Ask HN: What Makes AI a Bubble?

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I am operating as an advisor for Indian firms targeting the international market. What I’ve noticed is that many of the companies have moved away from Intercom, Zendesk, or other such tools and built in-house simpler versions.

The same thing applies to Chargbee, Chargify, and other such tools. These ready-made solutions have many features, and they are complex. Most companies only need a subset of those features but the ability to customise them. Making a general-purpose tool is very difficult.

The same thing I’ve noticed for Uptimerobot, PagerDuty, and others.

As a result, I suspect SaaS revenue will drop further and further.

Companies are questioning why we pay $x,xxx per month for a SaaS solution when we can roll it out for some token expense, highly customizable? And it's nothing new, Google has its software managing its internal stuff.

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running an ai product on top of anthropic's api. from this side: customer demand is real, recurring revenue is real. but margin lives or dies on whether anthropic keeps cutting token prices. real revenue, fragile pricing. that's the bubble shape most people miss.

Bubbles happen when a) someone buys something where they don't understand the value to, b) sell it off to another sucker who also doesn't understand the value.

If a is not true, the prices will fall to their value. If b is not true, overpriced goods don't move, and the price doesn't blow up as fast as it does.

Yes, they increase productivity, but how much? Is OpenAI really contributing a trillion dollars of value to the world? A thousand billion, a million million. 50 billion months of a $20 subscription. 80 million lifetime subscriptions of $20/month. That much value?