Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
311–320 of 370 posts
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That _could_ happen, but very likely not in a short enough timeline to save them.
> In fact spacex story tells you next : investments in infrastructure is the best investment
ROFLMAO. How's the stock doing?
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you really seen engineers fired for failing to spend $1,000 on tokens a day because their bosses read my piece about Strong DM? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/ I would hope that my commentary on those patterns would be less likely to lead to bad decisions than if people just read Strong DM's own description of their software factory approach: https://factory.strongdm.ai/
> Have you really seen engineers fired for failing to spend $1,000 on tokens a day because their bosses read my piece about Strong DM? Bruh, come on. Not directly is the best answer I have for that. Unfortunately, they didn't read your article carefully, because the idea of productivity gains was all the candy they needed to jump in the van.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Apple already had giant margins before and could easily absorb memory price increases. The fact that they did not and instead decided to increase prices shows how confident they are that people will buy their hardware anyway.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#315I will never understand the decision-making process that led to "Let's build an awesome VR headset that can't do gaming". I would love to replace my monitor with Apple Vision Pro for programming and productivity. I would gladly pay $1000 for that. But at $4000 it really needs to put me in a Microsoft Flight Simulator cockpit.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
AI is going to be very useful going into the future. It’s just that it will just be incorporated into the existing programmers tool kit, and not the be all end all.
what i see at $employer is wanting to do everything with ai from start to finish (and i mean everything) but from looking at the output (or lack of) of coworkers i'm thinking that perspective may be closer to the truth...
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
It all comes down to the fact that Zitron thinks these AI companies are over levered and have significant chances of collapsing industry wide. Yeah he uses more words to say it and bad arguments as part of it. But so did Galileo's "The tides prove that the Earth is moving around the sun" argument. Some arguments are bad, even if the overall point was correct. I think given the new Nikkei report from last week, we are…
He doesn't like or believe in the economics of the frontier labs and then works backwards from that, which takes him to some very strange places.
But Galileo was still had a useful framework for his criticisms despite all of his faults.
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I see Ed Zitron in virtually the same spot. Especially now that the SPVs thing is publicly confirmed by 3rd parties. I agree he made a bunch of shitty arguments over the years but Ed Zitron has seemingly stumbled upon something true and worth investigating now
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
No Apple was not sitting there and waiting as if its some grand plan. They tried their VR device which they don't even talk about now. They were late to AI and yes if the bubble bursts they will be at a better position but it's not some grand master strategy. Even inside apple there's been a lot of talk about how badly the company handled AI. As for laughing all the way to the bank, I am sure memory manufacturers and…
A better way to frame this might be that Apple tried VR and quickly realized the market wasn't there and moved on. Compare that to Meta, who went all-in (so much so that they changed the company name) despite apparent overwhelming user apathy toward the product. The estimates I've seen say that Apple spent ~$10b on their VR program, whereas Meta is in for about $80b.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you really seen engineers fired for failing to spend $1,000 on tokens a day because their bosses read my piece about Strong DM? Bruh, come on. Not directly is the best answer I have for that. Unfortunately, they didn't read your article carefully, because the idea of productivity gains was all the candy they needed to jump in the van.
It sounds to me like you are blaming imagined job losses on anyone who wrote about an interesting experiment that a company did.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple already had giant margins before and could easily absorb memory price increases. The fact that they did not and instead decided to increase prices shows how confident they are that people will buy their hardware anyway.
They did absorb them, this price madness began a year ago and they only increased prices last month.
Their price increases were a mixture of absorbing some of the increase and passing what they won't on us.