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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#411

Post by scoofy »

torginus wrote: post #339
reilly3000 wrote: post #213

I don’t like that he cited $12B in consumer spending as the benchmark for demand. Clearly enterprise spending has and will continue to dwarf consumer outlays, to the tune of $100b+ in 2025 on inference alone, and another $150b on AI related services. I see almost no scenario where the value of this hardware will go away. Even if the demand for inference somehow declines, the applications that can benefit from hardwar…

Also, as others have pointed out, if the next Pixel phone or iPhone has 'AI' as a bullet point feature, then people buying and iPhone will count as 'consumer AI spend', that's why they're forcing AI into everything, so they can show that people are using AI, while most people are ambivalent or hostile towards AI features.

I mean, that makes little sense. The desirability of the feature has a price. Putting a GPU in a phone is expensive and unnecessary.

The point of something being a gimmick is that it’s a gimmick. I just got an iPhone with a GPU but I would absolutely have purchased one without if it were possible.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#412

Post by scoofy »

baggachipz wrote: post #381
rsync wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TQQQ exists. There is a liquid market of TQQQ puts.

I'm trying to get out ahead of that and find an indicator that says it's about to collapse.

Market reflexivity makes an obvious indicator highly improbable.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#413

Post by jstummbillig »

alpineman wrote: post #131
jstummbillig wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are always so fidegty about this stuff — for super understandable reason, to be clear. People not much smarter than anyone else try to reason about numbers that are hard to reason about. But unless you have the actual numbers, I always find it a bit strange to assume that all people involved, who deal with large amounts of money all the time, lost all ability to reason about this thing. Because right now that…

Pets.com, Enron, Lehman Bros, WeWork, Theranos, too many to mention. Investors aren’t always right. The FOMO in that industry is like no other

The point is not whether they are right, but how low the bar is for what constitutes as palatable opinions from bystanders on a topic that other people have devoted a lot of thought and money to.

I just don't think "I don't know anyone who pays for it" or "You know, companies have also failed before" bring enough to the table to be interesting talking points.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#414

Post by sotix »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #60
aurareturn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of progr…

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. Is she more productive though? People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

> Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working.

Au contraire. Acute nicotine improves cognitive deficits in young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00913...

> Non-smoking young adults with ADHD-C showed improvements in cognitive performance following nicotine administration in several domains that are central to ADHD. The results from this study support the hypothesis that cholinergic system activity may be important in the cognitive deficits of ADHD and may be a useful therapeutic target.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#415

Post by NoGravitas »

ACCount37 wrote: post #260
emp17344 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what you’re saying. You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right? Can you provide more information?

LLMs can have surprisingly strong "theory of mind", even at base model level. They have to learn that to get good at predicting all the various people that show up in conversation logs. You'd be surprised at just how much data you can pry out of an LLM that was merely exposed to a single long conversation with a given user. Chatbot LLMs aren't trained to expose all of those latent insights, but they can still do some…

AIs have neither a "theory of mind", nor a model of the world. They only have a model of a text corpus.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#416

Post by NoGravitas »

piva00 wrote: post #182
ivape wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More information: Use the LLM more until you are convinced. If you are not convinced, use it more. Use it more in absurd ways until you are convinced. Repeat the above until you are convinced.

Is this satire? Really hard to tell in this year of 2025...

Yeah, Poe's Law hitting hard here.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#418

Post by NoGravitas »

fundatus wrote: post #73
rimeice wrote: post #2

> Some people think artificial intelligence will be the most important technology of the 21st century. I don’t, I think a workable fusion reactor will be the most important technology of the 21st century.

I mean, we already have a giant working fusion reactor (the sun) and we can even harvest it's energy (solar, wind, etc)! That's pretty awesome.

Using gravitational containment rather than magnetic containment is a pretty cool approach.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#419

Post by layer8 »

jbstack wrote: post #139
layer8 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I possibly assess the results in a programming language I haven’t used before? That’s almost the same as vibe coding.

The same way you assess results in a programming language you have used before. In a more complicated project that might mean test suites. For a simple project (e.g. a Bash script) you might just run it and see if it does what you expect.

The way I assess results in a familiar programming language is by reviewing and reasoning through the code. Testing is necessary, but not sufficient by any means.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#420

Post by NoGravitas »

alasdair_ wrote: post #403

Personal hot take: China is forbidding its companies from buying Nvidia chips and instead wants to have its industries use China-made chips. I think a big part of the reason for this is that they want to take over Taiwan and they know that any takeover could likely destroy TSMC and instead of this being a bad thing for them it could actually give them a competitive advantage vs everyone else. The fact that the US has…

I'd say the main reason is probably that they want to insulate themselves from US sanctions, which could come at any time given how unpredictable the US government is lately.
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