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

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

#221

Post by ghaff »

mepian wrote: post #219
ghaff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree. Xserve didn't work out for Apple and they dropped it pretty quickly--think I still have an A/UX coffee cup. Wasn't really in their DNA even if there was an argument before Linux took off. For better or worse, they're basically a client company and barely a software (OK and basically a software services) one--although they spend a fair bit on (roughly) user experience.

A/UX predates Xserve by 14 years.

And how much did A/UX sell? I Have an A/UX coffee mug in my kitchen. It even has a phone number on it.

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

#222

Post by tim333 »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #133
awakeasleep wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you provide evidence of where he's been wrong?

An example of him in July 2024: https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/

>And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble I've been warning you about since March...

>How does GPT – a transformer-based model that generates answers probabilistically (as in what the next part of the generation is most likely to be the correct one) based entirely on training data – do anything more than generate paragraphs of occasionally-accurate text?

etc.

Basically the essence is he's skeptical of AI / LLMs being any good so thinks all the investment is down the drain. Meanwhile AI progresses such that Fable can probably beat most humans and IQ tests, maths and the like. And the 'bubble' didn't deflate yet.

My take is that as a PR guy, used to people hyping stuff and not that up on comp-sci he fundamentally doesn't get what's going on. He assumes it's all hype rather than the steady progress in computing reaching brain equivalent levels and beyond.

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

#224

Post by bensyverson »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #201
dan_gee wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind sharing, what types of jobs are you working on now? I haven't personally seen a speed boost from LLMs, but my experience with them suggests that they could be effective in some domains and inadequate in others. E.G., I have observed that LLM tools are inadequate for generating C++ code.

I’m writing Swift (native iOS apps), with PHP backends. I have found it does good PHP code, and Swift code that definitely needs adult supervision. Also, very good for things like code documentation, debugging, and writing copy for things.

[dead]

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

#225

Post by maxdo »

pinkyboy wrote: post #6
maxdo wrote: post #3

I'm so tired of this shallow analysis claiming vendors are losing tons of money on subscriptions. How do you even judge that? Users go on vacation, they slack off, they spend the day talking to each other. There are very few people who are really effective at burning tokens. how do you know the ratio? do you have insides? No :) The biggest target is enterprise, and the economics for an LLM vendor look like this: pric…

It's fascinating that you simultaneously argue that margins will expand... while posting about personal behavior all of which points toward commoditization and intense price competition.

What’s wrong here ? You push the router , you keep same subscription price , customers are as happy or even more happy because router will make process faster, the costs will go down . The market size will increase several times .

If you have properties of the market where your costs will go down , the size of the market will increase and you are top contender. How is that a bubble or a bad market ?

Sure you have risks of underperforming and lose the competition, but how is that different from any business in the world ?

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

#226

Post by LogicFailsMe »

sodapopcan wrote: post #204
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The possibility of AI sticking around is apparently pretty threatening to the Zitron cult or what seemed like an innocuous response wouldn't be in such negative territory so quickly. But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful. And sure, we will look back on today's models like we look back upon Gordon Gekko and his giant early cell phone. And I cannot fathom how one can not separate AI the scienc…

> But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful. Yes, I said as much. I've said this is two other places in this thread, but when they are talking AI being useful, they aren't just talking about for software development. The software industry is seeing far more AI adoption, by a very large margin, than any other industry, and the success of the current companies hinges on it being heavily adopted ev…

So then what is the deadline for AI reaching into all these new industries (or are you asserting it will never happen)? And you're right, technical people latch onto him sounding like a horse's ass on technical subjects and why shouldn't they? IMO this isn't the same as Elon's endless empty FSD promises (which I called out the whole danged time from the beginning FWIW), but I get why people assume it is, I just don't agree.

I didn't have a lot sympathy for the guy who described the Internet as a series of tubes yet I believe Al Gore caught far more flack for that bit about inventing the Internet than he deserved given the inventor of the Internet defended that very claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

So if the bulk of what Zitron's talking about is valid, then what are the main points that aren't self-evident i.e. there's definitely either a buildout or a bubble in CapEx and only time will answer that question, not hot air and blatant market manipulation. What is he bringing to the conversation that we're all missing? Seriously, educate me.

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

#227

Post by twister2920 »

loumf wrote: post #22
scrlk wrote: post #10

> While people get some sort of benefit out of AI-generated code, these tools actually end up making them slower Curious that he references a METR study from July 2025, before the leap in model and harness performance towards the end of 2025/early 2026.

I don't know if his final analysis is right or wrong, but if he believes this, he's completely clueless (about this aspect at least). Edit: to be clear, I am talking about Ed’s contention that AI coding isn’t net productive.

coding is the one area Ed has acknowledged productivity gains. hard evidence is still lacking though

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

#228

Post by maxdo »

greesil wrote: post #7
maxdo wrote: post #3

I'm so tired of this shallow analysis claiming vendors are losing tons of money on subscriptions. How do you even judge that? Users go on vacation, they slack off, they spend the day talking to each other. There are very few people who are really effective at burning tokens. how do you know the ratio? do you have insides? No :) The biggest target is enterprise, and the economics for an LLM vendor look like this: pric…

I think Ed's argument is that given the infra investment the revenue won't be enough to pay back the original investors. In fact cheaper models make this worse for them. Who cares about the investors? Well it turns out the infra was financed in large part by debt that was securitized and a bunch of regarded investors that bought the debt looking for higher returns will be taking a huge haircut when the bubble pops. T…

Agents will explode the use 100x or more , so even if you push into your router mix models that dynamically do inference that is 100x 10x 5x cheaper , they are still fine.

In fact spacex story tells you next : investments in infrastructure is the best investment. If OpenAI or anthropic have committed infra in the worst case scenario they can re-sell it with margin .

The only way it will not payout suddenly we wake up in the world where ai fails to deliver . Which does not seems to be the case .

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

#229

Post by twister2920 »

rpdillon wrote: post #102
dan_gee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A resolute anti-AI perspective is a breath of fresh air compared to the middle-of-the-road "AI made me 10x more productive BUT"-style comments. My professional opinion is that LLM technology doesn't work very well for software development and I'm not interested in hemming and hawing over its supposed benefits any longer.

Talking with a friend of mine who's been in development for some time and I had been talking a little bit about the skill required to wield AI effectively and that people were expecting it to be something that required less skill than it does. He said his version of this observation is "your agents are only as good as you are." I think he's right, and the key is to practice and build the skill.

> agents are only as good as you are

that doesn't sound like a net benefit at all. I think mostly people just enjoy playing with these toys, and good developers are still good with them, bad developers still bad

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

#230

Post by Someone »

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…

> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices

Maybe. On the one hand, if there is a strong ceiling to what users are willing/able to pay for a smartphone (might not be true, with all those people making $$ on the stock market), they will have to cut prices.

On the other hand, if one part gets more expensive, premium phones need smaller relative price increases than budget phones. Certainly, if they are willing to accept lower margins, premium product might get more attractive.

Also, iPhones tend to have less RAM than competitors, so this might hit other premium manufacturers harder than Apple.

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