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The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

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Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#31
post #27
post #12

Outside a relatively small world of circular investment and FOMO feeding FOMO the general consensus seems to be “let it burn.” It appears very unlikely we will ever see an IPO of OpenAI. Anthropic appears less doomed, but still iffy at best. Tons of other large, but little discussed, AI startups are just dead-companies-walking at this point. The likes of AWS are showing good headline numbers but are taking out massiv…

It's holding up the entire US stock market and therefore the entire US economy and the dollar value. You probably don't want this particular Atlas to shrug.

It's inevitable though. The funny-money has outpaced actual money by lightyears at this point.

On the plus side, our interest rates aren't 0% right now, so there's some room there.

On the down side, our national debt generation now exceeds 125% of GDP and bond rates are shooting up because nobody wants to buy our debt.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect Nvidia to survive the crash on its own, and everyone else except Softbank to be bailed out with US taxpayer money.

Nvidia has hordes of raucous gamers on the prowl waiting to tear their chips out of their hands the moment hyperscaler demand falters; plus, China has made sure there will always be plenty of open models to run for hobbyists and neoclouds, even if training compute were to drop off a cliff. They'll be just fine.

I want to see the number of gamers that tear the chips from the dead hands of hyperscalers to make up for the implosion of that market. If I had to guess, half of humanity does not have interest in dedicated gaming chips. Memory, that's another story.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#33
post #26
post #5

well if bubble pops, everyone will die EXCEPT google UNLESS openAI/etc actually succeeds in making AGI that never hallucinates and goes over the current LLM limitations as for google... well they own the web (+google has plenty of other revenue sources, so it can just pay out its AI survival) if you're a website owner, would you welcome chatgpt/etc's data-collection bots? but... as for google's bots... you need your…

> but... as for google's bots... you need your website to be on the Google search results... Why? Depends totally on what kind of website you are running.

Totally agree. For a lot of tradefolks maps seem to be the actually more important location. Still Google obviously but it's less slopified in comparison to search. For now at least.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#34
Note that the “AI Bubble” term used here is only defined in the context of market speculation. If you are not an investor of AI companies then there is nothing to worry about for you. If you are an investor, then you should know that people can’t really predict when bubbles burst. Every prediction in the markets is a speculation and some investors can simply bets against the popular expectations to make good money.

Movements of AI stocks shouldn’t be confused with “AI as a technology” and “AI as a business”. Market valuation is a different game.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#35
post #8
post #5

well if bubble pops, everyone will die EXCEPT google UNLESS openAI/etc actually succeeds in making AGI that never hallucinates and goes over the current LLM limitations as for google... well they own the web (+google has plenty of other revenue sources, so it can just pay out its AI survival) if you're a website owner, would you welcome chatgpt/etc's data-collection bots? but... as for google's bots... you need your…

> well if bubble pops, everyone will die EXCEPT google Also, possible Apple since they haven't gone into deep debt to finance 'AI buildout'.

Apple is also just partnering with Google.

https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#36

I would argue we still have not even really gotten started. What do we have in the decade ahead? Robotics in every household, models 10x+ faster and more intelligent than today. Really no significant impact in life sciences, R&D, and 'offline' world / robotics today as of yet, which is where most of the value will live.

Robotics in the household has been the realm of science fiction for decades and it still hasn't happened. We get dedicated, compact machines like dishwashers and washing machine/dryers, that's it. Most recent innovation has been the automatic vacuum. If you want someone else to do household chores, hire someone. You can pay someone to do your house chores for years for the cost that these things will have initially.

>Most recent innovation has been the automatic vacuum

Which are pretty useless for a lot of home layouts and degree of putting cords etc. away. I took a look a few years back and got a stick vac instead. (And have a monthly housekeeper who does a lot more than a robo-vac would.)

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#37
post #12

Outside a relatively small world of circular investment and FOMO feeding FOMO the general consensus seems to be “let it burn.” It appears very unlikely we will ever see an IPO of OpenAI. Anthropic appears less doomed, but still iffy at best. Tons of other large, but little discussed, AI startups are just dead-companies-walking at this point. The likes of AWS are showing good headline numbers but are taking out massiv…

Anthropic is almost purely a model company. They own close to no data centers.

If models are becoming commodities, and the main bottleneck is actually serving them at scale, Anthropic does not appear particularly well positioned.

If AWS had a ~60-80% margin for decades, I see no reason why inference can't have a ~60-80% margin for quite some time.

The problem is, if costs continue to drop ~90% for the same level of quality every 18 months, demand is unlikely to grow 10x to keep the revenue stable.

Who knows. Jevon's paradox. But the cost/quality is dropping too fast that it's hard for me to imagine demand keeps up long term to keep revenues (and profits) GROWING.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia has hordes of raucous gamers on the prowl waiting to tear their chips out of their hands the moment hyperscaler demand falters; plus, China has made sure there will always be plenty of open models to run for hobbyists and neoclouds, even if training compute were to drop off a cliff. They'll be just fine.

I want to see the number of gamers that tear the chips from the dead hands of hyperscalers to make up for the implosion of that market. If I had to guess, half of humanity does not have interest in dedicated gaming chips. Memory, that's another story.

The gpus will be too expensive and a lot of them are not even close to useable for gaming. Any consumer gpus maybe but I suspect that nvidia will be able to pivot more quickly producing consumer gpus again.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#39
post #12

Outside a relatively small world of circular investment and FOMO feeding FOMO the general consensus seems to be “let it burn.” It appears very unlikely we will ever see an IPO of OpenAI. Anthropic appears less doomed, but still iffy at best. Tons of other large, but little discussed, AI startups are just dead-companies-walking at this point. The likes of AWS are showing good headline numbers but are taking out massiv…

More and more companies are signing up with OpenAI and Anthropic at near exponential growth to automate everyday tasks. If anything, these two should manage to IPO just fine. The rest of the downstream startups probably won't make it.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#40
Of course we know it. It’s been obvious since at least 2023. Everyone in AI oversells, except a few companies that built an actual business with revenue, like Midjourney. There is no AGI coming anytime soon no matter how much hype is being thrown around. We are not in the singularity. However, peak bullshit is NEAR.
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