Sooner or later the current AI bubble is going to burst. What’s going to happen when it does?
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It’s cyclic, but each cycle builds on the last
I will chortle a little.
I will chortle a lot
I will shart a little
After a few months, I’d get laid off and have to look for other data center work.
Anyone thinking about this should check out the newsletter and / or podcast of Ed Zitron. He’s been railing about this inevitablity for some time.
Im on the fence, although I want it to burst, I also think AI has enough use cases for it not to be a bubble. It’s just that all those use cases are evil, hence why I fear it might not burst.
AI has been a net-negative for society.
Meh. I’ve been buying semis and will continue when PEs suggest reasonable values. AI or not, it’s hard to see anything but long-term growth. I do wish that I had bet the mortgage on semis during the tariff tantrum.
I don’t think it will, AI will improve transform and expand in areas of usefulness, so I think we are still in the early days.
But at what point can we agree that it didn’t?
When we finally get FSD for real? When AI helps improve diagnosis and saves lives?
When AI creates new molecules that are better than any chemist could do without AI.What will it take for people to realize that AI is here to stay? And AI will remain a significant part of our economy.
Some people behave like AI is some sort of .com bubble, but from an economic viewpoint that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. The investment landscape into AI is completely different from the .com speculation that was completely void of content.AI is financed by established players that develop and use AI themselves, while .com was venture capital investing in ideas with no purpose.
Tesla may burst, because they try to sell themselves as an AI company, but they are so far behind it’s ridiculous.
I suspect the Tesla bubble may burst in 5-10 years.The dot-com bubbles only eliminated companies that didn’t have a stable business; those that did only saw their value drop slightly. However, they later recovered and became the giants they are today.
Then in the future the term BIG AI will emerge with the new companies and the old companies in the market.
It will burst. AI is improving at the same rate it always has and no one’s surprised, just LLMs have gotten attention from normal users who seem to think “this is AI”.
For actual AI, nothing has changed. You still need extremely well governed data and lots and lots of controlled training, lots and lots of condition farming and resolving, all at considerable cost not worth it for BAU, just AI-soecific projects.
It’s already bursting, as people realise what is AGI and what is non-logic LLMs and why the latter has limited use, especially with awful mass “training”.
The most realistic outcome is that LLMs are able to assist in increasing the pace of AGI.
AI is improving at the same rate it always has
This is blatantly false, there’s a reason there is talk of the cold winter of AI, and the long walk in the desert.
The desert walk was at least 2 decades of very little progress despite big investments, the cold winter was another decade without much progress because of disillusionment so nobody wanted to invest in it.
AI has progressed more for the past 10-15 years than it did for 40 years from about the 70’s to about 2010.For actual AI, nothing has changed.
I assume you mean strong or general AI, and that’s not what we are debating here, because that is not a reality yet.
Something that doesn’t exist obviously can’t burst.
But at what point can we agree that it didn’t?
When it isn’t killing the planet. When it isn’t straining the power grid making power for homes unreliable. When isn’t costing people jobs. When it doesn’t hallucinate. When it isn’t making people dumber.
Even technologies that totally transform society, like trains or the Internet, can overinvest and eventually pop. It doesnt mean the tech goes away, it just means investors take a bath and the dead weight gets burned off.
Yes I think Facebook and Microsoft may lose money on this, you could call that over investing, but for it to be a bubble that burst, companies need to go down, and people lose money on it.
Otherwise you may be looking for a completely different word which is fad, a period where something is over hyped, but quickly settles down like Fidget Spinners.
.com was a bubble because a lot of people lost a lot of money, so much so that it reverberated through the entirety of financial systems globally. I don’t think we will see a financial bubble burst due to AI, that is more than 1% of that at most.
META is throwing out money like crazy on their “META” project that will never succeed, and they are doing the same with AI, but they will not go bankrupt on it, and AI will almost guaranteed be more successful than the “META” project.
What I mean is that generally more money will be made on AI, than is lost experimenting with it.It would be pretty unusual for a company on the scale of Facebook or Microsoft to go under due to a bubble like this, although it is slightly possible they might slip down a tier in the shuffle. Its more likely well see lots of shitty little companies tacking AI onto things that dont need AI go under, and the speculative ventures burning investor money on market share or technologies that may never turn profitable will be thinned out greatly. Its also possible we could see some big names that dont have revenue outside the AI market suffer financial setbacks and be absorbed. Its also possible the bubble could continue to grow for years and we could see some really ridiculous investments and an even more devastating crash in the end.
It’s too damned useful. About every day I check Gemini and ChatGPT for a word or phrase I can’t remember, input some crap and out pops what I was looking for. I use if for a chunk of code I can’t get my head around. It’s the next Google and everyone wants a piece.
OTOH, I do see a sharp downturn in investment as things shake out. Like to dot.com bubble, there will be winners and losers, but you’re spot on. Investors aren’t spazzing out on every single opportunity. Still, gonna be some losers.
We can talk about the dangers of AI all night long, but it’s here to stay.
I agree 100%, and yes there are always losers due to competition and failure to compete. Just like some companies are losing money making cars, but cars are obviously not a bubble.
Maybe the most of the hype is over for now among investors, but AFAIK Nvidia who is the biggest supplier of hardware for it, is not seeing a slowdown in demand.
So maybe it’s more a slow down of interest in the media?
