Suggested background reading for what economists mean when they talk about an asset bubble. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
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Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#12Better to talk about the Gartner Hype cycle and it's stages compare it to technologies that clearly followed that cycle such as; - Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training - Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones - 3…
That's a nice story but without any advancements proper leverage of currently existing AI models can indeed remove many, many jobs from the labor pool, probably double digit percentage-wise.
The idea that these tools won't at all improve from where they are now isn't a widely held position.
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#13Part of why AI is concerning is that literally nobody can actually predict what the outcome of these models is going to be even a couple of years out, the decision tree just instantly blows out and becomes impossible to track.
Anybody telling you otherwise is lying to you.
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#14I really dislike the title and the article. You are basically stating that AI is not a bubble, but everything around AI is a bubble, which people obviously mean when they say AI is a bubble. Same was the case with dot com crash, where people didn't LITERALLY mean .com domains would crash, but everything around the domains (& Internet) would crash.
Does not help that the author is overinvested into the AI space.
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#15So we are in the "it will be useful later" phase. Here is a little stock chart from the dotcom bubble until today:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/juniper-networks/stock-price-...
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#16I appreciate the author trying to address this. The only issue is the author didn't define what 'pops' in the bubble. The 'what' that pops, probably, IMHO, is the investment and resources ecosystem dumped, poured, thrown, redirected, etc. to AI. Just like the .com boom, the costs and money thrown at AI are outsized and will 'pop" as it matures. A 'pop" and leveling down to something perhaps not so outrageous is comin…
Hi, I tried to address that in the video version.
I think what pops is the false belief.
.com -> going online will save you AI -> adding a chatbot will save you
To me, those are what qualify as bubbles. And the other stuff is just overheating, disruption, and other effects.
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#17>Do people actually believe that if you just "add AI" to what they have, they'll instantly become millionaires?
Looking at recent YC batches, YC seems to believe so.
He says bubbles are false beliefs about reality that everybody figures out is false. The claim that "[AI] will displace tens or hundreds of millions of knowledge workers in the next 3-10 years" is that false belief inflating the bubble. Big tech and investors are dumping money into AI thinking at least a sizeable portion of the white collar workforce is going to be replaced with $2000-$4000/month subscriptions to AI agents (I am so sick of the term "agent") acting almost autonomously. We're hitting the wall with what's feasible with LLM scaling laws even if you're dumping countries GDP worth of money into making bigger and better models. Is spending $500 billion to $1 trillion dollars to get something that performs marginally better than the best LLM today worth it?
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#18Better to talk about the Gartner Hype cycle and it's stages compare it to technologies that clearly followed that cycle such as; - Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training - Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones - 3…
That's a nice story but without any advancements proper leverage of currently existing AI models can indeed remove many, many jobs from the labor pool, probably double digit percentage-wise. The idea that these tools won't at all improve from where they are now isn't a widely held position.
Pareto principal. We've seen the 80% but that last 20% is going to be really tough (and expensive). GPT5 illustrates this - it wasn't really better than GPT4o and in some ways worse.
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a nice story but without any advancements proper leverage of currently existing AI models can indeed remove many, many jobs from the labor pool, probably double digit percentage-wise. The idea that these tools won't at all improve from where they are now isn't a widely held position.
Pareto principal. We've seen the 80% but that last 20% is going to be really tough (and expensive). GPT5 illustrates this - it wasn't really better than GPT4o and in some ways worse.
Regardless you have no way of knowing where you are on the curve at any given point.
That all being said I strongly disagree that GPT-5 isn't categorically better, I just think it's less obvious because we're starting to hit human cognitive ability to even assess that limits.
Re: The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI
#20I appreciate the author trying to address this. The only issue is the author didn't define what 'pops' in the bubble. The 'what' that pops, probably, IMHO, is the investment and resources ecosystem dumped, poured, thrown, redirected, etc. to AI. Just like the .com boom, the costs and money thrown at AI are outsized and will 'pop" as it matures. A 'pop" and leveling down to something perhaps not so outrageous is comin…
Hi, I tried to address that in the video version. I think what pops is the false belief. .com -> going online will save you AI -> adding a chatbot will save you To me, those are what qualify as bubbles. And the other stuff is just overheating, disruption, and other effects.
A financial bubble has a clear definition. You're just changing the meaning to be a different strawman so you can refute that. Are there lots of companies that are overvalued because of their AI offerings, and will those companies fail when they don't provide acceptable returns? If yes, bubble.