Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 370 posts

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#161

Post by austin-cheney »

goldenshale wrote: post #82
austin-cheney wrote: post #60

That fabled line one must cross to achieve profit is ridiculously out of alignment with the current valuations on AI. Its why SPCX is falling like a meteor, currently at $111 per share. The people who are going to end up making the most money on this are creditors and future businesses. When the AI bubble does pop there will be a massive glut of data centers and hardware available. Both Apple and Microsoft are realig…

I've never heard a compelling thesis for why this is a bubble that will pop. From my perspective AI adoption is just getting started, and every organization I see that starts on the journey only ramps up tokens dramatically. Even just sticking with current model capabilities we have years of business automation, personal automation, and so much more to saturate data centers. As the models improve that only makes more…

I think people wish AI would succeed, especially in software, but this appears to be the only argument made. Numerically, AI still costs far more than it returns in value. Its a subscription service. Even if everybody is told they must adopt early and heavily eventually AI has to qualify its expenses to its customers or they aren't going to keep using it.

Think Netflix. If you believe the money spent on Netflix over the course of a year is less than the entertainment you receive back you will likely continue to pay for it. If you believe the money spent on all entertainment subscriptions exceeds the value returned you will likely start cancelling some, or all, of the subscriptions. AI is not immune from economics or human behavior. When customer company budgets get tight the money spent on AI subscriptions might be reallocated or reduced to prevent reductions in head count.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#162

Post by dan_gee »

HAL3000 wrote: post #154
cmiles8 wrote: post #78

Apple looks better and better as every day passes. Other players going deeply into debt to build out massive infrastructure, VCs pumping up the model ecosystem that is now a total commodity. Apple’s just been sitting there with solid cashflow waiting for all this to implode and then have on-device models with their own chips. Apple will own the end device while the rest of the world is fighting over a pure commodity.…

Others are betting on AGI/almost AGI like system. It's a gamble because no one actually knows whether or when it will be possible to create it. But if their bets pay off, they could outcompete Apple. Basically, other companies are going all in on the next card, while Apple is holding back and waiting to see which cards are dealt.

IMO AGI is a bold-faced lie, backed by the age-old American fantasy of free labor. The whole concept seems quite ugly to me.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#163

Post by tptacek »

dragontamer wrote: post #39
hparadiz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I thought Ed Zitrons argument was just corroborated by Nikkei last Friday with the new report that 1.6 Trillion in SPVs accounts for off-books debt, on top of the $1.4 Trillion of on-books debt that's in these AI companies? The main argument of Ed Zitron is just that. Huge huge amounts of debt that's due "soonish". Every SPV is different but we are fast approaching the point where this all starts to become real. Now…

If that's all Zitron wrote, I don't think he'd be as polarizing (or as dunked on). But he goes way, way past that.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#164

Post by rdedev »

awakeasleep wrote: post #12
bananamogul wrote: post #2

I don't know if Ed Zitron is right about allhis analysis, but it's nice to have an alternative, well-argued narrative to the gushing torrent of AI company propaganda.

Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did. Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.

If you want to dismiss him for being hyperbolic or under estimating the usefulness of AI go for it.

If you are making the case that he is full of shit, please provide some actual evidence of his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#165

Post by fg137 »

I don't agree with many of Ed Zitron's opinions, but it is so enjoyable to listen to Better Offline and hear him ranting about AI. At least the logic is very coherent within itself, and it's not pretentious. It is a breath of fresh air compared to slop I see on LinkedIn and sometimes here.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#166

Post by satvikpendem »

dan_gee wrote: post #130
Silamoth wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t “need” any LLMs to do software development. Plenty of us were productively writing code for years before these models were released, and many of us continue to do so. The “AI” companies want to sell you hype. But you don’t “need” them - not if you’re a legit, professional programmer.

Thank you for your comment. The narrative that LLMs are essential to the future of the trade often feels like an assault on my professional expertise. Whatever your experience is, mine is that LLMs don't work well for software development. I wish people who use AI would be more willing take that perspective seriously.

You should read this thread and the linked article for a discussion about your last sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052023

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#167

Post by sajithdilshan »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #35
sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

This is quite a short sighted analysis. I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. The future of AI would be on-device models which are as powerful as current frontier models and also I can imagine companies have their own deployments of inference of…

Seriously, you should try Fable. It picks up on subtleties that Opus misses.

I have heard good things about it, but I truly don’t have a use case for it to justify the inference cost. It’s double the price of Opus

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#168

Post by dubcanada »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #106
cmiles8 wrote: post #78

Apple looks better and better as every day passes. Other players going deeply into debt to build out massive infrastructure, VCs pumping up the model ecosystem that is now a total commodity. Apple’s just been sitting there with solid cashflow waiting for all this to implode and then have on-device models with their own chips. Apple will own the end device while the rest of the world is fighting over a pure commodity.…

Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity? Before all the price hikes their products were already priced at the top of the market so I would assume that memory getting more expensive will impact their sales or margin quite a bit as they can’t subsidize hardware like AI companies do (they can of course eat into their own margins a bit w…

Let's be real here, Apple does not have to compete with AI for fab capacity, they can outbid anyone if they want. They have more money and longer contracts then anyone else. Apple customers will just end up paying for said DRAM price inflation.

The ones who will actually suffer is Apple 2.0 (presumably a different competing company), start ups, research, companies that are not worth trillions.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#169

Post by lern_too_spel »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #51

That article is a bit incoherent. I think it is pretty clear at this point that Apple has gone all-in on being the ideal edge silicon for AI. This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out. They are in one of the only parts of the obvious future AI market where there isn't really a fight for greenfield turf with other…

If they've gone all in on that, it looks even worse for Apple. Qualcomm's Hexagon has been a better NPU since the beginning. Now even Mediatek is better at it than Apple. Blogs like macrumors and daringfireball are notorious for not having any clue about what is going on in the broader industry.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#170

Post by JKCalhoun »

59percentmore wrote: post #27

His read on the Apple Vision Pro (both the circumstances of its creation and its path forward) are incorrect in quite the discouraging manner for me. AVP wasn't released early (late, if anything), and it wasn't a dud because of Tim Cook's disinterest. I also think it's irresponsible to not broach the obvious implication of "PC components becoming prohibitively expensive" + "untold amounts of compute sitting in comput…

Agree. Apple Vision Pro was a dud because the whole VR category is a dud.

People are starting to kinda hate tech. People don't seem to be looking for yet another "smart manacle". Time to move on.

Post reply on HN