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

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

#341
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Apple was not sitting there and waiting as if its some grand plan. They tried their VR device which they don't even talk about now. They were late to AI and yes if the bubble bursts they will be at a better position but it's not some grand master strategy. Even inside apple there's been a lot of talk about how badly the company handled AI. As for laughing all the way to the bank, I am sure memory manufacturers and…

I’m laughing right now, Apple is in a very good position and it was a grand plan because OpenAI, i.e. Sam Altman pitched Apple and got nothing, you cannot tell me going into that meeting with Tim Cook at Apple that Sam thought he could squeeze Apple for 50 billion dollars? Like he squeezed Microsoft? And what about Google? They probably thought for sure when they met with Apple that they would wipe out that $20 billi…

"Feature, not a product". SJ's comment when Apple investigated purchasing Dropbox.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a direct opinion about Zitron's economic takes. I don't have a stake in that argument, I don't do financial planning for inference providers or training, I'm open to a variety of arguments, in either direction, about viability. But I have direct subject-matter expertise with software engineering, and too much of what Zitron has to say about AI-mediated software development is clownish . Not wrong (everyo…

For all of Zitrons faults, he has workable numbers that a can be used and cited in arguments.

I believe that he might, but anything valuable he says will be said better and more credibly by someone else.

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

#343
post #78

Apple looks better and better as every day passes. Other players going deeply into debt to build out massive infrastructure, VCs pumping up the model ecosystem that is now a total commodity. Apple’s just been sitting there with solid cashflow waiting for all this to implode and then have on-device models with their own chips. Apple will own the end device while the rest of the world is fighting over a pure commodity.…

When this bubble bursts, it will take down a lot more people than just those pumping up the bubble. Guess who will be holding the bag when the banks end up with outstanding loans that will never be repaid? There will not be much of a win for Apple when a good part of the economy crashes.

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

#344
post #247
post #78

Apple looks better and better as every day passes. Other players going deeply into debt to build out massive infrastructure, VCs pumping up the model ecosystem that is now a total commodity. Apple’s just been sitting there with solid cashflow waiting for all this to implode and then have on-device models with their own chips. Apple will own the end device while the rest of the world is fighting over a pure commodity.…

Curious, why would Apple want to wait for "all this" to implode? They've had on-device silicon for AI for eons now (in AI-years), so they could have been executing their strategy, whatever it is, all this time, no? My outsider take is that Apple leadership never really believed in the capability of GenAI, and hence kept pursuing their pre-LLM strategy. An interesting signal about how that's working out now is that th…

It's like you said, they don't believe there is a viable business yet.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all of Zitrons faults, he has workable numbers that a can be used and cited in arguments.

I believe that he might, but anything valuable he says will be said better and more credibly by someone else.

> someone else.

> Cite better skeptics!

You are welcome to share any that you know.

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

#346
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm sure Galileo didn't like the idea of geocentrinism either for irrational reasons. Seriously, good enough telescopes havent been made yet and he's all confident etc. etc. But Galileo was still had a useful framework for his criticisms despite all of his faults. ---------- I see Ed Zitron in virtually the same spot. Especially now that the SPVs thing is publicly confirmed by 3rd parties. I agree he made a bunch…

The SPV thing has been known for months though; here's Matt Levine talking about it in his inimitable way last October: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-29/put... ( https://archive.md/A40Fv ) Maybe what's become more public is the scale of these SPVs, but Matt Levine's writing makes it seem like a sensible thing to do given the $$$ amounts involved.

Matt Levine doesn't talk about what's good in finance. Matt Levine talks about what's bad in finance. Very consistently.

If you think that Matt Levine is making something sound sensible, you probably are falling for his dry sense of ironic writing.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>he has numbers to back up the possible downfall. Those sorts of numbers apply to the common folk like you and me IMO. They do not apply to the billionaire class. They just don't. The CapEx play either pays out when the buildout is justified or it soft lands for them with a bailout like we just saw NVDA do today with OpenAI. No matter what, in the end, we'll be holding any bar tab in our retirement accounts if they'r…

> Those sorts of numbers apply to the common folk like you and me IMO. Oh, I understand that. I'm not American, but I know I will still be affected if this all goes bust. I'm not in the best state of mind right now, though, and the thought of everything burning to the ground isn't really concerning me. Also, interesting article. I was aware about plastics getting shipped to other countries but had no idea they were s…

So like I said, he's feeding you what you want to hear at this moment in your life. And I think a lot of people in the west feel similarly so it's viralAF. And even if it busts, your corrupt politicos can only let you suffer so much before the pitchforks and rope emerge so it will be contained. 2008 sucked and the failure to clean it up and punish the guilty is the road to 2026, but even now, AI is a well compensated skill in an age of agents that isn't that hard to pick up after you've processed whatever is going on with you.

I don't think the AGI is nigh, it may even be far, but there was an article today that demonstrated something close to the path I've long believed AI will take into industry and it scares the Bejesus out of Anthropic and OpenAI because it reduces them to glorified neoclouds in the long run if one can replicate this process with open weight models. And oh no, Dario Amodei and his ilk will have to settle for being centi-millionaires. Tragic.

https://fermisense.com/when-machines-take-the-wheel/

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity? Before all the price hikes their products were already priced at the top of the market so I would assume that memory getting more expensive will impact their sales or margin quite a bit as they can’t subsidize hardware like AI companies do (they can of course eat into their own margins a bit w…

> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity? I'd qualify this with for now . It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed…

> It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result

I really hope it doesn't but I could see this resulting in just a couple "PC" manufacturers remaining when this is all over. Things will never be the same after that, and likely much worse with a couple companies telling us what we can and can't do on our devices.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that he might, but anything valuable he says will be said better and more credibly by someone else.

> someone else. > Cite better skeptics! You are welcome to share any that you know.

Gary Marcus is the cite I usually give.

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

#350
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I disagree with most of Ed's takes but this is also a pretty wild refutation. National security is a canard for covering up national investment. The US doesn't need to have it's hand in the pockets of private businesses, but by making a murky NATSEC claim they can manufacture interest for investments and under-the-table cooperation. This is exactly how we saw companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft get roped…

SENTIENT wasn't doing the same kind of inference that AI companies have now, so suggesting they have nothing new to offer is incorrect. Advanced AI is clearly dual-use technology that can be used for adversarial or defensive purposes in ways most people simply aren't used to thinking about. Your lack of imagination is not proof of reality. The US releases open source models too. The primary concern is that there shou…

> Advanced AI is clearly dual-use technology

It looks like a liability, if the US's assault on Iran is any basis to go off-of. All the "frontier" AI in the world isn't helping the US win a brushfire war, it's a bit embarrassing I'd say. What's the contribution of frontier LLMs here, you think? What's the dangerous dual-use case, versus traditional computer vision and multimodal data aggregation systems? I'm not really seeing it, SENTIENT is far more impressive.

> When companies are hosting their models via API, they can have many other layers involved in serving those requests that can reduce abuse

That's not a safety feature. API providers do that to reduce their risk exposure and limit the liability they could face if someone attempted to abuse their service. Without the legal liability incentive, service providers would gladly remove those limits. As you've noted, Open Weight models don't have this feature at all, because the user is subsuming the liability; there's zero reason to drop or refuse requests for cybersecurity, "bioweapon research" or whatever stupid boogeyman topic you want to use to justify censorship. Of course, none of these LLMs have posed a legitimately unique threat to anyone in the past 6 years of "dual-use" LLMs being available - but a lack of evidence sure isn't going to stop your imagination.

> China puts more restrictions on models domestically than they do internationally.

> but the point is that this directly refutes your suggestion that China doesn't think they are a threat.

You're just describing a typical surveillance architecture. The United States does the exact same thing for data retention purposes, except they extend their surveillance globally instead of just imposing it just domestically. With open-weight LLMs, you are free to avoid that type of federal intervention and run the model or finetune it on your own hardware.

> That's unlikely

Nothing in that packet is very scary, but I will admit that it's hilarious how poorly a document like that ages in as few as 12 months:

  China’s artificial intelligence program is centrally planned and ideologically engineered through layers of national policy, and implemented by a coordinated collaboration among government, SOEs, private tech companies, academia, and the military. 
As opposed to the US' AI policy, which is centrally planned and ideologically engineered through layers of national policy, and implimented by a coordinated collaboration among government, private tech companies and the military.

Can you explain actual dangers, or are we going to remain at this impasse? I'm not super worried, yet.

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