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

After the Bubble

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: After the Bubble

#31

Post by somewhereoutth »

The AI bubble is causing large scale resource mis-allocation. That means that resources that could and should have been allocated to useful things have instead gone into data centre build outs and the panoply of marketing, executive hot air, forced/frivolous use of LLMs etc etc - the list goes on.

This means that society as a whole is perhaps significantly poorer than if LLMs had been properly valued (i.e. not a bubble), or had simply never happened at all.

Unfortunately it will likely be the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies that will bear the brunt. 'Twas ever thus.

Re: After the Bubble

#32

Post by martythemaniak »

> I think the people telling us that genAI is the future and we must pay it fealty richly deserve their impending financial wipe-out.

I think people need to realize that if the bubble gets bad enough, there will absolutely, positively, 100% be a bailout. Trump doesn't care who you are or what you did, as long as you pay enough (both money and praise) you get whatever you want, and Big Tech has already put many down payments. I mean, they ask him "Why did you pardon CZ after he defrauded people? Why did you pardon Hernandez after he smuggled tons of cocaine in?" and he plainly says he doesn't know who they are. And why should he? They paid, there's no need to know your customers personally, there's too many of them.

Re: After the Bubble

#33

Post by bryanlarsen »

marcusb wrote: post #18

> The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that. I think the first part of this is probably true, but I don’t think everyone knows it. A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it. It feels like a bubble to me, but I don’t think anyone can say to a certainty that it is, or that it will pop.

> A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it.

Or they're acting like they think there's going to be significant stock price growth between now and the bubble popping. Behaviors aren't significantly different between those two scenarios.

Re: After the Bubble

#34

Post by rglover »

> I wonder who, after the loss of those tens of millions of high-paid jobs, are going to be the consumers who’ll buy the goods that’ll drive the profits that’ll pay back the investors. But that problem is kind of intrinsic to Late-stage Capitalism.

> Anyhow, there will be a crash and a hangover. I think the people telling us that genAI is the future and we must pay it fealty richly deserve their impending financial wipe-out. But still, I hope the hangover is less terrible than I think it will be.

Yup. We really seem to be at a point where everyone has their guns drawn under the table and we're just waiting for the first shot—like we're living in a real-world, global version of Uncut Gems.

Re: After the Bubble

#35

Post by breedmesmn »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #31

The AI bubble is causing large scale resource mis-allocation. That means that resources that could and should have been allocated to useful things have instead gone into data centre build outs and the panoply of marketing, executive hot air, forced/frivolous use of LLMs etc etc - the list goes on. This means that society as a whole is perhaps significantly poorer than if LLMs had been properly valued (i.e. not a bubb…

[flagged]

Re: After the Bubble

#36

Post by christkv »

Its the whole layer of feature companies built on top of the core models what will pop (openai, anthropic, google resellers). Existing services will add AI bit by bit for features and survive. The core owners of models I think will survive (exception might be open ai, maybe). For the hardware there really are not that many TSMC wafers going around so max sales are capped for everyone at the newest nodes.

Re: After the Bubble

#38

Post by marcusb »

mr_mitm wrote: post #30
marcusb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the conventional wisdom, undercut by the fact that people have guessed (and bet their fortunes) that previous bubbles were bubbles well before they popped. Its more accurate to say that bubbles rely on most people being blind to the bubble's nature.

And how many people have guessed wrong? There will always be people betting on bubbles, some ought to be right.

A lot? Also irrelevant. All it takes is one for the statement "nobody can see the bubble" to be false. Take the housing bubble for instance. Do you think the people who called that one were successful purely by chance, or does the fact that a few investors observed that mortgage lenders were underwriting loans to people with extremely poor credit and approving loan applications the lenders knew to be materially fraudulent at a massive scale indicate that the call was more of an educated wager? Did they know to a certainty it was a bubble? No, of course not. Was it a very reasonable guess? Absolutely.

Re: After the Bubble

#39

Post by LexiMax »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #33
marcusb wrote: post #18

> The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that. I think the first part of this is probably true, but I don’t think everyone knows it. A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it. It feels like a bubble to me, but I don’t think anyone can say to a certainty that it is, or that it will pop.

> A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it. Or they're acting like they think there's going to be significant stock price growth between now and the bubble popping. Behaviors aren't significantly different between those two scenarios.

It's always been an interesting mental exercise for me to try and measure the unknowable gap between what people say they believe and the motivated reasoning that might drive their stated beliefs.

Putting your statement another way, if you and I can see the bubble, then it's almost a certainty that the average tech CEO also sees a bubble. They're just hoping that when the music stops, they won't be the one left holding the bag.

Re: After the Bubble

#40

Post by 9rx »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #24
MattGrommes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also wondering if the GPUs that die and need to be replaced actually become inert blocks of fused silicon or do they work at half speed or something? A data center full of half speed GPUs is still a lot of computing power waiting for somebody to use.

> computing power waiting for somebody to use. This is how "serverless" became a thing btw.

Maybe? inetd subprocesses on UNIX time sharing systems does look to be the first appearance of what we'd recognize as being serverless, but the timesharing concept was already on its way out in favour of personal computers by that time. It's questionable how much timesharing is responsible for its creation, despite the overlap. It seems more likely that the new age of networked personal computers looking for ways to interact with each other was the major driving force.

Of course, we didn't call it "serverless" back then. If you are referring to the name rather than the technology, I'd credit Ruby on Rails. It is what brought the app server back into fashion, being way too slow for the serverless technologies used before it, and it was that which allowed serverless to also come back into fashion again once developer started getting away from Rails, paving the way for the branding refresh we now know.

Post reply on HN