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The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

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Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#111

Post by nicce »

troupo wrote: post #74
nicce wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about profitability alone, but whether benefits are net positive for society over the long term. Profitability is easy with current standards. Get the users. Make them dependent. Increase the price. Make AI mandatory. List goes on.

> Profitability is easy with current standards. Get the users. Make them dependent. Increase the price. Make AI mandatory. List goes on. "Easy". "Just" get more users and "just" increase prices to somehow cover hundreds of billions of invested dollars and hundreds of millions of running costs. It's that easy. I'm surprised none of the companies mentioned in the article thought of that.

> I'm surprised none of the companies mentioned in the article thought of that.

I was just stating the obvious. That is what they are doing.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#112

Post by tim333 »

>I have written hundreds of thousands of words with hundreds of citations, and still, to this day, there are people who claim I am somehow flawed in my analysis...

Says the PR guy who discovered AI a couple of years ago and now knows it all and that all the AI experts are wrong.

I mean it's a good rant but I don't think he gets the bigger picture.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#113

Post by davidclark »

jsnell wrote: post #110

The analysis is just bogus. He is basically comparing two years of inflated AI capex estimates to a low-ball estimate of one year of trailing revenue. Let's unpack that a bit. Capex is spending on capital goods, with the spending being depreciated over the expected lifetime of the good. You can't compare a year of capex to a year of revenue: a truck doesn't need to pay for itself in year 1, it needs to pay for itself…

> Let's unpack that a bit.

I’m not accusing you of anything, just giving the feedback that this line makes your post sound like it is AI slop. This is an extremely typical phrase when you prompt any current AI with some variation of “explain this post”. Honestly, the verbosity of the rest of your post also reinforces this signal. The typo here also indicates cutting and pasting things together “Given what he has to say about . But more importantly,”

If it is not AI slop, then hopefully you can use this feedback for future writing.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#114

Post by jsnell »

davidclark wrote: post #113
jsnell wrote: post #110

The analysis is just bogus. He is basically comparing two years of inflated AI capex estimates to a low-ball estimate of one year of trailing revenue. Let's unpack that a bit. Capex is spending on capital goods, with the spending being depreciated over the expected lifetime of the good. You can't compare a year of capex to a year of revenue: a truck doesn't need to pay for itself in year 1, it needs to pay for itself…

> Let's unpack that a bit. I’m not accusing you of anything, just giving the feedback that this line makes your post sound like it is AI slop. This is an extremely typical phrase when you prompt any current AI with some variation of “explain this post”. Honestly, the verbosity of the rest of your post also reinforces this signal. The typo here also indicates cutting and pasting things together “Given what he has to s…

All written by hand, and you can check the style against thousands of posts I've made on HN over almost two decades.

(I explained the issue briefly in the first paragraph, but the article is 15k words. Hard to convincingly rebut that without the details.)

But thanks for the superficial style feedback and ignoring the substance.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#115

Post by elktown »

tim333 wrote: post #106
elktown wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I expect higher standards than the kind of confident extrapolation you find in pseudo-science. And "vision of the future" is your euphemistic rewrite. If that's clearly stated I obviously have no problem with people's fanciful speculation. But these are claims in the format: "X will be replaced in a couple of years, how should we adapt as a society?" etc etc.

Although if there is some small possibility that X will be replaced in a couple of years shouldn't people be able to consider it?

Well, since it's hard to prove a negative, that then applies to basically everything. Look, people can "consider" whatever they want to. But I'll certainly complain about the normalization of making sloppy extraordinary claims on gut feeling. It's like some /r/wallstreetbets user trying to predict the future by the shapes & patterns of stock graphs. It's intellectually lazy and suggests lacking critical thinking.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#116

Post by elktown »

29ebJCyy wrote: post #53
elktown wrote: post #40

What's clear is that the hype has reach such a critical mass that people are comfortable enough to publicly and shamelessly extrapolate extraordinary claims based purely on gut feeling. Both here on HN and by complete laymen elsewhere. AI-optimist or not, that's just shocking to me.

I don’t doubt this but it might help to include some examples if you have any close at hand.

From my perspective it's basically in every other comments section of AI related articles. Here's a particularly spicy one from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44646797

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#117

Post by urbandw311er »

snapcaster wrote: post #99
nerevarthelame wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you measuring your productivity? There are studies [0][1] that indicate it's common for people to self-assess that their productivity using LLMs increased by 20-40%, when in fact it decreased based on objective, controlled measures. [0] https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubto... [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

who you going to believe? random studies or your own lying eyes?

You say “random studies” like you’re trying to discredit them in some way. But they’re not “random”, they’re controlled, documented, objective and published for you to go and read the results.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#118

Post by Apocryphon »

jsnell wrote: post #110

The analysis is just bogus. He is basically comparing two years of inflated AI capex estimates to a low-ball estimate of one year of trailing revenue. Let's unpack that a bit. Capex is spending on capital goods, with the spending being depreciated over the expected lifetime of the good. You can't compare a year of capex to a year of revenue: a truck doesn't need to pay for itself in year 1, it needs to pay for itself…

> he basically ends up comparing a year of revenue to two years of Capex

He appears to only be doing that for the seven companies cumulatively, and in each company's case is only comparing year with year.

> Both capex and revenue are growing rapidly, and revenue will lag behind.

Even if his capex estimates are inflated, unless they're off by magntitudes, isn't the ratio between the two figures still alarming? What was, say, Amazon's initial capex for AWS compared to the revenue? Or in any other cases where long-term investment bore fruit?

> What happens when Amazon buys a GPU?

What else are they using GPUs for? Luna cloud gaming? Crypto mining?

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#120

Post by 827a »

thoroughburro wrote: post #8

The bubble will pop, just like the web bubble popped; and that’s going to suck. AI technologies will remain and be genuinely transformative, just like the web remained and was transformative (for good and ill).

The nasdaq composite p/e at its peak during the dotcom bubble breached 200.

Today we're at 40, and Nvidia alone is at 49.

As much as everyone wants this to be a bubble: it isn't. ChatGPT was the fastest "thing" in history to reach 100M MAUs, and is believed to be a top 5 most visited website today, across the entire internet. Cursor was the fastest company in human history to reach $500M in revenue. Midjourney, the company no one talks about anymore, is profitable and makes over $200M in revenue.

Being brutal here: HackerNews is in the bubble. Yeah, there's some froth, there's some overvaluation, some of these companies will die. But I seriously do not understand how people can see these real, hard statistics, not fake money like VC dollars or the price of bitcoin but fucking deep and real shit and still say "nah its like crypto all over again".

48% of survey respondents to a recent survey said they've used ChatGPT for therapy [1]. FORTY EIGHT PERCENT. There is no technology humanity has ever invented that has seen genpop uptake this quickly, and its not dropping. This is not "oh, well, the internet will be popular soon, throw money at it people will eventually come". This is: "we physically cannot buy enough GPUs to satisfy demand, our services keep going down every week because so many people want to pay for this".

[1] https://sentio.org/ai-blog/ai-survey

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