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

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

#461

Post by DebtDeflation »

pedalpete wrote: post #101
harmmonica wrote: post #92

Do I have this right that there have been no or at least very few pure AI IPO's during this cycle (I can't actually think of a single one)? So it's dissimilar to dotcom in that regard because during that time countless dotcoms went public with sky-high valuations and then failed. A bunch of reputable companies also went or were already public during that time and those saw huge valuation drops so that's more analogou…

This time is always different, until it isn't. However, it is different from the internet bubble partially for the reason you describe. There have been a few IPOs, but they perhaps happened earlier in the cycle, or companies are pivoting into AI. I'm thinking companies like Palantir, which was always AI, or Salesforce which is making a big AI pivot. Most of the funding is not coming from public sectors. There is so m…

Historically, the worst busts following the bursting of an asset price bubble, in terms of real economic impact, have been from debt fueled bubbles (Great Depression, Global Financial Crisis). You can read Hyman Minsky and Irving Fisher for a detailed analysis of why, but it mainly comes down to the fact that the financial obligations remain once prices and expectations have reset.

Then you have the busts that follow public equity fueled bubbles (Dotcom crash). Nowhere near as bad as the former, but still a moderate impact on the economy due to the widely dispersed nature of the equity holdings and the resulting wealth effect.

What we have now is more of a narrowly held private equity bubble (acknowledging that there's still an impact through the SP500 given widespread index investing). If OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and a bunch of AI startups go bust, who loses money and what impact does it have on the rest of the economy?

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

#462

Post by Archonical »

ivape wrote: post #138
ripvanwinkle wrote: post #122

This shouldn't be a surprise - capitalism always overshoots. Anything worth investing in will generally receive too much investment in because very few people can tell where the line is. And that's what causes bubbles but at this point it should be clear that AI will make a substantial impact - at least as great as the internet, likely larger

As FB IPO’d at 100bn, and marched to over 1T, when would you have considered it a bubble? You can ask the LLM if you need to … catch my drift?

I'm not sure I see the point. The march to $1T took 10 years with available financial statements.

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

#463

Post by watwut »

kakacik wrote: post #431
akimbostrawman wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't forget the dismantling of the local community and family identity to make people reliant on the government preventing resistance by division.

People do this to themselves and willingly, no spooky evil capitalists behind the curtains are necessary. People love money and what they can bring on the table, people often hate each other ie within families stiffed by peer pressure and expectations of mentalities formed in another very different era, people love discovering new countries and cultures. And so on and on. Ie me - I love my parents, my childhood was n…

But kids in those strict societies stay with parents more, help them and treat them better.

Meanwhile, you dont care about them except for them being potential resource of free work.

And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about other people doing free work for you and then tolerating your peculiarities with no reciprocation.

So, I dont think that is much of an argument here.

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

#464

Post by cindyllm »

kakacik wrote: post #431
akimbostrawman wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't forget the dismantling of the local community and family identity to make people reliant on the government preventing resistance by division.

People do this to themselves and willingly, no spooky evil capitalists behind the curtains are necessary. People love money and what they can bring on the table, people often hate each other ie within families stiffed by peer pressure and expectations of mentalities formed in another very different era, people love discovering new countries and cultures. And so on and on. Ie me - I love my parents, my childhood was n…

[dead]

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

#465

Post by muldvarp »

james_oofou wrote: post #444
muldvarp wrote: post #310

I'd love to see those "gigantic benefits". Currently, the only positive thing about LLMs I hear regularly is that it made people more productive. They don't get paid more (of course), they're just more productive.

more productivity at same cost = more stuff, cheaper

More productivity at same cost = More profit for companies.

Also, the cost of most of the stuff I (have to) buy (i.e. rent, groceries, ...) is not dominated by the wage of knowledge workers.

Or to put it differently: If AI makes me lose my job but doesn't decrease my rent, I'm in a really bad position.

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

#466

Post by BirAdam »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #226
Retric wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem. The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc. Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erod…

The political instability that came with social media isn't great, either.

I question this narrative. While social media is certainly having a negative impact, most democratic societies have relatively short life spans historically speaking. There’s also a tendency for economies to falter, for irrationality to increase, for birth rates to drop, and so on. It would seem that the same trends (roughly) occur in every democracy as it starts to fail.

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

#467

Post by squidbeak »

sokoloff wrote: post #451
squidbeak wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you mean is those with some form of ownership of the technology. If development eventually results in full automation, with the expense of production reduced to zero, money will be irrelevant.

Energy, raw materials, and logistics still remain. I don't think we'll ever get to a place where there isn't some input to a production process that is not infinite and free.

You don't see full automation with robotics as a possible outcome?

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

#468

Post by N70Phone »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #172
Waterluvian wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video game crash followed by video games taking off and eclipsing most other forms of digital entertainment. Dot com crash followed by the web getting pretty popular and a bit central to business. To all those betting big on AI before the crash: Careful, Icarus.

Bad comparison. The leap of faith necessary in LLMs to achieve the same feat is so large its very difficult to imagine it happening. Particularly due to the well known constraints on what the technology is capable of. The whole investment thesis of LLMs is that it will be able to a) be intelligent b) produce new knowledge. If those two things that dont happen, what has been delivered is not commensurate to the risk i…

Given they're referencing Icarus, they seem to agree with you.

Past bubbles leaving behind something of value is indeed no guarantee the current bubble will do so. For as many times as people post "but dotcom produced Amazon" to HN, people had posted that exact argument about the Blockchain, the NFT, or the "Metaverse" bubbles.

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

#469

Post by blks »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #327
palmotea wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people. Yes: you'll be homeless and living under a bridge, but you'll have an LLM therapist on your phone to console you. That's a benefit!

No they don't want that, because it could lead to an uprising against them. They want us provided with the essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we have something to lose. Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment s…

How will they steal added value and get richer if masses consume as little as possible?

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

#470

Post by blks »

simianwords wrote: post #367
vasco wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the comment to be quite sober and realistic. Other than usage of "they want" as a monolith group it's pretty accurate.

It is not realistic - we are consuming way more than any of the previous generations. Poverty is at an all time low and steeply dropped since the last century. We are curing diseases, people are living long. What's the pessimism about?

The climate will get worse and worse.
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