6·
    4 months ago

    But the bad analogy got me thinking about what if they could apply AI to certain productive areas and extract more surplus.

    If you look at the data for labour productivify growth in the united states you will see that although the growth is very volatile, the basic pattern is that growth in labor productivity over the last 75 years has steadily slowed down. To see the data, select the %chg option and MAX on the timeliness.

    This is despite the fact that during the keynesian period of high population growth and high productivity growth, there was a corresponding low unemployment.

    The very rapid growth of computing power in the neoliberal period did not offset the trend of stagnating labor productivity (because capitalists in the neoliberal period have chronically under invested into production), leading to the result that workers being displaced due to productivity rises is not a real threat.

    In most cases, capitalists are under investing in production and simply using ai as a scapegoat. Capitalists also have a tendency of overhyping things they believe will finally solve the contradictions of capitalism. They did this with fascism, ketnesianism, neoliberalism, computers and so on and so forth.

    I think that AI is more of a threat in regards to “qualitative” factors, such as the quality of products or mass surveillance. In the economy itself, companies like NVDIA overhype the effects of AI to inflation their stock prices.