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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

#91

I mean we are due our 6-8 year financial crash that we won't learn from. Once again it'll be coming from the USA's feral financial investments all to be bailed out by the tax player whilst the rest of the world picks up the pieces. Maybe its time we moved away from the petro-dollar if the USA can't be trusted to keep its finances in order.

Financial markets are already diversifying away from dollar as the sole reserve currency. Think swiss francs are doing pretty good.

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

#92
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through several network upgrades. You are saying the fiber in the ground lasts a long time, but all the equipment on either end gets replaced every ~5 years. I agree this build out seems pretty crazy, but people were saying the same thing with the internet. Arguing if the equipment has a replacement rate of 2-6 years or 30-40 years, I think isn't the part that makes this a bubble.

For fiber, the main costs were not the fiber itself, but acquiring the rights to lay the fiber and the labor to do so. The equipment at either end has a lifespan of somewhat less that 50 years, but that's a minor cost. Conversely, for the data centers we're talking about, the cost of the things that need replacing every five years is one of the primary costs.

I was responding to you mentioning fiber. But of course, the "internet" does run on servers, which also have a replacement rate. There were data centers before AI, and they had a lifespan well below 30 years.

I'm not arguing that the current build out isn't crazy, just that AI isn't going away. Just like everyone thought the internet was a fad, but then it continued to grow (remember web 2.0). AI will morph into something useful and will be sticking around, even if we can't envision what it will look like.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sci-fi AI has always been characterised by learning on the fly, which these models do not do. I guess we've got pretty close to what sci fi has often called "VI", autonomous machines that can carry out pre determined tasks to a level that looks concious, but are incapable of learning further.

They learn again when the labs train the next version. The previous version often has an indispensable role in orchestrating that process, as a critic and from usage transcripts of the previous model that they have access to. And between two training runs the model can assemble a lot of md files, memory files, and load them in on-demand. I think this is enough to make it scifi-level, but I agree there should be some way to customize it at a deeper level and adapt to each person's context. But things are still moving too fast for that to make sense. If they fine tuned a specific LoRA for Claude just for your projects and workflows, it would get outdated quite fast and you'd have to retrain it at quite a cost for the new version.

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

#94
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do. The faster it happens, the faster a recovery begins and we can devote resources back to doing more practical things. Get it over with as soon as possible, rip the bandaid off, insert your idiom of choice.

Have you converted all your dollars to other currencies and non-financial assets?

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

#95

There is something I have been pondering recently. If we compare the cost of AI subscriptions (let's say Claude's 100/month) to a median developer salary (let's say 100k/year to 200k/year), the difference is orders of magnitude. This fills like a gap that needs to close. I suspect llms are too cheap right now but will raise their prices to a point where only big companies will be able to afford subscriptions to use t…

> I suspect llms are too cheap right now but will raise their prices to a point where only big companies will be able to afford subscriptions to use them.

"A.I." == "Artificially Inexpensive"

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

#96

There is something I have been pondering recently. If we compare the cost of AI subscriptions (let's say Claude's 100/month) to a median developer salary (let's say 100k/year to 200k/year), the difference is orders of magnitude. This fills like a gap that needs to close. I suspect llms are too cheap right now but will raise their prices to a point where only big companies will be able to afford subscriptions to use t…

This is something I have been pondering recently. If I compare the cost of a plunger ($23.99 on Amazon) to a median plumber salary ($62,970 per year per BLS), the difference is orders of magnitude. This feels like a gap that needs to close. I suspect plungers are too cheap right now but will raise their prices to a point where only big companies will be able to afford subscriptions to use them. I think soon we will s…

Just because you can mad-lib something that makes sense at the surface doesn’t make it insightful.

How are plungers comparable to LLMs?

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

#97
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…

I mean, talk about circular investment and FOMO all you want, but if you use Fable every day you know what's coming. This is no bubble, we're just getting started.

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

#98
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.

TSLA's 400 PE ratio (along with Elon Musk's trillionaire status) was never sustainable. Where I disagree is with companies running market average PE ratios supposedly being doomed as well.

But also, don't count out OpenAI and Anthropic, no matter how shaky the numbers. The market has also demonstrated how to price SPCX so if they IPO, they will see their true FMV and I'm sure it's >0 and much much less than what they believe. For even in the worst case scenarios, they have valuable personnel, experience, and IP deploying AI at scale for what is to come, even if it's based on Chinese open weight models. RIP lightcone of all future value though.

As for the hyperscalers embedded in FAANNG, they've been using profitable divisions to cover the expense of growing but unprofitable divisions for a while now. In fact, that's business as usual. They're all going to land on their feet with PE ratios of ~20 or higher. Now take your favorite tech stock you prefer to scapegoat and figure out its approximate bottom relative to today. You'll be glad you did.

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, cost per task is probably not going down on average. The underlying issue is that LLMs are still bad at most tasks they could be used for, so as their contexts get larger and they're able to run longer without becoming incoherent, more tokens are spent on tasks to improve the quality of output. So cost per task is probably going up on average, but so is the quality of the output.

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

#100
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 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.

So you're saying we want to keep this bubble going forever?

If's it's a bubble, it's gonna pop, and better sooner than later.

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