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How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

arstechnica.com

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Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#41

Post by mrngld »

xnx wrote: post #14
pydry wrote: post #6

The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers, which is ironic because all it has really achieved is a deluge of slop. Social media has also gone utterly crazy. The last time I saw a gaslighting operation on this scale and volume (including accounts who "hate" AI "because its so scary good") was during the start of the Gaza war. These accounts becoming easier to distinguish…

> The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...

People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years". You know what Codex/Cowork/etc can do really stunningly good these days? Take the files you provide, listen to what you want from them, ask clarifying questions as necessary, then write a script that programmatically does exactly what you ask for, checks its own work and then gives you the result.

We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed.

There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble.

Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#42

Post by watwut »

vkou wrote: post #13

> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI. I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of yo…

I can name three:

- better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text.

Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#43

Post by deltoidmaximus »

alansaber wrote: post #30
watwut wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think CEO class want better, more effective companies. They have nothing to gain by that. They want monopoly situation for themselves, locked customers and helpless dependent employees.

It depends but obviously they want both, both control and value.

Enough control will create value for them anyway, it just might be at the expense of everyone else.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#44

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

Usually when talking about bubbles bursting its about a stock market bubble. P/E ratios now are approaching/passing the P/E ratios during the dot com boom/bust. Another reference point with high P/E ratios was around 1929-1930 (there are others too).

The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc.

An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output.

I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#45

Post by pydry »

mrngld wrote: post #41
xnx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...

People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our enti…

>There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years

I did a bunch of that type of work pre covid. IME it's usually an hour to build and about 3-5 weeks to handle bureaucracy, data cleaning and detective work to account for the lack of docs. AI would probably handle that 1 hour's worth of work OK but using it for the rest of that work would be a shortcut to hallucination town, especially when the context is something you have to dig up by actually talking to people.

Also it's the only bit of that job that isnt mind numbing.

There's an enormous number of projects all over the economy these days which are being presented as an enormous "AI win" where the benefits were dubious at best, because it's become a clear route to career advancement.

I'm equally certain that it has its niches but ~80% of where I'm seeing it used it's either smoke and mirrors or creating more problems than it is solving.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#46

Post by Avicebron »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #25
feverzsj wrote: post #21

It's kinda too big to fail in US now. If it bursts, US will decline quickly.

It's not, though. The banking system holds onto everyone's money in a fractional reserve system, if you let a run on the banks happen everyone's money is gone. That's "too big to fail". If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.

If they get bailed out with taxpayer dollers they better maje damn sure the taxpayers are getting immediate tangible benefits (as in cash or free mythos class AI every month at a minimum). Sama can go beg on the streets, we'll keep the tech.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#48

Post by tim333 »

cryo32 wrote: post #5

Just wait for the economics to catch up and eat the marketing. No effort required.

But what about the damage along the way? Misallocation of capital? Too many data centers and not enough jobs? CO2? Expensive RAM? Endless articles on HN about AI saying there are too many articles on HN about AI?

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#49

Post by beej71 »

vkou wrote: post #13

> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI. I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of yo…

It's allowed me to learn things more quickly. For example, I haven't written any C++ professionally for 20 years, and found myself in the position of needing to know it again. The existing material online for learning it is thick; sometimes I have a question that isn't answered directly or clearly in any way I can find with a standard search. I can grill the LLM much more quickly and pointedly.

However, this does not answer the usefulness-at-work question. Does anyone care if I know how the initializer list braces in constructor `Foo{1,2}` work? Today for hiring managers smitten with AI, seems like they don't.

Personally, I'm just trying to stay sharp on the off-chance that things crash out and people who know how to engineer *and* code become highly valuable. If not, I'll be doing something else, anyway.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#50

Post by tim333 »

alansaber wrote: post #32

I've been enjoying the industrial revolution parallels. Have the economics of bespoke products changed? Not really. But is it now easier to get a crude, but functional, approximation of an idea? Yes. The main issue appears to be users conflating B for A (and not realising their AI creation is fundamentally a mess).

I find the industrial revolution parallels interesting too. I figure we're in the steam age and this is a bit like the railway bubble. Or maybe a bit before that - I'm not sure current AI is as useful as railways.
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