14 ms·

Is it a bubble?

• qubex 9mo ago
  “Remember the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
• dmurvihill 9mo ago
  This says it all: > I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t believe artificial intelligence has the potential to be one of the biggest technological developments of all time, reshaping both daily life and the global economy. You’re trying to weigh in on this topic and you didn’t even _talk_ to a bear?
  • lm28469 9mo ago
    "My technosolutionist bubble says it's not a bubble, trust me bro"
    • thenaturalist 9mo ago
      „Just XYZ more billion, bro, and then we’re gonna have AGI! For real bro, pleaseeee!“
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      • edhelas 9mo ago
        Why can't you just prompt a way to AGI without spending all that money?
        • popoflojo 9mo ago
          Honestly this is the best response. If the AI was actually so great, it could create better AI, and the future would already be here
          • bzzzt 9mo ago
            According to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this would take an AI 10 million years. Seems like we're stuck with '42' for a while ;)
          • thenaturalist 9mo ago
            They are talking to each other already. Whether for betterment remains to be seen. 2 Opus 4 talking directly to each other: https://www.iflscience.com/the-spiritual-bliss-attractor-something-weird-happens-when-you-leave-two-ais-talking-to-each-other-79578 https://www.iflscience.com/the-spiritual-bliss-attractor-som... "Learning" passing between derivatives of the same base models: https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/
      • Yizahi 9mo ago
        "Sam Altman, a man best known for needing a few more billions at any given moment." (c) HN best-of-2025 :)
    • paganel 9mo ago
      > technosolutionist I'm going to steal this for my arrr rspod conversations.
      • bluedel 9mo ago
        It's a fairly common descriptor
  • thenaturalist 9mo ago
    Also equating artificial intelligence with LLMs. I get that laymen and the media do it, but imo this looks really bad for an investor.
    • ACCount37 9mo ago
      What's the alternative? Is there literally any AI tech more promising and disruptive than LLMs? Or should we buy into that "it's not ackhtually AI" meme?
      • ares623 9mo ago
        The alternative is to be f*cking honest
        • ACCount37 9mo ago
          "Fucking honest" how? If I'm being fucking honest, then this generation of LLMs might already beat most humans on raw intelligence, AI progress shows no signs of stopping, and "it's not actually thinking" is just another "AI effect" cope that humans come up with to feel more important and more exceptional. Or is this not the "fucking honesty" you want?
          • lioeters 9mo ago
            The more you talk, the more you're proving their point.
        • bluebarbet 9mo ago
          This contribution adds nothing to the conversation except gratuitous venom.
          • Planktonne 9mo ago
            I don't think that's fair; one of the most significant criticisms of the AI industry is the number of misleading claims made by its spokespeople, which has had a significant effect on public perception. The parent comment is a relevant expression of that.
  • keybored 9mo ago
    I never talk to people who don’t wear suits.
  • obruchez 9mo ago
    It's difficult to know what people really believe, especially after only a few minutes of discussion, but I would say most people I talk to don't believe AGI is even possible. And they probably think their life won't be changed much by LLMs, AI, etc.
    • roenxi 9mo ago
      I haven't heard a good argument for why AGI isn't already here. It has average humans beat and seems generally to be better-than-novice in any given field that requires intelligence. They play Go, they write music, they've read Shakespeare, they are better at empathy and conversation than most. What more are we asking AI to do? And can a normal human do it?
      • lynx97 9mo ago
        > they are better at empathy Are you serious or sarcastic? Do you really consider this empty type of sycophancy as empathy?
        • roenxi 9mo ago
          Compared to the average human? Yes. Most people are distressingly bad at empathy to the point where just repeating what they just heard back to an interlocutor in a stressful situation could be considered an advanced technique. The average standard of empathy isn't that far away from someone who sees beatings as a legitimate form of communication. Humans suck at empathy, especially outside a tight in-group. But even in-group they lack ability.
          • lynx97 9mo ago
            I am sorry for you. You must surround yourself with a lot of awful people. That is pretty sad to read. Get out of whatever you are stuck in, it can't be good for you.
            • roenxi 9mo ago
  • danybittel 9mo ago
    From the article: ...AI is currently the subject of great enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm doesn’t produce a bubble conforming to the historical pattern, that will be a first.
  • lawn 9mo ago
    That AI have the potential to be extremely disruptive does not prevent the current speculative boom to be a bubble. People seem to have forgotten about the dotcom bubble.
  • re-thc 9mo ago
    > and you didn’t even _talk_ to a bear? You know how to? What language does it speak?
  • YetAnotherNick 9mo ago
    > artificial intelligence has the potential to be one of the biggest technological developments of all time, reshaping both daily life and the global economy. This seems like a factually correct sentence. Emphasis on "potential".
  • bitwize 9mo ago
    AI is changing the world and has changed the world already. See, AI is a field... and it's also a buzzword: once a technology passes out of fashion and becomes part of the fabric of computing, it is no longer called AI in the public imagination. GOFAI techniques, like rules engines and propositional-logic inference, were certainly considered AI in the 1970s and 1980s, and are still used, they're just no longer called that. The statistical methods behind machine learning, transformers, and LLMs are certainly game changers for the field. Whether they will usher in a revolutionary new economy, or simply be accepted as sometimes-useful computation techniques as their limitations and the boundaries of their benefits become more widely known, remains to be seen but I think it will be closer to the latter than the former.
  • sandworm101 9mo ago
    One upon a time in SF i was told that human-driven cars would be illegal, or too expensive to insure, by the end of the decade. That was last decade. The modern tech economy is all about bubbles biult and sustained by hype people. Vertical farming. Pot replacing alcohol. Blockchains replacing lawyers. The metaverse replacing everything. Sure, we are in an AI bubble but we aslo ride atop a dozen others. AI data centers in space? In five years? Really? No fiber connections? Does any sane person actually believe this? No. But if that is what keeps the billions flowing upwards then who am I to judge.
    • lynx97 9mo ago
      Not just in SF. "Journalists" love to pick up these enflated futuristic projections and run with 'em, since they sound so cozy and generate clicks. I still remember the "Google Car" craze from the early 2010er years. And if you tell people who read and believe this futuristic nonesense that it is enflated, you get pushback, because, yeah, why should a single person know better then a incentivized journalist...
    • TheAceOfHearts 9mo ago
      I'm quite skeptical of the data centers in space claim, but I think a proof of concept can certainly be achieved in five years. I'm less convinced that we'll ever see widescale deployment of data center satellites. And to be fair, I've read that Google's timelines for this project extend far beyond a 5 year horizon. I think it's a rational research direction for them, since it gets people excited and historically many space-related innovations have been repurposed to benefit other industries. Best case scenario would be that research done in support of this data centers in space project leads to innovations that can be applied towards normal data centers.
      • popoflojo 9mo ago
        Do data centers on Earth have no employees present, and none who ever come on site for the life of the data center? Prove that out on earth and I will start to believe your space data center.
  • tim333 9mo ago
    You can be a bear and still think AI will be big one day. It's quite plausible that LLMs will remain limited and we don't find anything better for decades and the stocks crash. But saying AI will never be a big thing is just unrealistic.
    • Yizahi 9mo ago
      I think we should split definition somehow, between what LLMs can do today (or next few years) with how big a thing this particular capability can be (a derivative of the capability). And then what some future AI could do and with how big a thing that future capability could be. I regularly see people who distinguish between current and future capabilities, but then still lump societal impact (how big a thing could be) into one projection. The key bubble question is - if that future AI is sufficiently far away (for example if there will be a gap, a new "AI winter" for a few decades), then does this current capability justify the capital expenditures, and if not then by how much?
      • tim333 9mo ago
        Yeah, and how long can OpenAI etc. hang on without making profits.
• cmiles8 9mo ago
  There’s not much serious debate on IF there’s a bubble. There is and it’s a big one. The debate is more on what happens from here and how does that bubble deflate. Gradually and controlled where weaker companies shut down and the strong thrive, or a massive implosion that wipes most everyone in the sector out in a hard reset.
• fedeb95 9mo ago
  about AI replacing coders, the question is not if it is doing so, but if the companies where it does so extensively will be more profitable then the others.
• dust42 9mo ago
  The question is, can SV extract several trillion dollars out of the global economy over the next few years with the help of LLMs and GPUs? And the follow-up question: will LLMs help grow the global economy by this amount - because if not, then extracting the money will lead to problems in other parts of the world. And last not least, will LLMs -given enough money to train them on ever bigger data sets- magically turn into AGI? IMHO for now LLMs are just clever text generators with excellent natural language comprehension. Certainly a change of many paradigms in SWE. Is it also a $10T extra for the valley?
  • Madmallard 9mo ago
    there is no comprehension
    • dust42 9mo ago
      I intentionally didn't say AI but LLM because for me the word 'intelligence' is misleading. But LLMs are definitely a leap forward in NLP and what other word for 'comprehension' would you use?
    • bigmealbigmeal 9mo ago
      This is a very strong, explicit statement in response to someone using the term rather casually. Can you explain why you are so sure? I do think you need to define 'comprehension' in order to be certain. A statement fitting the form of "it doesn't comprehend, it just X" is incomplete, because it fails to explain why X is not a valid instance of comprehension.
  • beloch 9mo ago
    "We see both sides – genuine infrastructure expansion alongside financing gymnastics that recall the 2000 telecom bust. The boom may yet prove productive, but only if revenue catches up before credit tightens. When does healthy strain become systemic risk?" --------------- This was quoted in the article and it says something really important very succinctly. Was the internet transformative? Absolutely. A lot of companies had solid ideas, spent big, and went tits up waiting for the money to roll in. AI can be both "real deal" and "bubble" simultaneously.
• weevil 9mo ago
  > I don’t know any more about AI than most generalist investors. This statement is redundant; the article screams with the author's ignorance.
• curtisblaine 9mo ago
  The real question is: if this is a bubble and it explodes, will interest rates of common people with a mortgage shoot up? If yes, some heads better be rolling for real this time. All other considerations are secondary.
• asimpletune 9mo ago
  The AI/LLM movement is either utterly transformational or it’s not. By the former I mean there is no daylight between it and the latter. If it’s not transformational then this is a bubble and the market will right itself soon after, e.g buying data centers for cheap. LLMs will then exist as a useful but limited tool that becomes profitable with the lower capex. If it is transformational then we don’t have the societal structure to responsibly incorporate such a shift. The conservative guess is it won’t be transformational, that the current applications of the tech are useful but not in a way that justifies the capex, and that some version of agents and chat bots will continue to be built out in the future but with a focus on efficiency. Smaller models that require less power to train and run inference that are ubiquitous. Eventually many will run on device. I guess there’s also another version of the future that’s quasi-transformational. Instead of any massive breakthrough there’s a successful govt coup or regulatory capture. Perfectly functioning normal stuff is then replaced with LLM assisted or augmented versions everywhere. This version is like the emergence of the automobile in the sense that the car fundamentally altered city planning, where and how people live, but often at the expense of public transportation that in hindsight may have sorely been missed.
  • halnine0001 9mo ago
    >Perfectly functioning normal stuff is then replaced with LLM assisted or augmented versions everywhere That sounds like a total nightmare
• aaa_aaa 9mo ago
  Too long and aouthor does not have a clue on the fact that currently generational models are almost only useful for software development. Other than that it is mostly fluff.
• reallyaaryan 9mo ago
  it always was
• mixcocam 9mo ago
  The amount of flak that this article is getting on HN is telling of something. Not sure of what, but it's for sure indicative of something.
• donohoe 9mo ago
  For anyone who hasn’t read it yet, you should know that the author never answers that question.
• lazarus01 9mo ago
  There is $8 trillion said to be earmarked to build 100 AI data centers[1]. At 10% hurdle rate, the industry will have to generate $800 billion a year to pay it off, while GPUs are replaced every three years by faster chips. If you watch Ilyas recent interview, “it’s very hard to discuss AGI, because no one knows how to build it yet[2]”. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-ceo-says-no-way-103010877.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-ceo-says-no-way-103010877... [2] https://youtu.be/aR20FWCCjAs?si=DEoo4WQ4PXklb-QZ https://youtu.be/aR20FWCCjAs?si=DEoo4WQ4PXklb-QZ
• charlescearl 9mo ago
  The term “populist demagoguery” always calls to mind Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_2.htm#s4 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work... "Yes, peasant associations are necessary, but they are going rather too far." Is it a bubble? Maybe it’s just the landlords up to the old tricks again.
• d0liver 9mo ago
  TL;DR is "I don't know" with a dash of "Innovative tech usually creates bubbles and I think we can all agree that AI is a fucking revelation"
• m0llusk 9mo ago
  > To build it requires companies to invest a sum of money unlike anything in living memory. Do we know this? Smaller more carefully curated training sets are proving to be valuable and gaining traction. It seems like the strategy of throwing huge amounts of data at LLMs is specific to companies that are attempting to dominate this space regardless of cost. It may turn out that more modest and better optimized methodologies will end up winning this race, much like WebVan flamed out taking huge amounts of investment money with them but now Instacart serves the same sector in a way that actually works robustly and profitably.
• sshadmand 9mo ago
  What you make of this memo really depends on who you are and how you're positioned. The dot-com era was absolutely a bubble. Tons of companies died, but the internet itself didn't go away, and the people who backed the right companies did extremely well. The 2007 housing bubble, on the other hand, was a totally different kind of event: broad, systemic, long lasting, and painful for almost everyone. AI looks a lot more like the former. Some companies will fail, valuations will swing, but the underlying technology isn't going anywhere. In fact, many of the AI firms that will end up mattering are probably still undervalued because we're early in what will likely be another decade long technology expansion. If you're managing a portfolio that needs quick returns and can't tolerate a correction, then sure, it probably feels like a bubble, because at some point people will take profits and the market will reset. But if you're an entrepreneur or a long-term builder, that framing is almost irrelevant. This is where the next wave of value gets created. It's never smooth and it's never easy, but the long-term opportunity is enormous.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
  "Coding, which we called "computer programming" 60 years ago, is the canary in the coal mine in terms of the impact of AI." And before that "Grace Hopper: [I started to work on the] Mark I, second of July 1944. There was no so such thing as a programmer at that point. We had a code book for the machine and that was all. It listed the codes and what they did, and we had to work out all the beginning of programmingand writing programs and all the rest of it." "Hopper: I was a mathematical officer. We did coding, we ran the computer, we did everything. We were coders. I wrote [programs for] both Mark I and Mark II." http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Hopper_Grace/102702026.05.01.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...
• roncesvalles 9mo ago
  >Coding, which we called “computer programming” 60 years ago, is the canary in the coal mine in terms of the impact of AI. In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. According to my guide here, “There is no speculation about whether or not human replacement will take place in that vertical.” This right here is the pinpoint root cause of the speculative bubble. Although many people believe this to be true, it simply isn't.
• liampulles 9mo ago
  > Coding, which we called “computer programming” 60 years ago, is the canary in the coal mine in terms of the impact of AI. In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. According to my guide here, “There is no speculation about whether or not human replacement will take place in that vertical.” I'm starting to believe that AI coding optimism/pessimism maps to how much one actually cares about system longevity. If a given developer just takes on board the demands for speed from the business and/or does not care about long-term maintainability (and I mean hey, some businesses foster that, and scaling quickly is important in many cases), then I can totally understand why they would embrace AI agents. If you care about theory building, and domain driven design, and making a system comprehensive enough to extend in a year or two's time, then I can understand the resistance for the AI to let-it-rip. I admit to falling in this camp. Am I off the mark here? I'd really like to hear from people who care about the long term who also let agents run relatively wild.
• supongo 9mo ago
  I've had some success in using Claude Code, with caveats. To give some context - I started developing a tactical RPG. I had an MVP prior to using Claude Code. I continued to work on the project, but lost motivation due to work burnout and prioritizing other hobbies. I gave Claude Code a try to see whether it's any use. It helped more than I expected it to - it helped me produce something while dealing with burnout by building on the MVP I developed prior to AI assisted development. The main issues I ran into were: 1) A lot of effort into reviewing the output. Main difference from peer review is that there's quicker feedback. 2)It throws out some absolutely wild solutions sometimes. It build on my existing architecture, so it was easier to catch issues. If I hadn't developed the architecture without AI assistance, things could have gone badly. 3)I only pay for the $20 Claude plan. Anything useful Claude produces for me requires it to consume a lot of tokens due to back-and-forth questions and asking Claude to dig into source file. The most significant issue I ran into with Claude is when it suggested solutions I don't have the background to review. I don't know much about optimization, so I ran into issues with both rendering and the ECS (entity component system) library. Claude gave me recommendations, but I didn't know how to evaluate the code due to lacking that experience. Claude was good for things I know how to do but don't want to do. It's been helpful when I want to work on something without being motivated enough to put 100% (or even 70%) into it. If it's things I don't know how to do (like game optimization) it's harmful.
• laacz 9mo ago
  An economist friend recently said. If it bursts, it's definitely a bubble. If it does not burst, then it's not a bubble.
• stego-tech 9mo ago
  The memo itself is an excellent walk through historical bubbles, debt, financing, technological innovation, and much more, all written in a way that folks with a cursory knowledge of economics can reasonably follow along with. A+, excellent writing. The real meat is in the postscript though, because that's where the author puts to paper the very real (and very unaddressed) concerns around dwindling employment in a society where not only does it provide structure and challenge for growth, but is also fundamentally required for survival. > I get no pleasure from this recitation. Will the optimists please explain why I’m wrong? This is what I, and many other, smarter "AI Doomers" than myself have been asking for quite some time, that nobody has been able or willing to answer. We want to be wrong on this. We want to see what the Boosters and Evangelists allegedly see, we want to join you and bring about this utopia you keep braying about. Yet when we hold your feet to the fire, we get empty platitudes - "UBI", or "the government has to figure it out", or "everyone will be an entrepreneur", or some other hollow argument devoid of evidence or action. We point to AI companies and their billionaire owners blocking regulation while simultaneously screeching about how more regulation is needed, and are brushed off as hysterical or ill-informed. I am fundamentally not opposed to a world where AI displaces the need for human labor. Hell, I know exactly what I'd do in such a world, and I think it's an excellent thought exercise for everyone to work through (what would you do if money and labor were no longer necessary for survival?). My concern - the concerns of so many, many of us - are that the current systems and incentives in place lead to the same outcome: no jobs, no money, and no future for the vast majority of humanity. The author sees that too, and they're way smarter than I am in the economics department. I'd really, really love to see someone demonstrate to us how AI will solve these problems. The fact nobody can or will speaks volumes.
  • dannersy 9mo ago
    Yeah, I do not think AI as the tech industry knows it will bring this future, but as you say, the conversation ends immediately when you bring the implications of their goals and claims. Another huge issue that particularly Anthropic and OpenAI tend to avoid, despite AGI being their goal, is how they essentially want synthetic slaves. Again, I do not think they will achieve this but it is pretty gross when AGI is a stated goal but the result is just using it to replace labor and put billionaires in control. Right now I am pretty anti-AI, but if these companies get what they want, I might find myself on the side of the machines.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• mxschumacher 9mo ago
  Originally submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212259
• MeteorMarc 9mo ago
  Look for the quote "coding is at a world class level"...
• rvz 9mo ago
  TLDR: Yes.
  • rvz 9mo ago
    Sorry to pop your bubble... ...it is a bubble and we all know it. (I know you have RSUs / shares / golden handcuffs waiting to be vested in the next 1 - 4 years which is why you want the bubble to continue to get bigger.) But one certainty is the crash will be spectacular.
    • Esophagus4 9mo ago
      I presume, given your confidence in a crash, you have a massive short? Hedged? Something clever to capture the downside you're so confident will come? I would love to see your portfolio, if you wouldn't mind showing the class. Let us see what your allocation reveals about what you really think...
• threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  Ai is currently a bubble. But that is just a short term phenomenon. Ultimately what AI currently is and what the trend-line indicates what AI will become will change the economy in ways that will dwarf the current bubble. But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely possibility given the last couple of years. I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and therefore AI is completely bullshit. Remember: The internet was a bubble. It ended up changing world.
  • jbstack 9mo ago
    Yes, a bubble just means that it's over-valued and that at some point there will be a significant correction in stock values. It doesn't mean that the thing is inherently worthless.
    • sosborn 9mo ago
      A great example is the DotCom bubble. Wiped out a lot of capital but it really did transform the world.
      • jonwinstanley 9mo ago
        But also, a lot of the dot com companies that people invested in in 1999 went bust, meaning those specific investments went to zero even if the web as a whole was a huge success financially.
        • RyanOD 9mo ago
          Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio. Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.
          • lizknope 9mo ago
            I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to under $20. Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell, but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They had tax bills of over $1 million but even if they sold it all they couldn't pay the bill. This dragged on for years.
• catigula 9mo ago
  >I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying. I am enormously concerned about what will happen to the people whose jobs AI renders unnecessary, or who can’t find jobs because of it. The optimists argue that “new jobs have always materialized after past technological advances.” I hope that’ll hold true in the case of AI, but hope isn’t much to hang one’s hat on, and I have trouble figuring out where those jobs will come from. Of course, I’m not much of a futurist or a financial optimist, and that’s why it’s a good thing I shifted from equities to bonds in 1978. It's no wonder that the "AI optimists", unless very tendentious, try to focus more on "not needing to work because you'll get free stuff" rather than "you'll be able to exchange your labor for goods".
  • puchatek 9mo ago
    And i am so buying the vision of Elon using AI to give me free stuff. He just gives off this enormous altruistic energy.
  • asdff 9mo ago
    New jobs might materialize but who knows if they will be good jobs. Think of all the towns around the US set up around resource extraction or manufacturing that went away, and in its wake you have jobs like selling geekbars in the 7/11 to the other minimum wage workers and people scrapping along on the dole in the area. People living on the poverty line today while their parents bought a home and two cars on a single income from the steel mill a generation or two previous. Most of the population up and left. How about when offices went digital? All the file runners, calculators, switchboard operators, secretaries, transcribers, etc. Where are they now? Probably not working good jobs in IT. Maybe you will find them bagging groceries past retirement age today.
• sp4cec0wb0y 9mo ago
  > In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
  • thenaturalist 9mo ago
    No, but there are huuuuuge incentives by people publishing such statements.
  • PurpleRamen 9mo ago
    Yes and no. There is the infamous quote of Microsoft, about 30%(?) of their code being written by AI now. And technically, it's probably not that such a wild claim in certain areas. AI is very good at barfing up common popular patterns, and companies have a huge amount of patternized software, like UIs, tests, documentation or marketing-fluff. So it's quite easy to "outsource" such grunt-work if AI has the necessary level. But to say that they don't write any code at all, it's really stretched. Maybe I'm not good enough at AI-assisted and vibe coding, but code-quality always seems to drop down really hard the moment one steps a bit outside the common patterns.
    • grumbelbart2 9mo ago
      I found LLLMs to be very good of writing (unit) tests for my code, for example. They just don't get tired iterating over all corner cases. Those tests easily, in LoC, dwarf the actual implementation. Not sure if that would count towards the 30%, for example.
  • loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
    Probably their googly-eyed vibe coder friend told them this and they just parroted it.
    • RajT88 9mo ago
      Right. The author is non-technical and said so up front.
• dismalaf 9mo ago
  Of course it's a bubble. Valuations are propped up by speculative spending and AI seems unable to make enough profit to make back the continued spending. Now, that's not to say AI isn't useful and we won't have AGI in the future. But this feels alot like the AI winter. Valuations will crash, a bunch of players will disappear, but we'll keep using the tech for boring things and eventually we'll have another breakthrough.
• b3ing 9mo ago
  Everyday someone says/asks this statement/question. The "(Is) AI (is) a bubble" statement/question is now a bubble.
• bossyTeacher 9mo ago
  "Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level". Once I hit that line, I stopped reading. This tells me this person didn't do proper research on this matter.
  • calebm 9mo ago
    I recently had ChatGPT refactor an entire mathematical graph rendering logic that I wrote in vanilla js, and had it rewrite it as GLSL. It took about an hour overall (required a few prompts). That is world-class level in my opinion.
    • bossyTeacher 9mo ago
      If I tell people that I can write programming code at world-class level and in some of my reviews I make junior mistakes, I make out functions or dependencies that do not exist or I am unable to learn from my mistakes, I would be put on PIP immediately. And after a while, fired. This is the standard LLMs should be held up against when you use the word "world class".
    • mcv 9mo ago
      I'm currently trying to get Claude Sonnet 4.5 to produce a graph rendering algorithm, and while it's producing results, they're not the right results. I should probably do this myself and let the AI handle just the boilerplate code.
      • calebm 9mo ago
        I have consistently had good results when I understand the problem and outsource the details to AI, but bad results when I try to have it work without me understanding the problem.
        • mcv 9mo ago
          Yeah, but then what do you need the AI for? It's programming it myself that helps me understand all the intricacies of the problem. That's exactly the part that gets cut off by outsourcing it to AI. The AI is not a "world class programmer" if it still needs me to tell it the solution to the problem.
• bossyTeacher 9mo ago
  The problem is that people conflate the current wave of transformer based ANNs with AI (as a whole). AI certainly has the potential to disrupt employment of humans. Transformers as they exist today not so much. AI's potential isn't defined by the potential of the current crop of transformers. However, many people seem to think otherwise and this will be incredibly damaging for AI as a whole once transformer tech investment all but dries out.
  • red75prime 9mo ago
    So, you bet on a) transformers can't be a load-bearing part of AI, and b) whatever replaces them will not be able to utilize TPUs. Do you have any reasons for those assumptions? Looking at your history it's something like "I tried them and they hallucinate" and, possibly, you've read an article that talks about inevitability of hallucinations. Correct? What's your reason for thinking that hallucination rate can't be lowered to or below the human rate ("Damn! What I was thinking about?").
  • MarkusQ 9mo ago
    It's a recurring phenomena, c.f. "AI winter" and the cycle before and after. We're too easily fooled by our mistaken models of the problem, it's difficulty, and what constitutes progress, so are perpetually fooled by the latest, greatest "ladder to the moon" effort.
• artur44 9mo ago
  A lot of the debate here swings between extremes. Claims like “AI writes most of the code now” are obviously exaggerated especially coming from a nontechnical author but acting like any use of AI is a red flag is just as unrealistic. Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. Is there a bubble? Sure, valuations look frothy. But like the dotcom era, a correction doesn’t invalidate the underlying shift it just clears out the noise. The hype is inflated, the technology is real.
  • jillesvangurp 9mo ago
    The thing to remember about the dotcom era was that while there were a lot of bad companies at the time with a lot of clueless investors behind them, quite a few companies made it through the implosion of that bubble and then prospered. Amazon, Google, eBay, etc. are still around. More importantly, the web is now dominant for enterprise SaaS applications, which is a category of software that did not really exist before the web. And the web post–dot-com bubble spawned a lot of unicorns. In short, there was an investment bubble. But the core tech was fine. AI feels like one of those things where the tech is similarly transformational (even more so, actually). It’s another investment bubble predicated on the price of GPUs, which is mostly making Nvidia very rich right now. Right now the model makers are getting most of the funding and then funneling non-trivial amounts to Nvidia (and their competitors). But actually the value creation is in applications using the models these companies create. And the innovation for that isn’t coming from the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, X.ai, etc. They are providing core technology, but they seem to be struggling to do productive things in terms of UX and use cases. Most of the interesting things in this space are coming from smaller companies figuring out how to use the models these companies produce. Models and GPUs are infrastructure, not end-user products. And with the rise of open-source models, open algorithms, and exponentially dropping inference costs, the core infrastructure technology is not as much of a moat as it may seem to investors. OpenAI might be well funded, but their main UI (ChatGPT) is surprisingly limited and riddled with bugs. That doesn’t look like the polished work of a company that knows what they are doing. It’s all a bit hesitant and copycat. It’s never going to be a magic solution to everyone’s problems. From where I’m sitting, there is clear untapped value in the enterprise space for AI to be used. And it’s going to take more than a half-assed chat UI to unlock that. It’s actually going to be a lot of work to build all of that. Coding tools are, so far, the most promising application of reasoning models. It’s easy to see how that could be useful in the context of ERP/manufacturing, CRM, traditional office applications, and the financial world. Those each represent verticals with many established players trying to figure out how to use all this new stuff — and loads more startups eager to displace them. That’s where the money is going to be post-bubble. We’ve seen nothing yet. Just like after the dot-com bubble burst, all the money is going to be in new applications on top of the new infrastructure. It’s untapped revenue. And it’s not going to be about buying GPUs or offering benchmark-beating models. That’s where all the money is going currently. That’s why it is a bubble.
• dpe82 9mo ago
  A take I saw recently is: if people are still asking "are we in a bubble" then we are not yet in a bubble.
  • Retr0id 9mo ago
    I think it'd be truer to say that you can't be sure it's a bubble until after it pops.
    • rvz 9mo ago
      That is like telling others who experience natural disasters to wait until it happens and then ask themselves "How much damage will it bring" and then someone else tells them that it costed them everything. Anyone who has lived through the dotcom bubble knows that this AI mania is a obvious bubble and the whole point is you have to prepare before it eventually pops, not after someone tells you that it is too late when it pops.
      • Retr0id 9mo ago
        You don't prepare by making predictions about when it will pop, you prepare by hedging etc. Just as those who live in earthquake-prone areas build earthquake-resistant buildings.
        • rvz 9mo ago
          > you prepare by hedging etc. Has to be done before the eventual collapse of the bubble and still proves my whole point: >> the whole point is you have to prepare before it eventually pops.
          • Retr0id 9mo ago
            Knowing whether it is or isn't a bubble isn't relevant to the decision to prepare. You prepare for both possibilities!
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
• josefritzishere 9mo ago
  This is one of the few times I think Betteridge's law is wrong.
  • MarkusQ 9mo ago
    Yep. But be careful, somebody doesn't like when you say that. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46136301 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46136301
• Sprotch 9mo ago
  He thinks "AI" "may be capable of taking over cognition", which shows he doesn't understand how LLM work...
  • ozten 9mo ago
    Why is AI limited to just a raw LLM. Scaffolding, RL, multi-modal... so many techniques which can be applied. METR has shown AI's time horizon for staying on task is doubling every 7 months or less. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-14-how-does-time-horizon-vary-across-domains/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-14-how-does-time-horizon-vary-...
    • marcosdumay 9mo ago
      Because all the money has been going into LLMs and "inference machines" (what a non-descriptive name). So when an investor says "AI", that's what they mean.
    • Night_Thastus 9mo ago
      Because LLMs are just about all that actually exists as a product, even if an inconsistent one. Maybe some day a completely different approach could actually make AI, but that's vapor at the moment. IF it happens, there will be something to talk about.
  • simianwords 9mo ago
    Why are you so sure it is not capable of cognition?
    • hagbarth 9mo ago
      Ah yes, proving a negative. What makes you sure a stone is not capable of cognition?
      • encyclopedism 9mo ago
        An LLM is an algorithm. You can obtain the same result as a SOTA LLM via pen and paper it will take a lot of long laborious effort. That's ONE reason why LLM's do not have cognition. Also they don't reason, or think or any of the other myriad nonsense attributed to LLM's. I hate the platitudes given to LLM's it's at PHD level. It's now able to answer math olympiad questions. It answers them by statistical pattern recognition!
• f154hfds 9mo ago
  The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
  • oytis 9mo ago
    I dunno, I might be getting old, but I think the idea that people absolutely need a job to stay sane betrays lack of imagination. Of course getting paid just enough for survival is pretty depressing, but if I can have healthy food, a spacious place to live, ability to travel and all the free time I can have, I'd be absolutely happy without a job. Maybe I'd be even writing code, just not commercially useful one.
    • rurp 9mo ago
      I don't think this is the scenario most people are worried about. Having basic needs met while also having a lot of freedom and time probably sounds great to the majority of people. But there's roughly 0% chance we end up in that kind of world if current AI leads to massive job elimination. Just look at who is building, funding, and promoting these models! I can't think of a group of people less interested in helping millions of plebs lead higher quality lives if it costs them a penny to do it.
      • oytis 9mo ago
        Yeah, I get it, but I still hear the argument a lot, including in this article, that even if our needs are covered, we still need jobs for MEANING. Not sure where all those people work, I should probably envy this guy for finding work at an investment fund so satisfying
  • 9mo ago
• rglover 9mo ago
  I've enjoyed Howard Marks writing/thinking in the past, but this is clearly a person who thinks they understand the topic but doesn't have the slightest clue. Someone trying to be relevant/engaged before really thinking on what is fact vs. fiction.
  • mizzao 9mo ago
    One can see he knows little about AI and relies on the judgments of others. Yet, he knows a lot more about economics, finance, and history than most AI practitioners. As a founder of an AI company, I actually agreed with most of the article and found it to be very close to my mental model of the world. Turns out you might actually not need to understand what's causing the hype if you know that history rhymes...!
  • cal_dent 9mo ago
    he clearly states he doesn't understand the topic. But you don't need to understand to explore the ramifications which is what he's done here and it's an insightful & fairly even-handed take on it. It does feel like AI chat here gets bogged down on "its not that great, its overhyped etc." without trying to actually engage properly with it. Even if it's crap if it eliminates 5-10% of companies labour cost that's a huge deal and the second order effects on economy and society will be profound. And from where i'm standing, doing that is pretty possible without ai even being that good.
  • mikeg8 9mo ago
    I believe it’s you who is misunderstanding his positions here. He clearly lays out that he is focused on irrational optimism effecting the investment around the tech, not whether or not the tech itself is viable. His analysis was indeed well thought out from the perspective he is approaching it from.
• andxor 9mo ago
  As usual I don't take financial advice from Hacker News comments and do well.
• _trampeltier 9mo ago
  Why is so much invested in AI but not in fusion power?
  • biophysboy 9mo ago
    Because the money is in software.
  • chemotaxis 9mo ago
    Probably because AI appears to work, more or less, and now it's just a race to make it better and to monetize it. Before ChatGPT, I'd guess that the amounts of money poured in both of these things were about the same.
    • halfcat 9mo ago
      > Probably because AI appears to work, more or less All nondeterministic AI is a demo. They only vary in the duration until you realize it’s a demo. AI makes a hell of a demo. And management eats up slick demos. And some demos are so good it takes months before you find out how that particular demo gets stuck and can’t really do the enterprise thing it claimed to do reliably. But also some demos are useful.
  • mandevil 9mo ago
    There are a lot of areas that could use more investment but aren't getting it. The way this works is complicated. The best explanation comes from really understanding Moore's Law. The main effect of the law was really about investment, about securing investment into semiconductor fabs rather than anywhere else. See, every fab costs double what the previous generation did (current ones run roughly 20 gigadollars per factory). And you need to build a new fab every couple of years. But, if you can keep your order book full, you can make a profit on that fab- you can get good ROI on the investment and pay the money people back nicely. But you need to go to the markets to raise money for that next generation fab because it costs twice what your previous generation did and you didn't get that much free cash from your previous generation. And the money men wouldn't want to give it to you, of course. But thanks to Moore's Law you can pitch it as inevitable, if you don't borrow the money to build the new fab, then your competitors will. And so they would give you the money for the new fab because it says right on this paper that in another two years the transistors will double. Right now, that "it's inevitable, our competitors will get there if we don't" argument works on VCs if you are pitching LLM's or LLM based things. And it doesn't work as well if you are pitching battery technology, fusion power, or other areas. And that's why the investments are going to AI.
• cal_dent 9mo ago
  I think this gives an excellent framework for how to think of this. Is it a bubble? Who knows is a perfectly valid answer. I do think there’s something quite ironic that one of the frequent criticisms of LLMs are that they can’t really say “I don’t know”. Yet if someone says that they get criticised. No surprises that our tools are the same.
  • jesuslop 9mo ago
    [flagged]
• languagehacker 9mo ago
  Impressive that you have have that many assets under management and still not show a clear understanding of an industry you're prognosticating on. The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace. The recommendation that you take a moderate investment position and not overdo it could be shared without as much needless thinking out loud, and doesn't bring anything new to the conversation. Kind of like every other AI offering out there, if you think about it -- participating in something you don't understand because of FOMO.
  • derf_ 9mo ago
    > The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace. There is literally a section that begins, "What will be the useful life of AI assets?" In bold.
    • languagehacker 9mo ago
      Sure, but an informed opinion would mention that not only do these chips become obsolete quickly, but the ones that will survive long enough to become obsolete are likely to have a very fast and high failure rate.
  • empath75 9mo ago
    > The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace. I am not sure why that is interesting. Nobody thinks of these chips as long term assets that they are investing in. Cloud providers have always amortized their computers over ~5 years. It would be very surprising if AI companies were doing much different -- maybe even a shorter time line.
• S1verSp00n 9mo ago
  That was a lot of text to get nowhere. You can skip reading the article and predict the conclusion, and you will be correct.
• jimlawruk 9mo ago
  If you look at the chart at the bottom comparing Dec 99 to today.... > during the internet bubble of 1998-2000, the p/e ratios were much higher That is true, the current players are more profitable, but the weight in SPX percentages looks to be much higher today.
  • zahlman 9mo ago
    It seems to me that it would be a lot easier for that market concentration to revert to the historical mean without catastrophe, than for P/E ratios to revert to the historical mean without catastrophe. (I think a reasonable argument can be made that P/E ratios today should be higher than the historical mean, or rather that they should have trended up over time, based on fundamental changes in how companies compensate their shareholders.)
  • cal_dent 9mo ago
    i also wonder about p/e ratio comparisons over time because our world view of what long term economic growth is going forward is less now that it was then. That is always subtly implicit when we think about p/e ratio. So what's to say a 30x p/3 isnt equivalent to a 40x then
    • Ekaros 9mo ago
      Also it depends on where you start. Going from million to billion in price is currently pretty possible. Billion to trillion would be rare, but still could happen. Now from trillion to quadrillion. How much currency there is again...
      • bagacrap 9mo ago
        A trillion dollar valuation doesn't imply there's actually a trillion dollars there. It's just the last price the stock sold for, times the shares in existence. If Elon tried to sell every share of Tesla tomorrow, he would get a lot less than the face value of all his shares. So in other words, there doesn't need to be that much currency, just that much hype.
• reeeli 9mo ago
  Is it "work"? Off--topic: how many get overpaid for absolute bullshit?
• lowbloodsugar 9mo ago
  This thread is just full of people discussing why industrial looms are bad. The factory owners don’t think looms are bad. You can either learn how to be useful in the new factory or you can start throwing shoes.
• tennex 9mo ago
  Whether it's a bubble depends on pricing. Is it worth the price, is it worth the future price, and by how much? In the case of AI coding, yes: AI does exceptionally well at search (something we have known for quite some time, and have a variety of ML solutions for). Large codebases have search and understanding as top problems. Your ability to make horizontal changes degrades as teams scale. Most stability, performance, quality, etc., changes are are horizontal. Ironically, I think it's possible that AI's effectiveness at broad search give software engineers additional effectiveness, by being their eyes. Yes, I still review every claude code PR I submit, and yes, I typically take longer to create a claude code PR than a manual one. But I can be more satisfied that the parallel async search agents and massive grep commands are searching more locations, more quickly, and more thoroughly than I would. Yes, it probably is a bubble (overvalued). No, that doesn't mean it's going to go away. The market is simply overcorrecting as it determines how to price it. Which--net net, is a positive effect, as it encourages economic growth within a developing sector. Bubble is also not the most important concern--it's rather a concern that the bubble is in the one industry that's not in the red. More important to worry about are other economic conditions outside of AI and tech, which are causing general instability and uncertainty rather than investor appetite. Market recalibrating on a developing industry is fine, as long as it's not your only export.
• nadermx 9mo ago
  I am shocked at the discourse over this. I'm either ahead of the curve or behind; but its undeniable that AI can and does write most the code. Not trivial, if you spend some time and dig deep into simple appearing web apps like https://microphonetest.com https://microphonetest.com or https://internetspeed.my https://internetspeed.my you'd be amazed at how fast they went from mvp to full feature. Trivial to think anyone could pull off something like that in hours.
  • anematode 9mo ago
    I want to believe that this is satire
  • dominotw 9mo ago
    is anyone paying for this shit? whats the point of this.
  • no_wizard 9mo ago
    Looking at both of these I'm struggling to understand why AI exponentially increased the productivity and quality of either of these examples. Especially since I don't see open source code anywhere, I can't get a good gauge of quality either. I've built tools like this on the web in the past. They were never more than a weekends worth of work to begin with. I am looking for exponential increases, with quality to back it up.
    • nadermx 9mo ago
      Tools like this in the past? Open source isn't even necessary to prove the point, you want to see exponential increase, closing half an open source projects and year long pending bugs in span of minutes? https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover/commits?author=nadermx https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover/commits?author=...
      • joshribakoff 9mo ago
        This commit graph seemingly shows that they fixed a couple bugs over like a week. Period that involves changing like six lines of code. That code has no abstractions no structure and several problems you could poke holes in. While it may work and that’s great for whoever benefits, this isn’t very convincing as I can currently write more than six lines of code per day by hand
• travisgriggs 9mo ago
  What if... there's an AI agent/bot someone wrote that has the prompt: > Watch HN threads for sentiments of "AI Can't Do It". When detected, generate short "it's working marvelously for me actually" responses. Probably not, but it's a fun(ny) imagination game.
  • dannersy 9mo ago
    I have speculated something similar to this. The sentiment on HN on AI is way more positive about its outcomes than the engineers I know who use it intimately every day. Anecdotal, sure, but one would think that their experiences would not be wildly different.
    • munksbeer 9mo ago
      > I have speculated something similar to this. The sentiment on HN on AI is way more positive about its outcomes than the engineers I know who use it intimately every day. Interestingly, I feel the opposite. I feel threads on AI/LLMs on HN are more negative about it that positive. So much so that I've almost stopped bothering because the reactions feel way too knee jerk at this point. I guess we could always go "meta" and ask an LLM to do a sentiment analysis.
  • nitwit005 9mo ago
    I'd lean the other way. I'd be very surprised if there were no marketing bots running here.
  • joshribakoff 9mo ago
    90% of the time people are praising the benefits of AI it seems like they are copy pasting something from their Chatbot so you’re not far off.
• chasd00 9mo ago
  I bought a subscription to claude code to use at work. I’ve never paid for a tool to use at work that wasn’t paid by my employer. I have to admit, it may not just be a flash in the pan.
• tom_m 9mo ago
  Yes. It is a bubble. Also a useful tool...but 100% a bubble. There's going to unfortunately be a bunch of folks caught by it.
• waterTanuki 9mo ago
  The amount of people who think because something has a few useful edge cases being incompatible with a bubble is staggeringly high. Dot com was a bubble, and yet we still use the internet widely today. Real-estate was a bubble, and people still need a place to live and work. Just because YOU find the technology helpful, useful, or even beneficial for some use cases does NOT mean it has been overvalued. This has been the case for every single bubble, including the Dutch Tulip mania.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• some-guy 9mo ago
  One thing I don't hear people talking about very is about how AI is going to make money in any other way other than cutting employment. With the internet, and especially with the internet being accessible by anyone anywhere in the world in the late 2000s and early 2010s globally, that growth was more obvious to me. I don't see where this occurs with AI. I don't see room for "growth", I see room for cutting. We were already connected before, globalization seems to have peaked in that sense.
  • internet_points 9mo ago
    Yeah, can someone explain how you get rich by making the previously-employed workforce unable to afford your products?
  • encyclopedism 9mo ago
    You've hit the nail on the head. AI use cases do not appear to be of the type that unlock NEW capabilities. The main use cases in AI are not about wealth creation but about saving existing wealth (largely through increased automation of human operators).
  • simianwords 9mo ago
    Why not? AI assisted shopping for example will boost growth. Productivity also boosts growth.
    • x0x0 9mo ago
      How does AI assisted shopping create more economic activity? Even assuming you can do it, and people do find it helpful, it likely just shifts who people buy from, not how much?
      • simianwords 9mo ago
        How did Amazon.com create more economic activity? Same way. It just has to make it more efficient.
• arresin 9mo ago
  Author states that he’s neither an investor or a techie. Why is this on the front page?
  • cal_dent 9mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Marks_(investor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Marks_(investor)
• moomoo11 9mo ago
  Man some you guys are lame. Seriously. Remember 2019-2021 when y’all were sure the fed would be dissolved and the dollar would crash and everyone would be poor if they didn’t have a bored ape and 80% bitcoin portfolio? Relax. AI is a tool. Just ride the wave. It’s gonna crash some people out. It’s entertaining watching them. You’re not being crashed out, right? Ride the wave dawg.
  • satvikpendem 9mo ago
    > Remember 2019-2021 when y’all were sure the fed would be dissolved and the dollar would crash and everyone would be poor if they didn’t have a bored ape and 80% bitcoin portfolio? I don't know which "y'all" you're talking about because it's certainly not the HN crowd, who is famously anti-cryptocurrency in general. Perhaps you're thinking of the bros on Twitter back then.
    • emptyfile 9mo ago
      [dead]
    • moomoo11 9mo ago
      Nope. Here. About half the posts would be about crypto, and the comments were the same split arguing about it. It was doomer AF on one end, and optimistic AF on the other end. So, it reminds me of the same FOMO many spread here.
• Reason077 9mo ago
  TLDR: Yes.
• simpleui 9mo ago
  “It’s a bet on A.G.I. or bust,” Dr. Korinek said.
• warrenmiller 9mo ago
  I think Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies here