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A bubble that knows it's a bubble
- linotype 1y agoCiting Ray Dalio makes me question the credibility of the whole article.
- teapot7 1y agoMy ex boss read too much Ray Dalio and it ate his brain.
- cnnlives47 1y agoRelevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971273
- LarsDu88 1y agoI had the same thoughts as much as 2 years ago on how this will play out. Unlike with railroads and fiber optic cable however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years. Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US. Long term, I think the real winners are going to be in robotics. Still an unsolved field, but Waymo proves that even a nearly 20 year slog to the finish line is viable. And robotics infrastructure may be more robust to obsolescence than the underlying compute. I find it odd so many companies are making humanoid robots though... Over engineering that reeks of bubble economics and possible fraud.
- ehnto 1y agoI think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans. If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, in all degrees of motion a human has etc.
- xg15 1y agoCompletely off-topic: I find it odd that we easily use this argument for humanoid robots (and also self-driving cars), but handicapped people are still bound to wheelchairs and have to constantly fight to change the environment and make it wheelchair-accessible. If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fhd2 1y agoMuch like wheelchairs vs exo skeletons, the simpler (and cheaper) tech tends to win. I'd imagine in a future where robots are everywhere, they'll use whatever cheap locomotion is appropriate for their tasks, probably predominantly wheels. It's a fun vision to imagine bipedal robots everywhere like in old sci movies, but I'm not convinced that's how it'll play out, the economics don't make that much sense. Bipedal robots are more expensive to develop, build and maintain, more limited in their payloads, and because of the additional complexity, less reliable.
- throwawayqqq11 1y agoCost will be the reason why these over engineered robots fail. Cost is the reason why indoor vertical farms fail, even though in their case, the environment is controlled and the tech is relatively simple compared to omnipotent field robots. The most viable use case of AI is bullshiting humans, which is still a multi-billion market. Infrastructure hooray!
- fhd2 1y agoI look at this a bit more generously: We're pushing the boundaries of what's technically possible. At least for niche use cases, I'm convinced bipedal robots and GenAI will have lasting value. Are they the next automobile / electricity / smartphone? I'm sceptical.
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- willvarfar 1y agoYes the thing that might be missed in the point about how the big buildout of GPU compute is going to be the backbone of the future etc is that, unlike railroads and dark fibre, the GPU compute gets obsolete really really quickly. So it's not the same. I had a friend who got a Sun cluster for basically free when the 2000 dot com bubble burst. And when we were doing recreational math contests a couple of years later it was slower than our laptops. So it is very likely that a load of today's GPU compute is very competitive next year or the year after? The AI bubble bursting will kill investment in the next gen hardware in the west. But china will come to market with its first gen that it is currently building to replace its dependency on the west and will leapfrog the west etc. China isn't really completely dependent on competing in our AI bubble, its using AI for its own things and will plough on even when the west bubble bursts. Seems obvious? Still, there has been so much talk about the AI bubble bursting last week and this is the the best writeup.
- Negitivefrags 1y agoI do agree with you, but I think there a non-zero chance the situation might be different now. We are not getting the same insane gains from node shrinks anymore. Imagine the bubble pops tomorrow. You would have an excess of compute using current gen tech, and the insane investments required to get to the next node shrink using our current path might no longer be economically justifiable while such an excess of compute exists. It might be that you need to have a much bigger gap than what we are currently seeing in order to actually get enough of a boost to make it worthwhile. Not saying that is what would happen, I'm just saying it's not impossible either.
- dijit 1y agoThe half-life of iron is pretty low too, the advantage of the rail system is what it allowed us to do when it was cheap enough. All the investment in AI should help bring infrastructure up to a higher level, power distribution and cooling for example are at a much higher level than would have otherwise been. Who knows what use that might have if it suddenly becomes incredibly cheap. (this is my silver lining thinking)
- pjc50 1y agoThe half-life of metallic iron is apparently 2.6 million years, so I'm not sure what you mean there.
- ViewTrick1002 1y agoRust.
- GeoAtreides 1y agoMaybe some isotopes of iron have a half-life, stable isotopes don't decay (iron is the element where all decay chains end)
- dijit 1y agoHahahah, fair point, maybe you could show me a 50 year old rail that is still worthy of being ridden. ;) Even a 20 year old rail is problematic from what I understand (from a UK perspective).
- 1718627440 1y agoIt's not the tracks itself that need to be maintained first. When they are the issue the easiest fix is to swap the rails. What need to be done first is the gravel and then also the ties. Expensive are also trackout/switches with motors, and of course the signal boxes. What is now the big deal is adoption to newer technologies like ETCS. What needs the fastest maintenance nowadays, though, is software :-).
- isoprophlex 1y ago
- fhd2 1y ago> however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years. Is it all about the actual GPUs though, is that the only "infrastructure" being built? A list from the top of my head of things that I'd say do last: 1. Data center buildings (take a while to build, contents completely aside). 2. Organisations and processes for running operations and procurement in said data centers - doesn't take decades to build for sure, but it's something worthwhile to already have. 3. Advances in the actual chips, i.e. more powerful processing units. 4. Advances in chip fabrication. 5. Chip fabrication facilities and organisations (similar to #1 and #2). So sure, GPUs are highly temporary. But a lot of the things being developed and built around them much less so. I do think one possible bubble burst scenario is that we'll have cheap compute available for decades but not a lot of great ideas of what to do with it. That is not unlike the 2000s I suppose.
- bostik 1y agoConsider the second order effects of building all those data centers. The GPU hardware rots and becomes obsolete in a matter of years, but the national infrastructure required to support the physical sites isn't going away. Things such as... - improved power distribution networks - logistics arrangements to build and support the DC sites - lots and lots of new fibre interconnects to support the massive bandwidth needs - hopefully: better power delivery planning laws - plumbing infrastructure, because all that hardware requires cooling Some of the DC sites will be decommissioned from their initial use, but given the physical security requirements, might morph into handy higher-security industrial facilities with only small repurposing. Such reuse cases would especially benefit from improved logistics (see above).
- LarsDu88 1y agoThat's fine, but the non-GPU infrastructure represents half of the cost of the datacenter. The physical GPUs and compute represents the other half and will rather rapidly depreciate. This is not as hardy as fiberoptic communication lines used to build the internet, or railroad lines used to build transportation infrastructure.
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- Gravityloss 1y agoOn the other hand, since Moore's Law has flattened a lot in general, does this apply anymore? I think at least with CPU:s the depreciation has slowed down a lot compared to 15 years ago.
- tarsinge 1y agoWhat’s the intersection between the current LLM driven bubble and robotics? Apart from Tesla’s PR?
- LarsDu88 1y agoJust look at every Nvidia GTC presentation for the past 3 years and Chinese investments into companies like Unitree. The plethora of robotics startups that all build humanoid machines (rather than wheeled arms)
- _carbyau_ 1y agoI suspect that if AI doesn't use the compute then something else will happily fill the gap - like building more lanes on a highway. It will be interesting to see what fills the GPU compute glut though. Regards robot form factor; I'd rather R2D2 than C3PO. I don't want anything approaching the Uncanny Valley; I want a machine that does handy things!
- alralralr 1y ago[dead]
- xg15 1y ago> The speculation democratized investing in a way never seen before. Clerks, shopkeepers, and domestic servants, people who had never owned stocks before, mortgaged their homes and borrowed money to buy railway shares. I like the term "democratize investing" here. "We're granting the masses the privilege of dumping their lifesavings into this overhyped project, so we can make a clean exit".
- senko 1y agoSeveral paragraphs later, the article argues this time is different: > Yes, retail can buy Nvidia, but they can’t access pre-IPO rounds where the real speculation happens. This concentration among professional investors won’t prevent a bubble, but it might prevent the kind of widespread financial devastation that followed previous crashes.
- raldi 1y ago> Anthropic raised $450 million at a $4.1 billion valuation despite negligible revenue What year is this from? The author might want to do a recent news search.
- aurareturn 1y agoIsn’t Anthropic worth hundreds of billions by now and their revenue is doubling every 6 months?
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- Lionga 1y ago5.6 billion loss in 2024 on $918 million in revenue. When you are selling a 5 dollars for 1 dollar doubling revenue is easy. It just creates more losses, same with OpenAI
- aurareturn 1y agoWhat is their gross margins? Is the loss just because they have to keep competing at an ultra competitive race? On a software focused forum like HN, I’m surprised people still don’t understand the grow at all cost until you are the top 2 or 3 left model. There has been dozens of examples of tech companies losing money for years just to become highly profitable after. People are still not getting that big tech is investing like their lives depend on it is because they are. GenAI can render the core businesses of big tech obsolete.
- rurp 1y ago> There has been dozens of examples of tech companies losing money for years just to become highly profitable after. Sure, but there have been thousands of tech companies that lost money year over year and went bust. Odds are that any given AI company will end up losing a lot of money. Maybe the asymmetric potential payoff is worth the risk in certain cases, but it's not crazy to be skeptical about Anthropic or any other hot company.
- hahahacorn 1y agoI recently gave an unprompted tirade about bubbles creating pockets of fake economic activity with no “real” economic output or value creation tied to them, and how sometimes, the circulatory systems in those bubbles feed into themselves. E.g. someone borrowing against their higher property value(s) to put a down payment on another property. Leverage is the amplifier. And I don’t see many self-circulating capital flows. I expect contractions to be reasonable for this bubble, or more realistically industry stagflation.
- cantor_S_drug 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq9EOLdTf0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq9EOLdTf0E Here's the mechanism in simple terms: When US manufacturing jobs moved to China in the 2000s, American workers saw their incomes drop dramatically - like a factory worker going from $30/hour at Ford to $12/hour at Walmart. Instead of accepting lower living standards, the system created an alternative solution through housing and credit. As home prices rose rapidly (often 10-15% annually), workers could borrow against their home's appreciation through equity loans and refinancing. A worker whose house went from $150,000 to $300,000 could borrow $50,000 to maintain their lifestyle - buying trucks, boats, and continuing to consume as if their income hadn't dropped. This created a win-win illusion: China got manufacturing jobs, US companies got higher profits from cheap labor, Americans got cheaper goods at stores like Walmart, and workers felt wealthy despite earning less. Nobody complained because everyone seemed to benefit in the short term. The system worked as long as home prices kept rising, allowing people to keep borrowing against appreciation. But when housing prices stopped climbing around 2005, the illusion collapsed - workers were left with lower wages, massive debt, and no way to keep borrowing. This mechanism essentially allowed America to maintain consumption by borrowing against future wealth rather than addressing the fundamental problem of job losses. The 2008 financial crisis was the inevitable result when this unsustainable system finally broke down.
- FinnLobsien 1y agoI think this is directionally correct. But we tend to remember the technologies which became mainstream after the bubble burst and forget those that fizzled or found a much less world-changing niche. Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.
- Ekaros 1y agoVR is good example of money being burned and middling adoption to a not that big population. For average person it has ended up something cool, but in the end not common and forgettable. And I am not sure if it even was a bubble, but selected players just investing in it.
- FinnLobsien 1y agoExactly. Right now it’s easy to look at it as a relatively niche thing. But at the time it was going to be the next big thing transforming everything. Same as 3D printing. Certainly cool and useful in some niche contexts, but it has not disrupted manufacturing.
- gligorot 1y agoI would argue it disrupted engineering. So many videos on YouTube can be found of people cutting out expensive molds (for example) and getting a product to market faster and cheaper. And this is happening in companies as well (Prusa released an enterprise grade printer not long ago). At the same time, Printables and MakerWorld are flooded with…toys. They gamified their platforms and a ton of “thingy” models, ex. generic planter pots (some of them just renders, never even printed!) is the result. This certainly hides the benefit but I very much think it’s there.
- Ekaros 1y agoThere is places and things that work for 3d printing. Very small scale manufacturing. Prototypes. But actually selling those is somewhat hard and not scalable market. And home printing... Yeah that sounds like hobbyist to me with corresponding market. On other side you get to complex topologies and very specialised parts. Again pretty hard to scale and limited demand. In the end it is manufacturing and manufacturing is huge. But also generally does not have great margins. It has lot of competition. So 3D printing would end up there with others say makers of CNC machines, various presses and so on. Multi-billion dollar industry, but not tech.
- spaceman_2020 1y agoMostly agree with the author. But I also believe that this is very emergent tech and we’re still figuring out the best way to actually make use of it The clearest example is in AI generated visual content. If you dig through what people are doing, its clear that only a very small % of users are actually getting truly high-quality, ready-for-production content, while the rest are just prompting in pure slop. There is a skill level to this that hasn’t really permeated the mainstream Once that happens, we might see some of that 95% waste figure change to, maybe, 50% waste
- aurareturn 1y agoFYI, Altman also said OpenAI is planning to invest “trillions” into AI in the “near future”. He said this at the same time as saying AI is bubbly. This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.
- ivape 1y agoHe’s saying it’s bubbly because he can’t get good prices to buy out startups. He’s a buyer, first and foremost. No one wants to have to pay $20bn for some of these companies. They don’t believe it’s a bubble on any level, and I do think anyone in involved sees it as an infinite investment until the very end of the world (not kidding). It’s the end-game for software tech, especially if you are willing to be humbled by what stuff like Genie3 will become. There is absolutely nothing else left to invest in when it comes to software development, this is it.
- aurareturn 1y agoYep. Agreed. He said this to knock down price on AI startups for acquisition and to stop the ballooning talent war costing hundreds of millions. It’s so painfully obvious but so many AI doomers use it as evidence. He doesn’t want a talent war with Meta and Apple. And Meta has responded by signaling a truce in the talent war by saying they’re freezing AI hiring.
- xg15 1y agoSelf-contradictory communication seems to become his style. "AI is an existential risk for humanity, that's why we have to dump all resources we have into building it". "It's critically important that AI as an industry is regulated, but also we'll pull out of the EU if they try to regulate us"
- easywood 1y agoI think you should read it like this: "AI is an existential risk for humanity ...". ... so you should trust only us to build it "AI as an industry should be regulated ..." ... to make it harder for newcomers on the market.
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. The data centers kept humming after Webvan went dark. All that ‘wasted’ investment had already transformed into something physical. The pipes, servers, and networks that would become the foundation for Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and the digital transformation that actually did change everything. The bubble’s victims unknowingly funded the future. They just paid a decade too early. The flow of money to spur innovation is exactly like "Cambrian Explosion". We should do this more often, with biotech and future fields to come.
- flohofwoe 1y ago> Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;) I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an organism being propped up that wouldn't survive on its own in a competitive environment.
- cantor_S_drug 1y agoParadoxically, I think Cambrian Explosion happened because of innovation of eyes. Maybe the tech that currently was developed for VR headsets could find home in smart glasses (i.e. google glass)
- iammjm 1y agoThe Cambrian Explosion happened because of the environmental changes, such as the amount of free oxygen available, while innovations such as eyes were the result of the Cambrian Explosion with life becoming more diversified and complex. So I guess its more accurate to think of stuff that empowers AI, such as cheaper and better GPUs and machine learning, as cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen for organisms to feed and grow upon.
- layoric 1y ago> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives it at the other side of the transaction. It is still in circulation, it can still be used to outbid people for real things, just by different people. Also, pets.com still exists, it just forwards to petsmart.com.
- cjfd 1y agoThis is incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation . A bubble bursting is the inverse process of money creation. Money isn't paper bills or metal coins. It is mostly numbers in a computer.
- starwatch 1y agoMoney can be "lost", and "created". In fact, it regularly is by commercial banks; this is the cornerstone of the modern economy. The bank of England wrote a pretty accessible document on money being created and destroyed [1]. For a slightly deeper dive (but equally accessible) check out "Can’t We Just Print More Money?" by Rupal Patel, et al. [2] which describes the different kinds of money. The 2014 doc was a pretty wild read for me when it came out - it changed my perspective quite a bit. [1]:https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-... [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58796370-can-t-we-just-print-more-money-economics-in-ten-simple-questions https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58796370-can-t-we-just-p...
- danmaz74 1y ago"capital" in the economic sense isn't money at all - it's tools, infrastructure, knowledge; from this point of view, you're correct. A bubble bursting on the stock market doesn't destroy capital. On the other hand, the monetary value of the stock market (and other assets) going up and down does create or destroy "money". From a financial point of view, it's not a zero sum game.
- jstummbillig 1y agoThere is hubris, but calling it a bubble simply does not check out, for one reason alone: If AI did absolutely nothing from here on out but give maybe a somewhat better version of current claude code (and it confuses me to no end that some people still refuse to see what is going on there, which admittedly are increasingly few of those who try, which makes sense because stuff gets better) that leads to, say, a ~2x dev speed up it, given the size of the market and how much software is missing still, AI as a whole would still be undervalued. Of course, assuming that this would be the only thing where economic gains come from is already such a laughably bearish vision. It's just that that's all you need for the bubble-thesis to fall flat.
- marcyb5st 1y agoThis raises the question: hasn't the market already priced in a ubiquitous AI future? The current valuations seem to reflect the assumption that AI won't just 2x developer productivity but will also automate a huge portion of the workforce/boot productivity across the board. And I believe it has, and it's the only way to explain the sky-high valuations for companies that are 1) still losing money and, more importantly, 2) have no moat. If that's true, then we are in a bubble by definition. When AI development eventually stagnates, failing to deliver on these promises, valuations will correct fast (and painfully). What happens then to Nvidia and other hardware companies? And what about the massive AI investments currently propping up the economy [1]? These would also be slashed, messing up the entire supply chain that's gearing up to meet this demand. While I agree the technology is great and useful, I believe we are in bubble territory. I believe it's unlikely to be as transformative as the CEOs and VCs funding these companies claim. [1] https://sherwood.news/markets/the-ai-spending-boom-is-eating-the-us-economy/ https://sherwood.news/markets/the-ai-spending-boom-is-eating...
- rurp 1y agoA 100% increase in software development velocity is a wild claim to assert at this stage. The industry as a whole is not seeing anything like that and the handful of people making claims to that end are executives with a vested interest in boosting the hype. LLMs probably increase prototype or ad-hoc script development by that amount, but that only accounts for a minuscule amount of actual work being done in the industry. Also whatever LLM productivity gains are currently happening are being massively subsidized. Once companies switch out of lighting money on fire mode most of these products will get dramatically worse and more expensive. Maintaining a cutting edge LLM isn't a railroad that you build once and can run and manage for centuries at a fraction of the initial price, they require constant expensive investment.
- adinhitlore 1y agothis was widely docummented BEFORE the "ai bubble", there's well known academic term for it, it's called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter I knew about since like 2010 or before, anti-tech Luddite will act like it's never a thing, shatup.
- benrutter 1y ago> Here’s what’s never happened before: everyone knows the script. I'm don't think this is unique, most bubbles historically as far back as the South Sea bubble have had a lot of people aware of the irrationality, but investing in an attempt to profit from it. I'd even go so far as to say, this is exactly what makes bubbles so volatile as opposed to normal "market corrections". If the dotcom boom had been all people who really believed they were sensibly evaluating the internet's financial potential, I don't think we'd have seen them jump ship quite so quickly. I won't predict the future, but another point about historic bubbles: they almost all go on much further than people think they will before collapse.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoOh, they know its a bubble. FOMO is kind of rational I guess. Seeing others profit wildly while you fall behind can be pretty motivational to enter the trade.
- pydry 1y agoGreater fool theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
- tim333 1y agoI agree with that. This one may be unique in possibly living up to the hype.
- aredox 1y agoWhat remains of Japan's bubble? The country has never really got out of the rout of its "lost decade" and is sliding away into irrelevance.
- throw-qqqqq 1y agoThe Nikkei 225 index is at all-time-highs in August 2025. Highest pay hikes in 30 years, BoJ raised interest rates etc. (sure, both because of inflation, but still). Things seem to be slowly changing in Japan.
- aredox 1y agoThe yen is crashing, there are rice shortages and the country is at 0% growth - before Trump's tarriffs. At this point it is wrong to speak about Japan's "lost decade" - it should be "lost decades".
- throw-qqqqq 1y ago> The yen is crashing In my opinion, that happens because the JPYUSD carry trade. This reverses as they raise interest rates (which has been kept artificially low in Japan for decades).
- throw0101c 1y agoIs AI a bubble? Probably. Does that make it meaningless? Not at all. Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (2003) is strikingly prescient--and worth revisiting [thread] * https://twitter.com/rubyscanlon/status/1958891869489836076#m https://twitter.com/rubyscanlon/status/1958891869489836076#m Perez goes back to the technology of canals: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_Financial_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_... People getting excited for something (perceived as) new is part of the human character.
- cryptos 1y agoWhat do you think will be the survivors of the AI business, once the bubble bursts?
- lproven 1y agoNow that is the most interesting question anyone here asked. It looks likely it could take all the big software companies with it, and all the big cloud providers. It may well kill most GPU vendors, most datacentre and hosting companies. Industrial-scale LLMs are propping up the entire cloud business, and that itself was bloated and overgrown. SaaS was a mistake. Anything -aaS was a mistake. I'd _like_ to see this kill off MS, Oracle etc. Intel is teetering. NVidia is probably screwed. AMD may follow. There's geopolitics here too. China wants Taiwan and has actively been divesting from Western hardware and software. So has Russia. Lots of Linux growth there: it's free, it works, they can just take it. And there's rapid climate change too, which is starting to become visible. Everyone who manufuctures in Taiwan may well be doomed. But ditto everyone in the tropics, in the newer tech centres: Malaysia, Thailand, etc. Everyone who gets chips from Taiwan is probably screwed. Everyone who assembles in PacRim and SE Asia too. That will take down most Western companies. Apple might weather it: it sells hardware, and it has its own unique OS family. But others make its hardware for it -- in those areas. Chinese tech may bloom. Small scale individual FOSS will be OK. Stuff reusing legacy tech, that can run on old kit. Everyone's deprecating x86-32. That may bite them hard. Everything dependent on virtual stuff and public cloud, everything dependent on K8s and remote datacentres, everything you can't run locally on kit you own that sits in premises you own. That includes a lot of the games industry. Non-commercial OSes will be OK. Bad times for RHEL and the clones. Bad times for SUSE and maybe Canonical. Maybe OK for Debian. Good for Arch & Alpine & Slackware. Stuff that needs GPUs, bad. Stuff that works fine in standard def on CPU graphics, good. But I am just indulging my own biases and skepticism here, I freely admit.
- 1718627440 1y agoI don't think for example MS will be doomed so fast. Even when they loose all their investments and a lot of money. They still have their software, and contracts with nearly every company.
- wtcactus 1y agoI think we should be weary of the fact that Sam Altman having an interest in cutting VC funding for new AI products and competitors in order to condensate most AI funding into OpenAI and kill any new competitors, doesn't make him exactly a neutral player in all of this. The "fearmongering" he is trying to create, can be seen as self-serving, so his opinions should be taken with a very big grain of salt.
- SebFender 1y agoA golden rule that has been very decent in the last decades - When my mom starts asking me "What's up with this tech" - it's most usually is a bubble ;)
- mikewarot 1y agoThe thing is, this is a financial bubble, not a capabilities bubble. If you're worried about money, this is horrible news. If you just want to get shit done, it's great news, only if you can avoid losing personal agency long enough to survive the crash. We're headed towards the hockey stick in terms of what people using AI can do. I'm rapidly learning that even ChatGPT5 can get confused, and lose sight of goals, but not in the hallucination variety, just the bog standard way people end up trapped in rabbit holes. I'm learning how to talk to it and get it back on track. AI really can be productive, but it still needs guidance to be really useful.
- zippyman55 1y agoMy thoughts: I'm expecting the LLM-driven bubble to burst. Not AI in general, but it seems LLM has been soaking up all the investment dollars and LLM will eventually hit a wall in critical fields where an expert can poke holes at the results. The data centers go poof! Now, the contracted land rights, water rights, and electricity rights, highly discounted will be of value. Kind of like the defunct railroad rights in your community that can't easily be repurposed into a bike path as the city does not have the rights. So, I wonder if there will be companies formed to buy up the infrastructure rights (the contracted cheap power and water) and re-sell them to the city and counties that originally generated the contracts. Its too easy to see the naïve city and county officials succumbing to the hookers and other marketing techniques when these contracts were issued. Now they can be sold back at a profit.
- nuc1e0n 1y agoThe thing is the infrastructure that is being built now is owned by a small number of already large companies. Is it really that likely that Microsoft, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Alphabet/Google, Oracle, Nvidia and all the companies Elon Musk is involved with are going to go bankrupt?
- steveBK123 1y agoNothing new here, thats just a feature of bubbles. “When I see a bubble forming, I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire,” goes one of George Soros’s well-known quotes. “That is not irrational.”