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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

#61
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Robotics in the household has been the realm of science fiction for decades and it still hasn't happened. Wasnt AI science fiction (research) for decades but just took couple of years after Chatgpt to become mainstream. Why do you that wont happen to robotics?

We don't have sci-fi AI, and in any case "this thing is now possible, therefore [much more difficult thing] will be possible soon" is not a rational thought.

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

#62

> I caution anyone looking at API prices: they dropped the price, but is it actually less expensive? > Yeah, they dropped the price, but count the number of tokens you're tossing into it and see if it's actually cheaper. It's good for marketing, but the rub is how much you're actually using. The level of discourse is so horrible now, I don't have words. Are these the ones making predictions on AI bubble?

[flagged]

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

#63
post #16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do they even have any direct exposure to the whole AI bubble? If not, I'd say they don't even count in the "everyone"-

Their exposure could be net positive. If other companies fail they will still be around to pick up their customers.

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

#64

> I caution anyone looking at API prices: they dropped the price, but is it actually less expensive? > Yeah, they dropped the price, but count the number of tokens you're tossing into it and see if it's actually cheaper. It's good for marketing, but the rub is how much you're actually using. The level of discourse is so horrible now, I don't have words. Are these the ones making predictions on AI bubble?

This is poorly stated in the podcast, but the underlying point is correct: while cost-per-token is going down, overall token use is way up. This is causing the cost of using LLMs in corporations to skyrocket.

Do you first agree that not only is the cost-per-token going down, cost per task is going down which obviously encourages people to use it more?

If a car company releases a new car with higher mileage, would you suggest that cars are getting costlier?

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

#65
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> infrastructure that looks increasingly unneeded This is the crux that needs to be substantiated. Without substantiation none of your other arguments hold up.

Are you saying people haven’t been throwing unneeded GPU capacity on the market? That is happening. Frankly it’s the opposite scenario (that’s there’s all this demand) which is struggling for any hard evidence.

Which players, specifically, are you talking about? Everything you said is opinion passed off as fact.

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

#66
There's a bubble around data centers, mainly. That's fueled by projected demand of AI and assumptions companies make about how the pie for that revenue is going to be divided up.

What's very real is the rapidly growing amount of revenue for both OpenAI and Anthropic. That's already tens of billions per year and growing quite rapidly. Investments against that kind of revenue aren't completely horrible. To a point. But at the multi trillion dollar valuation level, of course there are going to be issues with living up to those expectations.

In my view some of the base assumptions are looking not so solid currently. It's not a given that OpenAI and Anthropic will end up with most of the revenue. The Chinese trust Silicon Valley just about as much as vice versa. Which is why they are doing their own models, chips, and data centers. This is driving a rapid commoditization for things like frontier models, open model weights, and chips. This in turn gives countries outside the US a lot of options to stay independent. Which burst the bubble that all that global revenue was going to flow towards Silicon Valley. Some of that still might. But that will have to happen based on cost and merit.

There are also geopolitical circumstances that cause most data center plans to be bottle necked on permitting, chip shortages, grid connectivity, availability of gas turbines, gas, solar panels, inverters, batteries, water, and other resources. As it turns out, you can't just willy nilly plan for hundreds of GW of data centers and expect those to pop into existence overnight along with all the needed infrastructure. Most of the announced/planned capacity for this will likely not be realized. Certainly not this decade. 5-10% by 2035 would be a lot given all the constraints and scarcity. No amount of reality distortion can change the physical constraints on this topic.

The good news is that most of the money needed for this hasn't been spent yet. And what has been spent won't be going to waste. Up and running data centers are a hot commodity right now. They won't be running idle if a bubble bursts. But probably investors dreaming of multi trillion dollar IPOs might be a bit more cautious now that SpaceX stock is trading well below its IPO value.

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

#67

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.

Yep, that is what the bet is. The build out will continue, even if it looks different. The Internet was a 'bubble' at one point, and after it crashed in 2000, it didn't go away, it continued to build out. We're still using the Internet after the Internet bubble popped.

On a $100B AI datacenter, some 60-70% of the center needs to be replaced every 2-6 years. These companies claim the hardware lasts 6 years while simultaneously claiming they are relying on new hardware to lower inference costs (implying much more frequent updates).

Over 40 years, that's 7-20 hardware changes, that turns into between $420B and $1.4T of ongoing investment (not accounting for inflation). The $30B that is called "infrastructure" only accounts for 2-7% of the overall bill.

This is NOTHING like fiber buildouts because the fiber lasts the whole 40 years with ZERO replacements and very close to 100% of the cost is infrastructure rather than a tiny percentage.

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

#68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Robotics in the household has been the realm of science fiction for decades and it still hasn't happened. Wasnt AI science fiction (research) for decades but just took couple of years after Chatgpt to become mainstream. Why do you that wont happen to robotics?

We don't have sci-fi AI, and in any case "this thing is now possible, therefore [much more difficult thing] will be possible soon" is not a rational thought.

> We don't have sci-fi AI

Current frontier models are absolutely sci-fi AI by any measure that existed up until the late 2010s. If you showed a current frontier agentic AI, with bidirectional speech, tool use etc. to a person from 2010, they'd say it can't be real, there must be a person inside that mechanical turk.

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

#69
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.

well there are just 2 sources for website profits:

1. money from advertisements (from views, visits): you need to be on google search results at the bear minimum.

2. money from non-advertisements, mostly-offline (eg. you sell preminum stuff/service): you CAN hand out pamphlets to your service website IF your ROI per visit is so good to be true...

but even in the 2nd case, it really helps to be on the google's search result

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

#70
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying people haven’t been throwing unneeded GPU capacity on the market? That is happening. Frankly it’s the opposite scenario (that’s there’s all this demand) which is struggling for any hard evidence.

Which players, specifically, are you talking about? Everything you said is opinion passed off as fact.

SpaceX has put a ton of excess capacity on the market.

Meta tanked chip stocks by saying it was considering the same.

Worries about compute overcapacity, via folks saying they want to offload capacity, is literally the thing that nuked the “situational awareness” fund last week.

It’s long term demand that matters, not just “price.” High prices without true demand is the literal definition of a bubble.

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