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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#371

Post by torginus »

This might be just a crappy conspiracy theory, but as I started watching financial news in recent times, I feel like there's a concerted effort on the part of media to manipulate retail investors into investing/divesting into stuff, like 'the NASDAQ is overvalued, buy gold now!' being the most recent example.

I feel like the fact that AI was constantly shilled while it didn't work, now everybody talking about being bearish on A(G)I, while the AI we as consumers do have, becoming actually pretty useful and with the crazy amounts of compute already onlined to run it, I think we might be in for a real surprise jump, and might even start to feel the AI's 'bite'

Or maybe I'm overthinking stuff and stuff is as it seems, or maybe nobody knows and the AI people are just throwing more compute at training and inference and hoping for the best.

On the previous points, I can't tell if I'm being gaslit accidentally by algorithms (Google and Reddit showing me stuff that support my preconcieved notions), intentionally (which would be quite sinister if algorithms decided to target me), or everyone else is being shown the same thing.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#372

Post by cornholio »

jennyholzer wrote: post #77
cornholio wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silly to say that the only objective that will vindicate AI investments is AGI. Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU…

You seem to be making an implicit claim that LLMs can create an effective cancer drug "10% of the time". Smells like complete and total bullshit to me. Edit: @eucyclos: I don't assume that Chat GPT and LLM tools have saved cancer researchers any time at all. On the contrary, I assume that these tools have only made these critical researchers less productive, and made their internal communications more verbose and les…

No, that's not the claim. The claim is that we will create a hypothetical LLM that, when tasked with a problem at the scientific frontier of molecular biology will, about 10% of the time, correctly reason about existing literature and reach conclusions that are valid or plausible to similar experts in the field.

Let's say you run that LLM one million times and get 100.000 valid reasoning chains. Let's say among them are variations on 1000 fundamentally new approaches and ideas, and out of those, you can actually synthesize in the laboratory 200 new candidate compounds, and out of those, 10 substance show strong in-vitro response, and then one of those completely cures some cancerous mice.

There you go, you have substantially automated the intellectual work of cancer research and you have one very promising compound you can start phase 1 trials that you didn't have before AI, and all without any AGI.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#373

Post by 9rx »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #211
driverdan wrote: post #188

I keep seeing articles like this but does anyone actually think we're not in a bubble? From what I've seen these companies acknowledge it's a bubble and that they're overspending without a way to make the money back. They're doing it because they have the money and feel it's worth the risk in case it pays off. If they don't spend, another company does, and it hits big they will be left behind. This is at least insura…

HN isn't always right. There was massive pushback against self driving and practically everyone was saying it would fail and is a bubble. The level of confidence people had about this opinion was through the roof. Like people who didn't know anything would say it with such utter confidence it would piss me off a bit. Like how do you know? Well they didn't and they were utterly wrong. Waymo showed it's not a bubble. A…

> Waymo showed it's not a bubble.

Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. Which is still really useful, but a far cry from the promise of everyone being able to buy a personal pod on wheels that takes you to and fro, no matter where you want to go, while you sleep that the bubble was premised on. In other words, Waymo has proven the bubble. It has been 20 years since Stanley, and I still have never seen a self-driving car in person. And I reside in an area that was officially designated by the government for self-driving car testing!

> I think the realistic answer is we don't actually know if it's a bubble.

While that is technically true, has there ever not been a bubble when people start dreaming about what could be? Even if AI heads towards being everything we hope it can become, it still seems highly likely that people have dreamed up uses for the potential of AI that aren't actually useful. The PetsGPT.com-types can still create a bubble even if the underlying technology is all that and more.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#374

Post by y0eswddl »

tbrownaw wrote: post #185
emp17344 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well there was that example a while back of some store's product recommendation algo inferring that someone was pregnant before any of the involved humans knew.

That wasn't LLMs, that's the incredibly vast amounts of personal data that companies collect on us and correlate to other shoppers' habits.

There was nothing involved like what we refer to as "AI" today.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#375

Post by rsync »

baggachipz wrote: post #244

I'm trying to pinpoint the canary in the financial coal mine here. There will be a time to pull out of the market and I really want to have an idea of when. I know, timing the market, but this isn't some small market correction we're talking about here.

TQQQ exists.

There is a liquid market of TQQQ puts.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#376

Post by y0eswddl »

ivape wrote: post #291
greekrich92 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincerely, consider that you may be at risk of an LLM harming your mental health

I’m not going to sit around and act like this LLM thing is not beyond anything humans could have ever dreamed of. Some of you need to be open to just how seminal moments in your life actually are. This is a once a lifetime thing.

Huh? Can you explain this?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#377

Post by aurareturn »

bakugo wrote: post #90
aurareturn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of progr…

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. This isn't a sign that ChatGPT has value as much as it is a sign that this person's work doesn't have value.

What kind of logic is this?

ChatGPT automates much of my friend's work at PwC making her more productive --> not a sign that ChatGPT has any value

Farming machines automated much of what a farmer used to have to do by himself making him more productive --> not a sign that farming machines have any value

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#378

Post by y0eswddl »

aurareturn wrote: post #102
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. Is she more productive though? People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

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…

There's literally a study out the shows when developers think LLMs are making them 20% faster, it turned out to be making them 20% less productive:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#379

Post by fxtentacle »

Gigachad wrote: post #89
raincole wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming In the last few months, every single non-programmer friend I've met has ChatGPT installed on their phone (N>10). Out of all the people that I know enough to ask if they have ChatGPT installed, there is only one who doesn't have it (my dad). I don't know how many of them are paying customers though. IIRC one of them was using ChatGPT to translate academic writing…

I’ve been trying out locally run models on my phone. The iPhone 17 is able to run some pretty nice models, but they lack access to up to date information from the web like ChatGPT has. Wonder if some company like Kagi would offer some api to let your local model plug in and run searches.

That would be perfect. Especially because Kagi could also return search results as JSON to the AI if they control both sides of the interaction.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#380

Post by jacknews »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #355
jacknews wrote: post #83

I think these articles slightly miss the point. Sure, AI as a tool, as it currently is, will take a very long time to earn back the $B being invested. But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push? Everything changes. So I think there's a massive, massive upside risk being priced into these investments.

> But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push? What if Jesus turns up again? Seems a little optimistic, especially with several leading AI voices suggesting that AGI is at least a lot further away than just parameter expansion.

It seems rather more likely to me, even if it's millennia way, that we get a semblance of an autonomous agentic AI, than what you suggest.

It might be impossible, or just need some innovations (eg, transformer), but my point is the investments are non-linear.

They are not investing X to get a return of Y.

If someone reaches AGI, current business models, ROI etc will be meaningless.

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