Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 370 posts

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#31

Post by dan_gee »

Legend2440 wrote: post #9
bananamogul wrote: post #2

I don't know if Ed Zitron is right about allhis analysis, but it's nice to have an alternative, well-argued narrative to the gushing torrent of AI company propaganda.

Is it though? He's more of a gushing torrent of anti-AI propaganda. He has an agenda too, it's just the opposite one.

A resolute anti-AI perspective is a breath of fresh air compared to the middle-of-the-road "AI made me 10x more productive BUT"-style comments.

My professional opinion is that LLM technology doesn't work very well for software development and I'm not interested in hemming and hawing over its supposed benefits any longer.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#33

Post by sodapopcan »

ofjcihen wrote: post #15
tptacek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are good sources of well-argued AI skepticism, and then there's Ed Zitron.

At this point I have yet to hear a solid argument against his arguments that use half as much evidence as he does. That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense. If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.

Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. Zitron isn't even anti-AI per se. He clearly talks out his ass at times (like AI doesn't work for developers... which he's not saying so much anymore, I don't think) but his main talking points are around numbers and profitability.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#34

Post by dan_gee »

awakeasleep wrote: post #12
bananamogul wrote: post #2

I don't know if Ed Zitron is right about allhis analysis, but it's nice to have an alternative, well-argued narrative to the gushing torrent of AI company propaganda.

Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did. Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.

Can you elaborate on what happened that made you look dumb?

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#35

Post by AussieWog93 »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

This is quite a short sighted analysis. I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. The future of AI would be on-device models which are as powerful as current frontier models and also I can imagine companies have their own deployments of inference of…

Seriously, you should try Fable. It picks up on subtleties that Opus misses.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#36

Post by d4ng »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

This is quite a short sighted analysis. I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. The future of AI would be on-device models which are as powerful as current frontier models and also I can imagine companies have their own deployments of inference of…

Why is on-device AI the future? What is your reasoning behind this? Look at the proportion of things we compute on someone else’s computer relative to what we compute on our own device. Why would this change for LLMs?

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#37

Post by sroussey »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

This is quite a short sighted analysis. I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. The future of AI would be on-device models which are as powerful as current frontier models and also I can imagine companies have their own deployments of inference of…

The money being poured into AI infrastructure means there is a market for new ways of doing things that take 1/1000 of the power or are 1000x faster, or both.

And there are many such moonshot startups.

AI on GPUs is an efficient as gaming on CPUs.

All that math where perfect precision is not required means that you can’t tell do things in different ways.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#38

Post by thewebguyd »

scrlk wrote: post #10

> While people get some sort of benefit out of AI-generated code, these tools actually end up making them slower Curious that he references a METR study from July 2025, before the leap in model and harness performance towards the end of 2025/early 2026.

Interestingly, that METR study has updated data for 2026 that shows a speed up, although they admit that the data may not be reliable because of changed pay rate for participation, but this quote is telling:

> The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without AI, which likely biases downwards our estimate of AI-assisted speedup.

So compared to just last year, they had a hard time finding participants because too many didn't want to work without AI.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#39

Post by dragontamer »

hparadiz wrote: post #29
ofjcihen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I have yet to hear a solid argument against his arguments that use half as much evidence as he does. That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense. If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.

[flagged]

I thought Ed Zitrons argument was just corroborated by Nikkei last Friday with the new report that 1.6 Trillion in SPVs accounts for off-books debt, on top of the $1.4 Trillion of on-books debt that's in these AI companies?

The main argument of Ed Zitron is just that. Huge huge amounts of debt that's due "soonish". Every SPV is different but we are fast approaching the point where this all starts to become real.

Now I dunno why Ed Zitron feels the need to write 10,000++++ word articles that only says "more leverage than people expect", but that's really the crux of things.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#40

Post by s0ss »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

This is quite a short sighted analysis. I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. The future of AI would be on-device models which are as powerful as current frontier models and also I can imagine companies have their own deployments of inference of…

How's it "quite short sighted"? Are you saying the math _does_ make sense? if so, how?
Post reply on HN