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How the AI Bubble Bursts

martinvol.pe

11–20 of 557 posts

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#11
> nobody is sure if even their metered pricing is profitable

This is most likely wrong. Lab executives insist that serving tokens is profitable. It's the cost of training next-gen models that requires them to keep raising ever larger rounds. More importantly, many independent providers price tokens of open-weight models at a fraction of Anthropic's prices.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#13
History doesn't have to repeat. There's barely anything else going on in terms of innovation, and AI is a real step function technology. We might be overspending but there's no way we're getting another AI winter like last time (remember last time investment in 90s AI had to compete for resources with the internet boom).

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#14

> How this affects you? > checks list ... nope, nothing will either directly or indirectly affect me. Let it happen sooner, rather than later, and unleash the mobs at the tech bros that set the world on course to make everybody's life more miserable. We'll still be here to get the scrapped RAM and GPUs to train and infere local models thank you very much.

The current best models are already very capable of disrupting the job of millions of people. I don’t think a scenario where we just go back to pre-Claude Code exists and I’m sure the same models can be tuned for much of other white collar work at similar capability

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#15
post #9

HN is no longer a reliable place for the truth. Quite frankly, unless you are utterly self educated, you are terribly vulnerable to this place. At this rate, I’d almost prefer to talk on a private mailing list with vetted resumes.

Why?

You have to be uneducated to even read an “AI is bubble article”. Anyone working this stuff knows how much more compute we need.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#16

I could see OpenAI hitting financial issues which triggers some media induced panic and for people to claim the AI bubble has popped. However, the core utility of the best AI (read: Anthropic's ATM, by miles), will still exist and be leveraged by those who have learned to use it well. I could also see the exponentially declining power requirements offsetting the exponential-but-slower rate of AI compute demand, which…

It’s pretty much undeniable at this point that the sentiment has changed.

About 2 months ago this place was unbearable - filled with doom and hype AI posts. I welcome the calming and eventual slow release of the bubble.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#17

> nobody is sure if even their metered pricing is profitable This is most likely wrong. Lab executives insist that serving tokens is profitable. It's the cost of training next-gen models that requires them to keep raising ever larger rounds. More importantly, many independent providers price tokens of open-weight models at a fraction of Anthropic's prices.

The point is that you can’t just serve tokens without also training the next models. It’s an inseparable part of your costs, so naturally you can’t be profitable unless the price you are charging ALSO covers training.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#18
From the beginning of this I’ve wondered the same question: how do these companies justify spending such massive amounts now (and 3 or 4 years ago) when software and hardware efficiencies will bring down the cost dramatically fairly soon?

They basically decided that scaling at any cost was the way to go. This only works as a strategy if efficiency can’t work, not if you simply haven’t tried. Otherwise, a few breakthroughs and order of magnitude improvements and people are running equivalent models on their desktops, then their laptops, then their phones.

Arguably the costs involved means that our existing hardware and software is simply non viable for what they were and are trying to do, and a few iterations later the money will simply have been wasted. If you consider funnelling everything to nvidia shareholders wasting it, which I do.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#19
post #13

History doesn't have to repeat. There's barely anything else going on in terms of innovation, and AI is a real step function technology. We might be overspending but there's no way we're getting another AI winter like last time (remember last time investment in 90s AI had to compete for resources with the internet boom).

Isn’t that covered at the top of the post?

> AI is here to stay. If used right, chances are it will make us all more productive. That, on the other hand, does not mean it will be a good investment.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#20

> nobody is sure if even their metered pricing is profitable This is most likely wrong. Lab executives insist that serving tokens is profitable. It's the cost of training next-gen models that requires them to keep raising ever larger rounds. More importantly, many independent providers price tokens of open-weight models at a fraction of Anthropic's prices.

But are they actually profitable, or do they employ creative accounting where only parts of overhead expenses are counted against all of inference revenue, similar to what Uber did?

OpenAI's numbers show that they definitely are not profitable on inference, and even worse, revenue growth scaled linearly with inference cost from 2024 to 2025, which means they can't outgrow this problem. See https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

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