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A bubble that knows it's a bubble

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Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#101

Post by lproven »

cryptos wrote: post #85

What do you think will be the survivors of the AI business, once the bubble bursts?

Now that is the most interesting question anyone here asked.

It looks likely it could take all the big software companies with it, and all the big cloud providers. It may well kill most GPU vendors, most datacentre and hosting companies. Industrial-scale LLMs are propping up the entire cloud business, and that itself was bloated and overgrown. SaaS was a mistake. Anything -aaS was a mistake.

I'd _like_ to see this kill off MS, Oracle etc.

Intel is teetering. NVidia is probably screwed. AMD may follow.

There's geopolitics here too. China wants Taiwan and has actively been divesting from Western hardware and software. So has Russia. Lots of Linux growth there: it's free, it works, they can just take it.

And there's rapid climate change too, which is starting to become visible.

Everyone who manufuctures in Taiwan may well be doomed. But ditto everyone in the tropics, in the newer tech centres: Malaysia, Thailand, etc.

Everyone who gets chips from Taiwan is probably screwed. Everyone who assembles in PacRim and SE Asia too.

That will take down most Western companies.

Apple might weather it: it sells hardware, and it has its own unique OS family. But others make its hardware for it -- in those areas.

Chinese tech may bloom.

Small scale individual FOSS will be OK.

Stuff reusing legacy tech, that can run on old kit.

Everyone's deprecating x86-32. That may bite them hard.

Everything dependent on virtual stuff and public cloud, everything dependent on K8s and remote datacentres, everything you can't run locally on kit you own that sits in premises you own.

That includes a lot of the games industry.

Non-commercial OSes will be OK.

Bad times for RHEL and the clones. Bad times for SUSE and maybe Canonical.

Maybe OK for Debian. Good for Arch & Alpine & Slackware.

Stuff that needs GPUs, bad. Stuff that works fine in standard def on CPU graphics, good.

But I am just indulging my own biases and skepticism here, I freely admit.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#102

Post by rurp »

jstummbillig wrote: post #36

There is hubris, but calling it a bubble simply does not check out, for one reason alone: If AI did absolutely nothing from here on out but give maybe a somewhat better version of current claude code (and it confuses me to no end that some people still refuse to see what is going on there, which admittedly are increasingly few of those who try, which makes sense because stuff gets better) that leads to, say, a ~2x de…

A 100% increase in software development velocity is a wild claim to assert at this stage. The industry as a whole is not seeing anything like that and the handful of people making claims to that end are executives with a vested interest in boosting the hype. LLMs probably increase prototype or ad-hoc script development by that amount, but that only accounts for a minuscule amount of actual work being done in the industry.

Also whatever LLM productivity gains are currently happening are being massively subsidized. Once companies switch out of lighting money on fire mode most of these products will get dramatically worse and more expensive. Maintaining a cutting edge LLM isn't a railroad that you build once and can run and manage for centuries at a fraction of the initial price, they require constant expensive investment.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#103

Post by electroly »

Fargren wrote: post #69
Freak_NL wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For disabled people who can use their arms and propel themselves, a wheelchair is low-maintenance, dependable, repairable, self-powered, and generic enough for there to be a healthy market and not too much vendor lock-in. Wheelchairs are not necessarily low-tech, but they are fully understandable. If the user of a wheelchair is unable to move themself for whatever reason, any able bodied person can step in and push.…

All of those are arguments for why robots should generally have wheels rather than legs, except for when legs are specifically needed.

Furthermore, mobile robots currently in home use--vacuum and mop robots--are all wheeled, of course. We've shown we can accommodate wheeled robots in the home if we feel like the payoff is worth it.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#104

Post by throw-qqqqq »

aredox wrote: post #60

What remains of Japan's bubble? The country has never really got out of the rout of its "lost decade" and is sliding away into irrelevance.

The Nikkei 225 index is at all-time-highs in August 2025. Highest pay hikes in 30 years, BoJ raised interest rates etc. (sure, both because of inflation, but still).

Things seem to be slowly changing in Japan.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#105

Post by zippyman55 »

My thoughts: I'm expecting the LLM-driven bubble to burst. Not AI in general, but it seems LLM has been soaking up all the investment dollars and LLM will eventually hit a wall in critical fields where an expert can poke holes at the results. The data centers go poof! Now, the contracted land rights, water rights, and electricity rights, highly discounted will be of value. Kind of like the defunct railroad rights in your community that can't easily be repurposed into a bike path as the city does not have the rights. So, I wonder if there will be companies formed to buy up the infrastructure rights (the contracted cheap power and water) and re-sell them to the city and counties that originally generated the contracts. Its too easy to see the naïve city and county officials succumbing to the hookers and other marketing techniques when these contracts were issued. Now they can be sold back at a profit.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#106

Post by nuc1e0n »

The thing is the infrastructure that is being built now is owned by a small number of already large companies. Is it really that likely that Microsoft, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Alphabet/Google, Oracle, Nvidia and all the companies Elon Musk is involved with are going to go bankrupt?

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#107

Post by tim333 »

benrutter wrote: post #52

> Here’s what’s never happened before: everyone knows the script. I'm don't think this is unique, most bubbles historically as far back as the South Sea bubble have had a lot of people aware of the irrationality, but investing in an attempt to profit from it. I'd even go so far as to say, this is exactly what makes bubbles so volatile as opposed to normal "market corrections". If the dotcom boom had been all people w…

I agree with that. This one may be unique in possibly living up to the hype.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#108

Post by tobias3 »

aurareturn wrote: post #79
Lionga wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5.6 billion loss in 2024 on $918 million in revenue. When you are selling a 5 dollars for 1 dollar doubling revenue is easy. It just creates more losses, same with OpenAI

What is their gross margins? Is the loss just because they have to keep competing at an ultra competitive race? On a software focused forum like HN, I’m surprised people still don’t understand the grow at all cost until you are the top 2 or 3 left model. There has been dozens of examples of tech companies losing money for years just to become highly profitable after. People are still not getting that big tech is inve…

That depends on the regulators being asleep on the wheel again and letting monopolies happen. At the minimum here in Europe they'd automatically fall under Digital Services Act. According to OpenAI they have 41.3 million average monthly active recipients in the European Union. Only a few million more and they fall under DSA.

That is if US sanctions don't kill the DSA.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#109

Post by scheme271 »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #11

I think this is directionally correct. But we tend to remember the technologies which became mainstream after the bubble burst and forget those that fizzled or found a much less world-changing niche. Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.

3d printing has gone somewhat mainstream unlike the others. Manufacturers use it and it's somewhat common to see stuff that's been 3d printed being sold or created as small run prototypes.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#110

Post by 1718627440 »

dijit wrote: post #78
pjc50 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The half-life of metallic iron is apparently 2.6 million years, so I'm not sure what you mean there.

Hahahah, fair point, maybe you could show me a 50 year old rail that is still worthy of being ridden. ;) Even a 20 year old rail is problematic from what I understand (from a UK perspective).

It's not the tracks itself that need to be maintained first. When they are the issue the easiest fix is to swap the rails.

What need to be done first is the gravel and then also the ties. Expensive are also trackout/switches with motors, and of course the signal boxes. What is now the big deal is adoption to newer technologies like ETCS.

What needs the fastest maintenance nowadays, though, is software :-).

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