I've been reading a lot of stories like this lately. I'm no business genius, but you'd assume that investors are. Are they just blind or are they burning cash on purpose. What's the steelman argument here?
After the AI Crash
111–120 of 244 posts
Re: After the AI Crash
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
If they're hosted in China next to a coal power plant and maintained by people getting paid 1/10th of a US engineer sure.
I doubt opanai and anthropic will go that road
Re: After the AI Crash
#113Oh no, no one saw it coming. Oh well, anyway. Let’s argue about SQL vs NoSQL again. I miss that.
These days we argue whether the version of SQL created by the AI Swarm at Cursor is really SQL, or whether that benchmark is invalid because SQL and its code is already in the model's training data. Does that scratch the itch for you? X-D
https://startupfortune.com/cursors-ai-agents-rebuilt-sqlite-...
Re: After the AI Crash
#114a contrarian take that's been eating away at my mind lately: - if every autonomous self-driving car is going to need some sort of edge AI data center nearby (for instantaneous exceptional incident handling) - if every household robot is going to need some sort of edge AI data center nearby (for instantaneous exceptional incident handling) - if there are going to be millions of self-driving cars and autonomous robots…
I think the answer here is that we are NOT going to have the Jetson's future with humanoid robots in many homes nor self driving cars taking over the roads. I am less sure about that second one, though, since people in my family tell me their self driving Tesla's do a great job.
But those silver boxes at the side of the road? Might see many more of those, and much larger, maybe red hot on top
Re: After the AI Crash
#115> 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?
Heliocentrism calling... Yeah, we reject anything new and scary. Gotta wonder what the cavepeople made of the wheel. Edit: still triggered by heliocentrism in 2026? OK then.
People weren’t as ignorant back then as you think. They had very good reason to reject heliocentrism, namely that constellations don’t grow and shrink in size as the earth moves around. That, they said, would require the universe to be unimaginably big and empty, much more so than any other observation they could make at the time would suggest.
If you have the time, I recommend reading Pliny’s Natural History. I think it really shows how much more open-minded these people were than we give them credit for. They just didn’t have the technology we have.
Re: After the AI Crash
#116It’s not a question of if but when at this point. To parallel to The Big Short this is the point in the movie where folks realize it’s mathematically impossible for things to not implode and so players are quietly positioning themselves for that eventuality before things are allowed to blow. It’s been a dramatic shift these last six months but everywhere I look now folks are quietly preparing their battle armor to su…
Thats a weird take. Google/Alphabet can literaly just afford their AI investment.
Microsoft can as well.
So Anthropic only has a few thousand people which is nothing and OpenAI has also only a few thousand.
A lot of people working at these companies would find a new job easily and probably making a shit ton of money anyway.
The broader AI companies do not have that much venture capital, not that many peple and potentially not even that high of risks.
Deepseek didn't do their funding round because they could'nt even get the compute if they wanted to. So they might be very lean.
And even investors for OpenAI and Anthropic might accept that they stop R&D and just keep the services up and running as they are cost effective.
The bigger problem will be the industry itself: If i'm 5x more productive, and generate now more costs on the business, they will reduce headcounts to compensate for it.
Re: After the AI Crash
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, the empire aka, protection of free trade as a service is still alive and well with no viable alternative on the horizon. Every other empire is either not free trade or - just plain mercantilism and thus will exploit way more then the quite "idealist" us- trump is just a taste of what the others in power would feel like.
Isn't the US like very clearly anti free trade at this point?
It is pro-kicking out oppossition to the system that uses the system to grow in power without contributing anything back to it. So the us has abandoned the "Wandel durch Handel" ideology- which lets admit it- was a brutal failure. Russia did not change. China changed back. None of the countries in the middle east got democratic or "contributing to the worlds allmende". Turkey is sliding back.
So its cleaning the house of parasites o clock.
Re: After the AI Crash
#118I don't have much background in the area, but I am surprised to see that everyone here basically agrees a crash is imminent. There are disanalogies to past crashes that don't convince me that a big crash is definitively coming in the near term.
For example:
- Anthropic makes a profit right now and is seemingly on an exponential upward trajectory, so the debt being too much for it doesn't seem compelling to me.
- AI technology continues to get better exponentially and doesn't have any clear sign this trend is flattening. If anything, it's accelerating. So it's plausible the investor value is legitimate for these companies given the massive potential for continued profitability.
- I would say markets are typically very good predictors of the future. Many sophisticated investors know about the case for the future crash and are still buying at these valuations.
I am open to being wrong, but the assessment in the blog seems one-sided to me.
Polymarket currently puts the chance of such a downturn at 20% by December 2026. Seems like most people would put higher chances here, but I'm not convinced by the arguments. (https://polymarket.com/event/ai-bubble-burst-by)
Re: After the AI Crash
#119Earlier 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
I do mostly agree with you, but...
> Creating new humans is easy
If you did a survey I suspect agreement with this statement would be rather bimodal.
Re: After the AI Crash
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heliocentrism calling... Yeah, we reject anything new and scary. Gotta wonder what the cavepeople made of the wheel. Edit: still triggered by heliocentrism in 2026? OK then.
People weren’t as ignorant back then as you think. They had very good reason to reject heliocentrism, namely that constellations don’t grow and shrink in size as the earth moves around. That, they said, would require the universe to be unimaginably big and empty, much more so than any other observation they could make at the time would suggest. If you have the time, I recommend reading Pliny’s Natural History. I thin…
Another reason many people rejected heliocentrism was that you could get excommunicated (or worse!) if you professed to accept it.