Sooner or later the current AI bubble is going to burst. What’s going to happen when it does?
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It won’t burst because it’s ideal spying, advertising and mass brain washing software. It’s easier and cheaper to respond from chat with altered history than drop bombs. It’s easier to summarize what you have on phone than dump phone data. It will progress until there is no privacy and all screens are shared with big brother. Technology is no longer created to serve people but to enslave people.
Many people have been saying this for the last 3 years and I still think the bubble burst is as inevitable as a future economy that is entangled with AI. The overhype is obvious and a course correction kickstarted by a crash just a matter of time. The stock markets will have a very bad time before governments step in and waste our taxpayer money to give handouts to the super rich. But hey, at least big tech has to try regaining our trust and lie a little less obviously about their AI products for a while so it won‘t be all bad I guess? /s
I will chortle a little.
I will chortle a lot
I will shart a little
*puts on diapers*
kinky
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.
OP here. Thanks for the heads up (Ed’s up?). That looks like a good newsletter
It’s cyclic, but each cycle builds on the last
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.
I agree it has some value, but the problem is that value doesn’t seem to align with the cost of Western AI.
If you look at what Altman said about how much OpenAI was losing despite charging an arm and a leg for its premium subscription, no one will pay for that for low value items such as transcription or scaffolding code.
Unless it can actually replace high value jobs long term rather than short term pretend replace as with Klarana then its doomed with the current models.
AI has been a net-negative for society.
So we have firearms but they seem to sell pretty well.
It doesn’t have to be nice to make it not a bubble.
After a few months, I’d get laid off and have to look for other data center work.
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.Fam have you seen evaluations of AI companies. For the amount of venture capital poured into openai, their profit should 20x or it’ll take a century for the investments to recoup. The reason for why they keep investing is that the AI is supposed to blow up the market and earn gazillions back.
Everyone agrees ML is extremely useful. Most people also agree that LLMs have their uses too.
What we don’t agree is that AI is the printing press, electricity and the internet rolled into one. And if it isn’t, then all this investment is made under false pretense, hence it is a bubble
I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I do think it will burst. It reminds of the ludicrous claims made about the last two few VC tech bubble trends, like VR and Blockchain. The hype wasn’t that it was a useful technology. It was that these were the new paradigm shifts. These will change how society fundamentally functions. Obviously they didn’t. Obviously those bubbles burst.
Part of the reason, I think, is that the current round of venture capitalists made their fortunes on the internet itself. It was the paradigm shift, and it toppled the way people had done things for a hundred years in a way that can’t really be described to anyone who didn’t live through it. It colonized and conquered every space humans went, and became ubiquitous. Retail stores found themselves under siege by amazon. Video stores found themselves obsoleted by streaming platforms, cable TV and movie theaters fought for relevance. It made some men richer than God. A computer in the palm of your hand, allowing you access to the totality of human knowledge and the collective of human communication. It was like the fucking ansible.
Those structures have calcified now, and the internet is at its limit for integration. So tech bros latch on to ever more destructive technologies named after ever more dystopian sci fi, figuring that throwing a billion at any random project is worth it if pans out once again, and it becomes the next paradigm shift. The problem is that all the projects they try to elevate are mostly just ways to disrupt existing industries and reform them under their control without worker protections. Uber operated at a loss for 15 years just to turn taxi driving into indentured servitude. Mark Zuckerberg was obsessed with VR because his primary competitors owned a hardware platform (so Google owns Android, Apple Iphone etc) and he needed FB to have one too. Being a tech bro, the reason he pitched as meeting software was to undermine commercial real estate. NFTs were an attempt to disrupt central banking. AI is an attempt by Silicon Valley to cut highly paid tech workers from the payroll.
Sorry, this post got away from me. This is the part that has a bubble timer on it, I believe. LLMs produce garbage code, and garbage art. It has inflicted immediate, incalculable harm on people real lives. Eventually, I believe (if the current world order survives anyway) lawmakers will clamp down on it.
I don’t think the VCs care much about the infinite incalculable loss. But there’s this idea that (I think) Robert Evans introduced me to. He noted that Fascists love the infinite lie machine. Fascist governments classically controlled the media, and Russia has demonstrated what a wonderful weapon of war LLMs really are. That alone terrifies me. Its worth something to the worst people, and who knows what might happen if say, Peter Thiel wants to continue underwriting it so that way he can, say, direct fascist uprisings against governments that try to regulate him, or I don’t know, portray striking workers as domestic terrorists.
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.
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.
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.
I think the difference here is that you can’t quite just put an AI tag on something, and then investors flock to give you money.
The AI companies that are invested in, are mostly companies that actually have something to show. And the biggest investment and benefactor is Nvidia that actually makes loads of money from AI products.But they do. Lots of crap has “AI powered” plastered on the investor prospectus with no real world application. The worst Ive seen has been targeted at audiences that wernt burned by .com, such as in China, but even in the US youll have a hard time finding a startup that doesnt incorporate AI in some way.
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?
