After the AI boom: what might we be left with? • Hacker News Board

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#171

Post by ACCount37 » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #133

The AI "bubble" won't burst just like the "internet bubble" didn't burst. the dotcom bubble was a result of investors jumping on the hype train all at once and then getting off of it all at once. Yes, investors will eventually find another hype train to jump on, but unlike 2000, we have tons of more retail investors and AI is also not a brand new tech sector, it's built upon the existing well established and "too big…

People don't have the grasp of just how insane that "800M MAU and still growing" figure is. CEOs would kill people with their own bare hands to get this kind of userbase.

OpenAI has ~4B of revenue already, and they aren't even monetizing aggressively. Facebook has an infinite money glitch, and can afford to put billions in the ground in pursuit of moonshots and Zuck's own vanity projects. Google is Google, and xAI is Elon Musk. The most vulnerable frontier lab is probably Anthropic, and Anthropic is still backed by Amazon and, counterintuitively, also Google.

At the same time: there is a glut of questionable AI startups, extreme failure rate is likely - but they aren't the bulk of the market, not by a long shot. The bulk of the "AI money" is concentrated at either the frontier labs themselves, or companies providing equipment and services to them.

The only way I see for the "bubble to pop" is for multiple frontier labs to get fucked at the same time, and I just don't see that happening as it is.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#172

Post by card_zero » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

fruitworks wrote: post #73

bigyabai wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are on the cusp of intelligent machines. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We have machines that talk , which is corollary to nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if reason is partially a product of manipulating language.

It's nice that you say partially, that's bit different from every other HN comment that wondered this. Yeah, probably partially, as in, you have reason, you add in language, you get more reason.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#173

Post by bubblelicious » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Great take! Certainly resonates with me a lot

- this is war path funding

- this is geopolitics; and it’s arguably a rational and responsible play

- we should expect to see more nationalization

- whatever is at the other end of this seems like it will be extreme

And, the only way out is through

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#174

Post by dcminter » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #133

The AI "bubble" won't burst just like the "internet bubble" didn't burst. the dotcom bubble was a result of investors jumping on the hype train all at once and then getting off of it all at once. Yes, investors will eventually find another hype train to jump on, but unlike 2000, we have tons of more retail investors and AI is also not a brand new tech sector, it's built upon the existing well established and "too big…

The dot com crash was a thing though. The bubble burst. It's just that there was real value there so some of the companies survived and prospered.

Figuring out which was which was absolutely not possible at the time. Not many people foresaw Sun Microsystems as being a victim and nor was it obvious that Amazon would be a victor.

I wouldn't bet my life savings on OpenAI.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#175

Post by bluesnowmonkey » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

zirror wrote: post #155

ogogmad wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that modern LLMs are a just like crypto/Web3, except in all the ways they're not, so they must be useless. --- Less flippantly, they are excellent for self-studying university-level topics. It's like being able to ask questions to a personal tutor/professor.

But you need to verify everything unless it’s self evident. The number of times CoPilot (Sonnett 4) still hallucinates Browser APIs is astonishing. Imaging trying to learn something that can’t be checked easily, like Egyptian archeology or something.

You have to verify everything from human developers too. They hallucinate APIs when they try to write code from memory. So we have:

  - documentation
  - design reviews
  - type systems
  - code review
  - unit tests
  - continuous integration
  - integration testing
  - Q&A process
  - etc.

It turns out when include all these processes, teams of error-prone human developers can produce complex working software. Mostly -- sometimes there are bugs. Kind of a lot actually. But we get things done.

Is it not the same with AI? With the right processes you can get consistent results from inconsistent tools.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#176

Post by ACCount37 » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:50 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #123

flyinglizard wrote: post #10

I admit to only being in this industry for three decades now, and only designing and implementing the thermal/power control algo of an AI chip family for three years in that time, but it's the first time I hear of chips "wearing under high intensity use".

Chips absolutely do wear out. Dopants electromigrate and higher temperatures make it faster. Discrete components like capacitors also tend to fail over time. Is it going to be that significant though? No idea.

Depends on the design, and how hard you push it.

Just ask Intel what happened to 14th gen.

It's not normally an issue, but the edge cases can be very sharp. Otherwise, the bigger concern is the hardware becoming obsolete because of new generations being significantly more power efficient. Over a few years, the power+cooling+location bill of a high end CPU running at 90% utilization can cost more than the CPU itself.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#177

Post by laluser » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

bitmasher9 wrote: post #56

> GPUs that have a 1-3 year lifespan In 10 years GPUs will have a lifespan for 5-7 years. The rate of improvement on this front has been slowing down faster then CPU.

The reason for not keeping them too much longer than a few years is that at the end of that timespan you can purchase GPUs with > 2x performance, but for the same amount of power. At some point, even though the fleet has been depreciated, they become too expensive to operate vs. what is on the market.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#178

Post by pixl97 » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

Planktonne wrote: post #61

falcor84 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the quote "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism"? Well, AI has allowed me to start imagining the end of capitalism. I'm not claiming we're necessarily very close, but I can clearly see the way from here to a post-scarcity society.

How do you square that with all current AI development being intensely capitalistic?

All kinds of things commit suicide, intentional and unintentional.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#179

Post by Belphemur » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Quite an interesting read Basically saying we're in war time economy with a race to super intelligence. Whichever super power does it first has won the game.

Seeing the last tariffs and what China done about the rare earth minerals (and also the deal the US made with Ukraine for said minerals), the article might have a point that the super power will cripple each other to be the first with the super intelligence. And you also need money for it so tariffs.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#180

Post by pixl97 » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

dgacmu wrote: post #42

mikert89 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dude again, we have computers that can talk and make decisions. We have birthed something here. We have something, this is big.

I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982. It sounded pretty robotic and the decisions were 1982-level AI: Lots of if statements. I'm not really trying to be snarky; I'm trying to point out to you that you're being really vague. And that when you actually get really, really concrete about what we have it ... starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think". Computers…

>I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982.

And it became and industry that as completely and totally changed the world. The world was just so analog back then.

>starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think"

Computer thinking will never become magical. As soon as we figure something out it becomes "oh that is just X". It is human thinking that will become less magical over time.