GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire • Hacker News Board

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#21

Post by arcanemachiner » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #12

JCM9 wrote: post #2

There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.

CEOs are just salivating at the prospect of firing most of their staff and replacing them with AIs. And then you have hype men at these AI companies blowing a burning coal mine of smoke up their asses. And every month the products become even more expensive for even more incremental gains. The hype is unsustainable. How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already?

> How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already?

Just imagine how many predictions we'll have in six months, or even a year from now!

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#22

Post by robbomacrae » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

jonas21 wrote: post #19

woeirua wrote: post #3

It's 1999 again.

So you're saying they're basically right, but 5 or 10 years too optimistic on the timeline?

seems about right to me!

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#23

Post by Analemma_ » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:29 PM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #16

Well, at least AI is going to be better than the blockchain hype. No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for. I had a very hard time explaining once you put something in the chain, you can’t easily pull it back out. If you wanted to verify documents, all you have to do is put a hash in a database table. Which we already had. It has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from c…

My monkey jpegs are surely going back up! Just have to keep hodling.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#24

Post by jstummbillig » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:30 PM UTC

What arrogant and cynical way of looking at business operations. You don't know how anything interesting turns out in the future. You make educated guesses and those cost money. When you run a business, everything costs money. But that is not "lighting money on fire", that is how all learning happens.

If anyone thinks they have figured it all out, stop blabbering around. Short the market.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#25

Post by andy99 » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

$40B seems very low. I wouldn't be surprised to find the annual corporate churn on innovation / transformation / IT/IM new initiatives whatever you call it, is way higher than that. There's some subset of corporate spend that's just chasing new stuff and keeping up on what the hot topics are.

I think there is a bubble, if it's really just $40B maybe I'm wrong.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#26

Post by ed_elliott_asc » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

arcanemachiner wrote: post #21

jandrese wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs are just salivating at the prospect of firing most of their staff and replacing them with AIs. And then you have hype men at these AI companies blowing a burning coal mine of smoke up their asses. And every month the products become even more expensive for even more incremental gains. The hype is unsustainable. How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already?

> How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already? Just imagine how many predictions we'll have in six months, or even a year from now!

We don’t need to imagine, we can ask ChatGPT

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#27

Post by OtherShrezzing » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

JCM9 wrote: post #2

There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.

The VCs are the small players in this bubble now. Big traditional finance is helping Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon build out their datacenters, and the infrastructure to power them. VCs have a lot of money compared to your startup, but they can’t finance a trillion dollars in construction projects.

They’re all so highly levered up that they can’t afford for the bubble to pop. If this goes on for another couple of years before the pop, we may see “too big to fail” wheeled out to justify a bailout of Google or Microsoft.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#28

Post by gerdesj » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #23

kayodelycaon wrote: post #16

Well, at least AI is going to be better than the blockchain hype. No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for. I had a very hard time explaining once you put something in the chain, you can’t easily pull it back out. If you wanted to verify documents, all you have to do is put a hash in a database table. Which we already had. It has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from c…

My monkey jpegs are surely going back up! Just have to keep hodling.

I've lost track of my memes. Should I be locking up the green crayons or my daughters?

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#29

Post by xyst » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #16

Well, at least AI is going to be better than the blockchain hype. No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for. I had a very hard time explaining once you put something in the chain, you can’t easily pull it back out. If you wanted to verify documents, all you have to do is put a hash in a database table. Which we already had. It has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from c…

[flagged]

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#30

Post by throwmeaway222 » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

There is no real source for this data other than "executives" that only think in numbers and of course those are the types that collude with their CFOs to come up with great ways to get giant tax write-offs. I would imagine they are not "burning billions" they are coming up with new ways to describe how they ALREADY burned billions.