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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

cnbc.com

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Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#41

Post by hyghjiyhu »

janalsncm wrote: post #22
mattnewton wrote: post #2

Seems like a measured approach- my read is him saying it’s probably a bubble in that bad ideas are being funded too, but there are a lot of really good ideas doing well. Also nit: Typo right in the digest I assume, assuming “suring” is “during”, does cnbc proofread their content?

Then it’s a market for lemons. Buyers can’t (or choose not to) tell a good AI idea from a bad one.

A market for lemons means there is an information asymmetry. Sellers know what they have and try to offload their lemons on clueless buyers. I don't think that's the case here.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#42

Post by hibikir »

zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36
blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

If you look at year over year chip improvements in 2025 vs 1998, it's clear that modern hardware just has a longer shelf life than it used to. The difficulties in getting more performance for the same power expenditure are just very different than back in the day.

There's still depreciation, but it's not the same. Also look at other forms of hardware, like RAM, and the bonus electrical capacity being built.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#43

Post by somewhereoutth »

My understanding is that the cost of training each next model is very very large, and a half trained model is worthless.

Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People will continue using the old models, but they will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not much more than historical artifacts.

My point is that the threshold for continuing this process (new models) is very big (getting bigger each time?), so the 'pop' will be a step function to zero.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#44

Post by rhetocj23 »

zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36
blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

Personally I think people should stop trying to reason from the past.

As tempting as it is, it leads to false outcomes because you are not thinking about how this particular situation is going to impact society and the economy.

Its much harder to reason this way, but isnt that the point? personally I dont want to hear or read analogies based on the past - I want to see and read stuff that comes from original thinking.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#45

Post by rchaud »

lumost wrote: post #9
Insanity wrote: post #3

I think most level-headed people can see this is a giant bubble which will eventually burst like the dot-com crash. And AI is technology that's hard to understand to non-technical (and even some technical) investors. But of course, every company needs to slap AI on their product now just to be seen as a viable product. Personally, I look forward to seeing the bubble burst and being left with a more rational view of A…

OpenAI has a reasonable path to reduce their costs by 10-100x over the next 5 years if they stop improving the models. That would make them an extremely profitable company with their only real risk being “local ai”. However customers have wanted their data in the cloud for years, local inference would likely just mean 0 cost tokens for OpenAI. The challenge is the rest of the industry funding dead companies with bill…

OpenAI is trying to launch a hardware product with Jony Ive, an ads company, a AI slop-native version of TikTok and several other "businesses". They look well on their way to turning into a Yahoo! than a Cisco or VMWare.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#46

Post by formerly_proven »

rchaud wrote: post #39
blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

Dotcom mania companies were not Internet providers. They tried making money on the internet, something people already saw as worth paying for.

This is not really true, e.g. Cogent was basically created by buying bankrupt dotcum-bubble network providers for cents on the dollar.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#47

Post by rhetocj23 »

gizajob wrote: post #30
pseudosavant wrote: post #10

What is going on with AI right now could be a bubble just like there was the dotcom bubble. But it isn't like the internet went away after the dotcom burst. The largest companies in existence today are internet companies or have products that wouldn't make sense without the internet. Sure, many of these "thin prompt wrapper around the OpenAI API" product "businesses" will all be gone within a few years. But AI? That…

The bubble is in the valuations on the stock market, not in the technology.

Thats not true actually.

The technology - for what it is being used vs what is invested - does not match up at all. This is what happened to the dot-com bubble. Theres was a whole bunch of innovation that was needed to come to bring a delightful UX to bring swathes of people onto the internet.

So far this is true about LLMs. Could this change? Sure. Will it change meaningful? Personally I dont believe so.

The internet at its core was all about hooking up computers so they they could transform from just computational beasts to communication. There was a tremendous amount of potentitial that was very very real. It just so happens if computers can communicate we can do a whole bunch of stuff - as is going on today.

What are LLMS? Can someone please explain in a succint way...? Im yet to see something super crystal clear.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#48

Post by hx8 »

zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36
blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

A lot of the infrastructure made during the Dotcom boom was shortly discarded. How many dial-up modems were sold in the 90s?

The current AI bubble is leading to trained models that won't be feasible to retrain for a decade or longer after the bubble bursts.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#49

Post by hx8 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #46
rchaud wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dotcom mania companies were not Internet providers. They tried making money on the internet, something people already saw as worth paying for.

This is not really true, e.g. Cogent was basically created by buying bankrupt dotcum-bubble network providers for cents on the dollar.

Also AOL was a mix of dialup provider and Dotcom service. There were many other popular examples of such.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#50

Post by rhetocj23 »

coffeecoders wrote: post #11

Every bubble looks obvious in hindsight. The dot-com crash left behind Amazon and Google. The crypto crash left behind Coinbase and a few real revenue generating companies. If this is the AI bubble, then the survivors are going to look very obvious in a decade, we just don’t know which ones yet.

But google and amazon were obvious to those in the know, in terms of what they delivered.

S Jobs called it back in 1995-97 - he referred to it as shopping for information and shopping for good and services.

Nobody has this crystal clear, tangible vision re. LLMs. Nobody at all. That is a big problem.

I found the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSfFcaluHc&t=1700s

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