Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? • Hacker News Board

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#141

Post by beepbooptheory » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 1:33 AM UTC

carsoon wrote: post #122

ghm2180 wrote: post #109

I have a noob question. How can developed economies where populations levels have plateaued continue to be expected to post positive GDPs (and therefore add net new goods and services) yoy? Homes as assets should pass on, higher cost services of today would be replaced by lower cost which only temporarily would increase units sold(but should eventually plateau because #units/person is not going to change). No compone…

People don't stop wanting things. Total GDP can keep rising so long as technologist can improve efficiency through robotics, inventions and scientific breakthroughs. GDP just describes peoples amount of activity. People will always build bigger buildings or monuments (see egypt pyramids, dubai skyscrapers, cambodia angkor wat). These are actaully not inelastic as megaprojects will quickly hit real limits regardless o…

You would just think there has got to be end to it all... technology needing to increase so much, indefinitely, the imagination falters tbh. Its like we have to become space gods by year 2500 or we are going to go bankrupt as species anyway.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#142

Post by stevage » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 1:34 AM UTC

furyofantares wrote: post #116

stevage wrote: post #42

Fundamentally they seem different. The web looked like it had the potential to make lots of money but no one knew exactly how. AI literally does people's jobs for them. There's not much imagination required.

For the most part, current AI tools do tasks for people, not their jobs. And for the most part it does rather poor quality, low-depth work (but with superhuman speed and superhuman breadth).

If the task is normally "hire a person to do X" it comes out the same.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#143

Post by roxolotl » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 1:37 AM UTC

hnburnsy wrote: post #83

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…

Aside from a belief that the AI adoption will happen very quickly, which maybe that’s your main point, you’re not really disagreeing with the article:

> All this means two things to us: 1)The AI revolution will indeed be one of the biggest technology shifts in history. It will spark a generation of innovations that we can’t yet even imagine. 2) It’s going to take way longer to see those changes than we think it’s going to take right now.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#144

Post by refactor_master » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 1:43 AM UTC

mancerayder wrote: post #52

forgetfulness wrote: post #6

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…

You forgot - cheating on job interviews, writing resumes to be repetitive, and adding an annoying flowery tone to non-native English speakers who think AI wrote something for them that isn't AI-obvious.

I wonder how many market inefficiencies this creates. People with worse education, people who cheated their way to a job opening compared to a better candidate, etc. Basically counteracting the productivity gains AI was supposed to bring.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#145

Post by refactor_master » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 1:52 AM UTC

chickensong wrote: post #118

munk-a wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really weird thing is that Big Business actually is buying supercomputer clusters to do just that. I can't really talk to the government side but a lot of businesses' early forays into AI was just slapping a chatbot on their product and hoping it'd attract a lot more business. I also think you'd be surprised how integrated really dumb chatbots are into business communication these days. I think most smart people…

> just slapping a chatbot on their product That's happening of course, but that's not really the whole picture. Any org that already invests in R&D is likely considering or already implementing modern AI tech into their existing infrastructure. A big oil or pharmaceutical or materials company likely doesn't care much about chat bots, or any customer-facing tech for that matter.

Actually, big orgs are doing exactly that; slapping a chatbot onto their support ticket backlog. Being really, actually “data driven” is hard, and must happen from the bottom up. So instead there’s chatbots in their frontend and support backend, but the backend doing the actual lifting probably hasn’t changed one bit.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#146

Post by stack_framer » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 2:00 AM UTC

exegete wrote: post #64

mancerayder wrote: post #29

I grew up in the 90's and remember being a computer nerd BEFORE the .com bubble, and starting my career precisely after it burst. Let me tell you one difference I personally am experiencing that differentiates the two. Note, this is a pro-'we're in a bubble' stance: In the late 90's and early 2000's, businesses were SALIVATING to get online, individuals were finding new ways to benefit and profit from it, and massive…

Work keeps forcing it on us. I’m hoping the bubble bursts just so I don’t have to hear about it at work anymore and can actually get some work done.

Same. We even have AI hackathons where your project must use AI in some way. I have a serious case of AI fatigue.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#147

Post by badlogic » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 2:12 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #108

chickensong wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big business and government aren't buying supercomputer clusters and licensing models to run chats.

The really weird thing is that Big Business actually is buying supercomputer clusters to do just that. I can't really talk to the government side but a lot of businesses' early forays into AI was just slapping a chatbot on their product and hoping it'd attract a lot more business. I also think you'd be surprised how integrated really dumb chatbots are into business communication these days. I think most smart people…

I can talk for the gov. site in my European home country: they too are buying GPUs for chat ...

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#148

Post by ambicapter » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 2:15 AM UTC

ghm2180 wrote: post #109

I have a noob question. How can developed economies where populations levels have plateaued continue to be expected to post positive GDPs (and therefore add net new goods and services) yoy? Homes as assets should pass on, higher cost services of today would be replaced by lower cost which only temporarily would increase units sold(but should eventually plateau because #units/person is not going to change). No compone…

Maybe because the advertising and marketing machine will continue to churn and induldge and shame people into consuming ever more stuff.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#149

Post by themafia » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

hnburnsy wrote: post #83

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 me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much quicker.

Based on what? We're only seeing linear improvements for increasing spending. There's no new algorithm ideas on the horizon, just more and more hardware, in the hopes that if we throw enough RAM and CPU at the problem, it will suddenly become "AGI."

No one has their eye on power budgets or sustainability or durability of the system. The human brain has such a high degree of energy efficiency that I don't think people understand the realities of competing with it digitally.

The main problem "AI" seems to solve is that humans get bored with certain tasks. The language models obviously don't, but they do hallucinate, and checking for hallucinations is an exceedingly boring task. It's a coffin corner of bad ideas.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#150

Post by BirAdam » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

sbuas wrote: post #125

resize2996 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for my internet and used it all day long.

The money paid was to access the internet not run it, that's a world of difference.

In the 1990s, there were plenty of closets running websites, BBSs and other internet available resources. As a percentage of total internet users, it was higher than those doing so today. So, money was paid to run portions of the internet at home by ISP subscribers.