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After the AI Crash

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Re: After the AI Crash

#81

Post by jdw64 »

These days, I find it hard to predict the future. Things feel too complex, and the times seem different.

People say the AI bubble will burst, and I also think it will. But I want to think about how it might differ from other bubbles.

One positive factor is that during the internet startup era, there was almost no revenue. But now, big tech companies are generating profits and can absorb AI-scale losses.

The dot-com bubble burst, but the internet ended up being far more valuable than the bubble itself. I think the value was priced in early, and AI will be similar.

The core issue is always the same: there's a bubble and there are warnings, but you never know when it will collapse. And the people who act first on the warnings have to give up on the upside. The only winners are those who sell everything just before the crash. The problem is knowing when that moment is.

One difference from the dot-com bubble is that after it burst, a second wave of entrepreneurs leveraged the cheap telecom infrastructure that was left behind. So after the AI bubble bursts, will OpenAI and Anthropic fall and new companies emerge? I'm skeptical about that. Something feels different this time.

My biggest concern, though, is that if I suddenly couldn't use AI anymore, I'm worried about how long it would take to recover the coding skills I've lost after nearly a year of barely hand-coding. AI has become too deeply embedded in my life

Re: After the AI Crash

#82

Post by heaney-555 »

joshstrange wrote: post #34

> Most new technologies have been welcomed by the public with open arms. I'm not going to predict how this is going to turn out in either direction but this statement gives me pause. I don't think that's ever been true. Yes, the siren song is strong but initially most new tech is met with skepticism. Are we so quick to forget "the internet/computers are just a fad"-type thinking?

Exactly, it's utter nonsense. The general public thought the first bicycles, automobiles, computers, mobile phones, smart watches, and AirPods were stupid. And now they are normal. Same with video games and dating apps.

Re: After the AI Crash

#83

Post by spwa4 »

ursuscamp wrote: post #48
toasty228 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> absolutely no way to stop it. Unless if they take down the flat rate subs and you have to pay api prices, usage will drop a lot. Right now I freelance using gpt, if I had to pay api prices I'd probably lose 50% of the income, if not more, with the ~40% tax on top I might as well spend my time doing something else

I don't necessarily buy that API prices represent "real" prices of the models.

It's probably a safe assumption that openrouter prices for Kimi K3 are "real".

Re: After the AI Crash

#84

Post by tempfile »

gruez wrote: post #64
badrequest wrote: post #54

When I joined my first startup, they said if you didn't have a good plan for going public or getting acquired by series C, then the D in series D stood for death. Uber et al raised like a J round. None of the rules around markets or investments are real, it's all vibes-based, and the decision-makers love talking to their ChatGPT mistresses too much to let this all come crashing down.

>Uber et al raised like a J round. None of the rules around markets or investments are real Uber's a poor example because it did IPO in 2019 and its stocks are up around 75% since then.

Yeah. Uber's a successful company and they raised a J round. Therefore the rule (D means Death) is not real. I'm not sure what you're implying, or if you just misunderstood the original comment?

Re: After the AI Crash

#85

Post by NiloCK »

tempfile wrote: post #68
ursuscamp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily buy that API prices represent "real" prices of the models.

What do you think the real price is? Subscriptions are heavily subsidised, I don't know anyone who would deny that.

The general model for subscriptions is that power users are subsidized by subscriptions of casual users, like a gym membership or whatever.

This is a little dicier in post-agent AI, because it's easier for casual users to automate power-user consumption, but the providers have done decently in discouraging that.

Re: After the AI Crash

#86

Post by Marha01 »

zero_shift wrote: post #49
mosura wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificial intelligence. If humans are machines executing on some medium eventually it will be possible to emulate them on some other medium. Believing otherwise requires some essentially religious convictions on the existence of the soul or similar.

We already have human intelligence. Creating new humans is easy (and fun) The only reason to emulate human intelligence is to capture it, exploit it, and reduce the negotiating power of those who have it naturally. Anyone who wants this is not a friend of human beings

> Creating new humans is easy (and fun)

This could not be further from the truth.

Creating a new educated, competent human takes ~25 years, and significant costs and resources.

AGI can be just copy-pasted at essentially no cost. Even a robot that is mass-produced for tens of thousands of dollars is still much less expensive and takes much less time to make than a competent human.

Re: After the AI Crash

#87

Post by Schlagbohrer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #43
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is going to happen to the job market during and the years following the crash Junior programmers will be in demand again. Someone will have to fix the mountains of vibe coded technical debt.

I'm not sure that you're going to fix that with juniors...

What if they're cheap, though? Perhaps the pay scale for programmers starts to resemble that for finance bros: very low pay for the first few years because so many go into the field, and those who accumulate skill (and connections, etc) can then hit the hockey stick part of the graph and get a huge pay boost when they become middle and senior. So, it would be a deskilling of programmers at the start of their careers but still worthwhile to hire them if they are cheap and can dig through the tech debt with sheer numbers/manpower. I'm just spitballing here.

Re: After the AI Crash

#88

Post by ekidd »

toasty228 wrote: post #33
Kuyawa wrote: post #14

AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. The only reading on the crystal ball is if US companies fail, China will take the lead by leaps and bounds, so the only solution is to keep pushing the cart until the wheels come off or we all cross the finish line, together.

> absolutely no way to stop it. Unless if they take down the flat rate subs and you have to pay api prices, usage will drop a lot. Right now I freelance using gpt, if I had to pay api prices I'd probably lose 50% of the income, if not more, with the ~40% tax on top I might as well spend my time doing something else

You're unlikely to ever be priced out of tokens, at least if you'd be willing to settle for a model closer to Sonnet 4.5. That level of model certainly isn't as efficient as Fable 5, but it can crank out CRUD apps and other consulting mainstays quite well, with some supervision.

To give you an example of model in this class, the DeepSeek V4 Flash preview is a 284B A13B model, with a native quantization mixing 4 bit and 8-bit values. You can easily run it on an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell (or 2) at a reasonable quant, especially if you offload the MoE weights to 48-64GB of system RAM. This costs US$11,800 at Microcenter right now, and it will work in any gaming box with decent cooling and a modern 1000W power supply. Over the lifetime of the card, an entire system would cost you under $4,000/year. Power is about 300W for the card (either a blower model, or a workstation model with the power cap), and another 150W or so for the rest of the server.

Or you could buy it on Open Router from dozens of different commodity vendors, starting around $0.09 per million tokens input, $0.18 per million tokens output. This is a competitive market price, so some of the providers might be losing money or reselling surplus capacity. But given the underlying hardware costs, the numbers are in the ballpark. In other words, if you're willing to settle for lower-quality tokens, you can get roughly Sonnet 4.5 for close to free, or as a modest capital expense for a successful freelancer. Halfway decent tokens are cheap, and you can generate them in-house!

Re: After the AI Crash

#89

Post by zero_shift »

Marha01 wrote: post #67
zero_shift wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an absurd position to take. Nobody benefits by having less time to adapt to changes in their employability I am not calling you out personally here, but this comment bears many hallmarks of the "accelerationist disease": thinking in abstract models rather than in concrete terms; optimising for the fangs of capital rather than human beings, imaginary infinite bets that lead participants to nonsensical conclusi…

> Nobody benefits by having less time to adapt Not exactly true. If AI goes from 0 to 100 quickly (human level AGI in a few years), we will all lose our jobs together and will have to confront this fact. There is no ignoring such massive societal elephant in the room. If instead AI improves slowly, lots of people will lose their jobs, but majority will not. Those still with jobs may not be persuaded by the sizable jo…

Firstly, this generation of AI is not going to take away all jobs

Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help

Accelerationists want to see their jobs go up in smoke because they think that if enough white collar workers are impoverished, everyone who was formerly poorer than them, will chip in to rescue us

Just like they didn't in 1985...

In a context where the state already has less tax revenue due to mass unemployment! It's completely bananas thinking that only survives on internet brainrot forums

Re: After the AI Crash

#90

Post by Marha01 »

contagiousflow wrote: post #39
mosura wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificial intelligence. If humans are machines executing on some medium eventually it will be possible to emulate them on some other medium. Believing otherwise requires some essentially religious convictions on the existence of the soul or similar.

Sure, but that only stands if you believe the only purpose of human intelligence is for economic benefit.

That does not follow. The argument about the possibility of artificial intelligence makes absolutely no claims about the purpose of human or artificial intelligence. One is a claim about "is", another is a claim about "ought".
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