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A bubble that knows it's a bubble

craigmccaskill.com

21–30 of 134 posts

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#21

FYI, Altman also said OpenAI is planning to invest “trillions” into AI in the “near future”. He said this at the same time as saying AI is bubbly. This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.

He’s saying it’s bubbly because he can’t get good prices to buy out startups. He’s a buyer, first and foremost. No one wants to have to pay $20bn for some of these companies. They don’t believe it’s a bubble on any level, and I do think anyone in involved sees it as an infinite investment until the very end of the world (not kidding). It’s the end-game for software tech, especially if you are willing to be humbled by what stuff like Genie3 will become.

There is absolutely nothing else left to invest in when it comes to software development, this is it.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#22

FYI, Altman also said OpenAI is planning to invest “trillions” into AI in the “near future”. He said this at the same time as saying AI is bubbly. This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.

Self-contradictory communication seems to become his style.

"AI is an existential risk for humanity, that's why we have to dump all resources we have into building it".

"It's critically important that AI as an industry is regulated, but also we'll pull out of the EU if they try to regulate us"

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#23
post #21

FYI, Altman also said OpenAI is planning to invest “trillions” into AI in the “near future”. He said this at the same time as saying AI is bubbly. This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.

He’s saying it’s bubbly because he can’t get good prices to buy out startups. He’s a buyer, first and foremost. No one wants to have to pay $20bn for some of these companies. They don’t believe it’s a bubble on any level, and I do think anyone in involved sees it as an infinite investment until the very end of the world (not kidding). It’s the end-game for software tech, especially if you are willing to be humbled by…

Yep. Agreed. He said this to knock down price on AI startups for acquisition and to stop the ballooning talent war costing hundreds of millions.

It’s so painfully obvious but so many AI doomers use it as evidence.

He doesn’t want a talent war with Meta and Apple. And Meta has responded by signaling a truce in the talent war by saying they’re freezing AI hiring.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#24
post #6
post #4

I had the same thoughts as much as 2 years ago on how this will play out. Unlike with railroads and fiber optic cable however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years. Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US. Long…

I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans. If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, i…

Completely off-topic: I find it odd that we easily use this argument for humanoid robots (and also self-driving cars), but handicapped people are still bound to wheelchairs and have to constantly fight to change the environment and make it wheelchair-accessible.

If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#26
post #24
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans. If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, i…

Completely off-topic: I find it odd that we easily use this argument for humanoid robots (and also self-driving cars), but handicapped people are still bound to wheelchairs and have to constantly fight to change the environment and make it wheelchair-accessible. If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.

[deleted]

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#27
post #17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Influencers, streamers, crypto … Housing is back … Dotcom came back… Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it. So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years. AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able t…

> AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able to do what it’s doing today. We could only dream of it. Sure, but do the math. It doesn’t work out yet. This stuff burns money and energy. Either revenue has to go up A LOT or costs do have to come down A LOT (or quality has to suffer by using smaller models).

If we assume that every American will pay 20 USD per month for AI that's already 100bn per year.

Electricity will become very cheap during the day at least with solar continuing its declining trajectory.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#28
> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. The data centers kept humming after Webvan went dark. All that ‘wasted’ investment had already transformed into something physical. The pipes, servers, and networks that would become the foundation for Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and the digital transformation that actually did change everything. The bubble’s victims unknowingly funded the future. They just paid a decade too early.

The flow of money to spur innovation is exactly like "Cambrian Explosion". We should do this more often, with biotech and future fields to come.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#29
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR is good example of money being burned and middling adoption to a not that big population. For average person it has ended up something cool, but in the end not common and forgettable. And I am not sure if it even was a bubble, but selected players just investing in it.

Exactly. Right now it’s easy to look at it as a relatively niche thing. But at the time it was going to be the next big thing transforming everything. Same as 3D printing. Certainly cool and useful in some niche contexts, but it has not disrupted manufacturing.

I would argue it disrupted engineering. So many videos on YouTube can be found of people cutting out expensive molds (for example) and getting a product to market faster and cheaper. And this is happening in companies as well (Prusa released an enterprise grade printer not long ago).

At the same time, Printables and MakerWorld are flooded with…toys. They gamified their platforms and a ton of “thingy” models, ex. generic planter pots (some of them just renders, never even printed!) is the result.

This certainly hides the benefit but I very much think it’s there.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#30
post #5

> The speculation democratized investing in a way never seen before. Clerks, shopkeepers, and domestic servants, people who had never owned stocks before, mortgaged their homes and borrowed money to buy railway shares. I like the term "democratize investing" here. "We're granting the masses the privilege of dumping their lifesavings into this overhyped project, so we can make a clean exit".

Several paragraphs later, the article argues this time is different:

> Yes, retail can buy Nvidia, but they can’t access pre-IPO rounds where the real speculation happens. This concentration among professional investors won’t prevent a bubble, but it might prevent the kind of widespread financial devastation that followed previous crashes.

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