How the AI Bubble Will Pop • Hacker News Board

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#151

Post by gorgoiler » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:30 PM UTC

What’s the theoretical total addressable market for, say, consumer facing software services? Or discretionary spending? That puts one limit on the value of your business.

Another limit would be to think about stock purchases. How much money is available to buy stocks overall, and what slice of that pie do you expect your business to extract?

It’s all very well spending eleventy squillion dollars on training and saying you’ll make it back through revenue, but not if the total amount of revenue in the world is only seventy squillion.

Or maybe you just spend your $$$ on GPUs, then sell AI cat videos back to the GPU vendors?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#152

Post by roxolotl » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:30 PM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #54

>data-center related spending...probably accounted for half of GDP growth in the first half of the year. Which is absolutely bananas. What? If that figure is true then "absolutely bananas" is the understatement of the century and "batshit insane" would be a better descriptor (though still an understatement).

This has been reported many places over the past year the percent seems to be all over the place though.

Yesterday “As much as 1/3rd”: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/if-ai-is-bubble-econo...

A week ago “More than consumer spending(but the reality is complex)”:https://fortune.com/2025/09/17/how-much-gdp-artificial-intel...

August “1.3% of 3% however it might be tariff stockpiling”: https://www.barrons.com/articles/ai-spending-economy-microso...

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#153

Post by kzalesak » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:30 PM UTC

Devasta wrote: post #80

When there was a speculative mania in railways, afterward there were railroads everywhere that could still be used. A bubble in housing has a bunch of houses everywhere, or at the very least the skeleton of a house that could be finished later. These tech bubbles are leaving nothing, absolutely nothing but destruction of the commons.

That's not entirely true - they are leaving the data centers themselves, and also all the trained models. These are already used

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#154

Post by donatj » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #136

donatj wrote: post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

> It's like letting a small child drive a car. Bad example, because FSD cars are here.

Find me an FSD that can drive in non-Californian real world situations. A foot of snow, black ice, a sand drift.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#155

Post by ____mr____ » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #63

> It’s not clear that firms are prepared to earn back the investment I am confused by a statement like this. Does Derek know why they are not? If hes does, I would love to hear the case (and no, comparisons to a random countries GDP are not an explanation). If he does not, I am not sure why we would not assume that we are simply missing something, when there are so many knowledgable players charting a similar course,…

Most AI firms have not shown a path toward profitability

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#156

Post by postexitus » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

uladzislau wrote: post #145

Calling this an “AI bubble” reads like pure sour grapes from folks who missed the adoption curve. Real teams are already banking gains - code velocity up, ticket resolution times down, and marketing lift from AI-assisted creative while capex always precedes revenue in platform shifts (see cloud 2010, smartphones 2007). The “costs don’t match cash flow” trope ignores lagging enterprise procurement cycles and the rapid…

All the same arguments could be used for dot-com bubble. It was a boom and a bubble at the same time. When it popped, only the real stuff remained. Same will happen to AI. What you are describing are good use cases - there are 99 other companies doing 99 other useless things with no cost / cash flow match.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#157

Post by emp17344 » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

ivape wrote: post #149

donatj wrote: post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

AI figured out something on my mind that I didn’t tell it about yesterday (latest Sonnet). My best advice to you is to spend time and allow the AI to blow your mind. Then you’ll get it. Sometimes I sit in wonder at how the fuck it’s able to figure out that much intent without specific instructions. There’s no way anyone programmed it to understand that much. If you’re not blown away by this then I have to assume you…

I don’t understand what you’re saying. You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right? Can you provide more information?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#158

Post by softwaredoug » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

uladzislau wrote: post #145

Calling this an “AI bubble” reads like pure sour grapes from folks who missed the adoption curve. Real teams are already banking gains - code velocity up, ticket resolution times down, and marketing lift from AI-assisted creative while capex always precedes revenue in platform shifts (see cloud 2010, smartphones 2007). The “costs don’t match cash flow” trope ignores lagging enterprise procurement cycles and the rapid…

Things can be a bubble AND actual economic growth long term. Happens all the time with new tech.

Dotcom boom made all kinds of predictions about Web usage. That decade plus later turned out to be true. But at the time the companies got way ahead of consumer adoption.

Specific to AI copilots. We currently are building hundreds that nobody will use for every one success.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#159

Post by ForHackernews » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

emp17344 wrote: post #150

donatj wrote: post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

Agreed… I feel increasingly alienated because I don’t understand how AI is providing enough value to justify the truly insane level of investment.

The same way that NFTs of ugly cartoons apes were a multi-billion dollar industry for about 28 months.

Edit: People are downvoting this because they think "Hey, that's not right, LLMs are way better than non-fungible apes!" (which is true) but the money is pouring in for exactly the same reason: get the apes now and later you'll be rich!

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#160

Post by isamuel » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 12:31 PM UTC

bakugo wrote: post #128

aurareturn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No she’s less productive. She just use it because she wants to do less work, be less likely to get promoted, and have to stay in the office longer to finish her work. /s What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder? Like ChatGPT is some…

You're working under the assumption that punching a prompt into ChatGPT and getting up to grab some coffee while it spits out thousands of tokens of meaningless slop to be used as a substitute for something that you previously would've written yourself is a net upgrade for everyone involved. It's not. I can use ChatGPT to write 20 paragraph email replies that would've previously been a single manually written paragra…

> And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

Come on, you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way. I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?” Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.