131–140 of 215 posts
I think I'm asking for the impossible here... But is anyone trying to hedge risk in their personal finances? I'm not a real "investor" (index funds only) but I am feeling more willing to forgo gains to be more risk averse just based on my own neuroses. Maybe I cash out and buy T-bills? Gold? Bullets? What's the non-crazy person equivalent?
To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is a…
> The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. The same could be said for the internet. But, and I know this will be hard for younger readers to believe, I seem to recall the value proposition of the Internet being more immediately apparent at the…
Proprietary, walled garden services, with their own dial-up numbers, such as AOL and CompuServe, were seen as the future. Microsoft thought their similar service (MSN?) was the way forward and didn't integrate the Internet into Windows 95. That was after Netscape's browser was released and (relative to the time, I'm sure) very popular.
To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is a…
>still haven't figured out applications the real answer is that the applications for the military, surveillance, and population control are proven, and the pathways to scale those capacities are clear, so the money will pour in no matter what. the implication is that we had better come up with some more consumer/humanity friendly applications that create comparable value, or that is all we will get.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value can be incredibly high... just like the value of the internet was incredibly high.. and it can still be a finanfial bubble. I feel like the people arguing against the bubble perspective are saying look the internet was actually valuable and so too will this.. and that's totally a valid perspective. The bubble is not about whether there's value but about whether or not the market will come down. All of the a…
> The value of modern AI seems very hig Very useful, clearly. But valuable? In aggregate it seems clear that it is. But where does that value acrue? It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. It does not seem possible that any conceivable business can pay for all the announced plans for developing data centres, nor energy available to power them. If AI systems can be developed to…
Won't the value will be concentrated in the few with the scale to build competitive AIs?
In a sense, costs are spread thinly across the content creators whose work has been stolen. (But of course, it is indeed incredibly concentrated in building datacenters.)
To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is a…
Arguably, it's exactly this mindset creating the problem. It's not the value of the technology that matters. It's the value of the companies. If one company was the only one that had a particular valuable technology, then that would matter, but otherwise 90% of them likely end up worthless even if the sector itself doesn't. How that washes out on net we'll have to see. I'm not gonna pretend I know more than anyone el…
Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…
To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is a…
The value can be incredibly high... just like the value of the internet was incredibly high.. and it can still be a finanfial bubble. I feel like the people arguing against the bubble perspective are saying look the internet was actually valuable and so too will this.. and that's totally a valid perspective. The bubble is not about whether there's value but about whether or not the market will come down. All of the a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring tril…
Ok, ignoring any AGI or massive advances, let's just say an LLM can help the average office worker be 15% more productive... what do you think the economic value of that is?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. The same could be said for the internet. But, and I know this will be hard for younger readers to believe, I seem to recall the value proposition of the Internet being more immediately apparent at the…
From what I've read, people spent a long time looking for the 'killer application'. Google didn't know how to make money off its search engine. Social media didn't exist in any mass form. Internet access on phones, beyond email, didn't exist in any usable way. Proprietary, walled garden services, with their own dial-up numbers, such as AOL and CompuServe, were seen as the future. Microsoft thought their similar servi…
That’s part of the difference with AI now: the internet immediately generated significant value almost instantly for relatively modest investments, so there were a ton of small and mid-sized companies who saw almost immediate profits from moving catalog sales or support online, switching software distribution from mailing diskettes to downloads, etc. and some people were able to cut into established markets where the existing companies were slow to change.
AI is different in two key ways: the first is the extremely high cost, which prevents a lot of the bottom-up growth we saw on the web, but the second is that it’s not a reliable technology like the web was so you can’t safely use it in the most valuable contexts. In the 90s, some people screwed up form validation badly but most people didn’t. Right now, companies would love to replace things like customer service or sales with chatbots but nobody on the market can make a system which is both safe and useful because things like prompt injection require theoretical breakdowns, not just attention to detail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What happens tomorrow if eg ChatGPT 5.1 performance becomes doable for $500 of tech? $50? The bubble would burst and the US economy would face a recession?
No, it wouldn't as the whole reason people were giving Openai that 500 dollars is because they thought they could make more than 500 dollars from it. So now that value is just shifted into the companies that were going to purchase from openai. It would just hurt the investors who have exposure to openai/anthropic/google/microsoft. Much of the value of this AI boom is not from the direct model companies but its from c…
* It would stop datacenter- and other related infrastructure construction, making huge investments effectively worthless for companies like Oracle and Amazon, and of course hurt the construction sector.
* It would hurt the companies you mention, plus a many more including NVidia, likely in ways that would lead to large-scale layoffs.
* It would seriously hurt corporate and VC investors and likely make them much less interested in large investments for quite some time, thus affecting other sectors as well.
* It would seriously hurt index funds and pension funds.
A number of years down the line, if LLMs are indeed capable of significantly boosting productivity, I'm sure we'd see a recovery, but when large bubbles suddenly burst there's usually some pretty serious fallout.