Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#81

Post by refulgentis » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

hvb2 wrote: post #6

JCM9 wrote: post #3

I’m bullish on AI as tech but folks are starting to sniff out that the financials of everything going on at the moment aren’t sustainable for much longer. I hope we have more of a “reality correction” than full blown bubble bursting, but the data is increasingly looking like we’re about to have a massive implosion that wipes out a generation of startups and sets the VC ecosystem back a decade.

The tech is way underpriced right now. It's basically a subsidized market right now, with the money flowing in coming from the private sector. The problem here is that it remains to be seen who is willing to pay for the service once it's priced at cost or even with a margin. And based on valuations of AI companies one would expect a huge margin.

It's not subsidized, lol.

Generally, I worry HN is in a dark place with this stuff - look how this thread goes, ex. descendant of yours is at "Why would I ever pay for this when it hallucinates." I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that. I'm worried for those who do, genuinely, I hope transitions out there are slow enough, due to obstinance, that they're not cast out suddenly without the skills to get something else.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#82

Post by jiscariot » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

foofoo12 wrote: post #69

dmix wrote: post #28

I'd be skeptical just because it's Oracle. Not exactly a sprightly company to bet on for novel technology.

Unfair. Oracle excels at some things, like extortion, blackmailing and litigation.

Just think about what they could accomplish if they had more engineers than lawyers.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#83

Post by refulgentis » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

causal wrote: post #9

hvb2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech is way underpriced right now. It's basically a subsidized market right now, with the money flowing in coming from the private sector. The problem here is that it remains to be seen who is willing to pay for the service once it's priced at cost or even with a margin. And based on valuations of AI companies one would expect a huge margin.

I wonder if a price correction would be a boon for open source, with the economics of smaller / self hosted models making a lot more sense when API prices have to surge.

It's not actually subsidized and the economics of smaller/self-hosted models are a much, much, worse nightmare (source: guy who spent last 2 years maintaining llama.cpp && any provider you can think of) (why is it bad? same reason why 20 cars vs. 1 bus is bad. same reason why only being able to use transportation if you own a car would be bad)

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#84

Post by rwmj » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #13

hvb2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech is way underpriced right now. It's basically a subsidized market right now, with the money flowing in coming from the private sector. The problem here is that it remains to be seen who is willing to pay for the service once it's priced at cost or even with a margin. And based on valuations of AI companies one would expect a huge margin.

It's hard for me to imagine paying real money for something that gives me a maybe-hallucinated answer that I need to check every single time. A flaky test is worse than a failing test.

Plus I can run a reasonable LLM on my own hardware, so I don't even need to pay anyone else. And what I can run locally is only going to get better and better.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#85

Post by foota » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

jiscariot wrote: post #82

foofoo12 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfair. Oracle excels at some things, like extortion, blackmailing and litigation.

Just think about what they could accomplish if they had more engineers than lawyers.

Imagine all the patents they could hold to extort over!

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#86

Post by refulgentis » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #16

ForHackernews wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for me to imagine paying real money for something that gives me a maybe-hallucinated answer that I need to check every single time. A flaky test is worse than a failing test.

_sigh_ Yes LLMs hallucinate, no it's no longer 2022 and ChatGPT (gpt-3.5) is the pinnacle of LLM tech. Modern LLMs in an agentic loop can self correct, you still need to be on guard but if used correctly (yes, yes, holding it wrong etc. etc.) can do many, many tasks that do not suffer from "need to check every single time".

Apologies that you're taking on the chin here. Generally, I'll just skip fantastical HN threads with a critical mass of BS like this, with pity, rather than an attempt to share (for more on that c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929335)

Been on HN 16 years and never seen anything like the pack of people who will come out to tell you it doesn't work and they'll never pay for it and it's wrong 50% of the time, etc.

Was at dinner with an MD a few nights back and we were riffing on this, came to the conclusion is was really fun for CS people when the idea was AI would replace radiologists, but when the first to be mowed down are the keyboard monkeys, well, it's personal and you get people who are years into a cognitive dissonance thing now.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#87

Post by theoldgreybeard » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #78

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #56

I can’t wait for the apocalyptic razing that’s coming.

Very unlikely (are you a greybeard? you should know this, unless we're at some sort of resentment > rational local minima)

sam altman just needs another trillion dollars and then we'll finally have AGI and then the robots will do all the work and everyone will get a million dollars per year in UBI and everything will be perfect

promise

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#88

Post by rwmj » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

lenerdenator wrote: post #34

What do you call Larry Ellison losing enough wealth to equal the yearly economic output of a small American metro area? A nice start. EDIT: Downvote it all you want, he's not going to increase your pay.

If Oracle implodes because of their debt (or any other reason actually), it'll make my day.

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#89

Post by philipwhiuk » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #81

hvb2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech is way underpriced right now. It's basically a subsidized market right now, with the money flowing in coming from the private sector. The problem here is that it remains to be seen who is willing to pay for the service once it's priced at cost or even with a margin. And based on valuations of AI companies one would expect a huge margin.

It's not subsidized, lol. Generally, I worry HN is in a dark place with this stuff - look how this thread goes, ex. descendant of yours is at "Why would I ever pay for this when it hallucinates." I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that. I'm worried for those who do, genuinely, I hope transitions out there are slow enough, due to obstinance, that they're not cast out…

> It's not subsidized, lol.

It's subsidised by VC funding. At some point the gravy train stops and they have to pivot to profit so that the VCs deliver return-on-investment. Look at Facebook shoving in adverts, Uber jacking up the price, etc.

> I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that

I don't know how you can afford not to realise that there's a fixed value prop here for the current behaviour and that it's potentially not as high as it needs to be for OpenAI to turn a profit.

OpenAI's ridiculous investment ability is based on a future potential it probably will never hit. Assuming it does not, the whole stack of cards falls down real quick.

(You can Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V OpenAI for all the big AI providers)

Re: Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

#90

Post by causal » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #83

causal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a price correction would be a boon for open source, with the economics of smaller / self hosted models making a lot more sense when API prices have to surge.

It's not actually subsidized and the economics of smaller/self-hosted models are a much, much, worse nightmare (source: guy who spent last 2 years maintaining llama.cpp && any provider you can think of) (why is it bad? same reason why 20 cars vs. 1 bus is bad. same reason why only being able to use transportation if you own a car would be bad)

> It's not actually subsidized

Source?