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A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

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Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#51

Post by lgleason »

Have we made some significant advancements similar to what happened with the Internet back in the 90's with HTML? Yes. But, this is a bubble we are currently in just like the .com bubble with lots of irrational exuberance.

That said, that job market is not as crazy as it was during .com, in fact right now most technologists are finding it more difficult to find work at the moment. Most of this AI hype started when the employment market started to slow down. Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts when crazy money enters the picture. So if, for example the fed really starts to cut rates and/or investment starts to really pick up and we have another boom period, the tail end of that seems to historically be when the bubbles pop.

Put another way, there is a good chance that the bubble will continue to inflate for a few years before it pops.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#52

Post by stego-tech »

Not a bad position to take, and very similar to my personal one (that gets immediately conflated as "LOL AI DOOMER" by the AI Booster Club): yes, this is a bubble, and yes, it will eventually pop, but the tools won't go away. What's been democratized isn't the entirety of human skills, but the narrow field of custom ML-based tooling, and that's going to change quite a lot in the decades ahead as people utilize them in unexpectedly novel ways.

It'll never be AGI or superintelligence, it won't create or cause the singularity, and it'll never be a substitute for learning, practicing, and honing skills into mastery. For the fields LLMs do displace in part or in whole, I still expect it'll largely displace the mediocre or the barely-passable, not the competent or experts. Those experts will, once the bubble pops and the hype train derails, find the novel and transformative uses for LLMs outside of building moats for big enterprises or vamping for investor capital.

I especially enjoy the on-prem/locally-run angle, as I think that is where much of the transformation will occur - in places like homes, small offices, or private datacenters where a GPU or two can accelerate novel tasks for the entity using it, without divulging data to corporate entities or outright competitors. Inference is cheap, and a modest gaming GPU or AI accelerator can easily support 99.9% of individual use cases offline, with the right supporting infrastructure (which is improving daily!).

All in all, an excellent post.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#53

Post by DrewADesign »

ryoshu wrote: post #43
entropsilk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact everyone thinks we are in an AI bubble is practically proof we are not in an AI bubble. The crowd is always wrong on these things. Just like everyone "knew" we were going into a deep recession sometime in late 2022, early 2023. The crowd has an incredibly short memory too. What it means is that people are really cautious about AI. That is not a self reinforcing, fear of missing out, explosive process bubble.…

Not really. Worked through the dotcom bubble. It was obvious to some people on the ground doing the work. It was obvious to some execs who took advantage of it. Feels similar. Especially if you are burning through tokens on Gemini CLI and Claude Code where the spend doesn’t match the outcomes.

I saw someone earnestly say that a business model with potential to generate actual revenue was no longer relevant, and companies need only generate enough excitement to draw investors to be successful because “the rules have changed.” At that moment, I saw that telltale soapy iridescent sheen. I’ve heard that before.

I’m worried that the US knowledge industries jumped the shark in the teens and have been living off hopeful investors assuming the next equivalent of the SaaS revolution is right around the corner, and AI for whatever reason just won’t change things that much, or if it does, the US tech industry will fumble it, assuming their resources and reputations will insulate them from the competition, just like the tech giants of the 90s vs Internet startups. If that’s true, some industries like biotech will still do fine, but the trajectory of the tech sector, generally, will start looking like that of the manufacturing sector in the 90s.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#54

Post by stillpointlab »

This is a good article, but it has a flaw that I keep seeing in these. Articles like this say "I built this app, and that app, and another app, and another one". Ok, let's see them. Are they any good? Please post the github link, or link to the webpage.

I'm reminded of the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#55

Post by exasperaited »

chromanoid wrote: post #40
exasperaited wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s already a new golden age of indie low budget movies. Those guys will not use AI to generate significant parts of their content, because it defeats the point of making an indie movie at all. I never cease to be shocked at how little tech people think of what creative people do and why they do it.

You seem to have an agenda here. I am sure there are many many visions of special effects and story arcs that could never be realized because of not being able to pull it off. This will change now. Green screens and sophisticated SFX tech will not be necessary to create fantastical images. You may call these kind of movies low brow entertainment but I am very curious to see indie movie interpretations of my favorite…

An agenda? I just give a shit about the creative people (indie filmmakers, photographers, artists, actors, models) I know, and I fail to see what AI brings them that their creativity does not already; special effects are such a tiny part of filmmaking, for example.

I don’t mean to say I don’t think there are any uses but I think the main misunderstanding here is that what holds indie filmmakers back isn’t access to technology, generally.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#56

Post by handbanana_ »

worldsayshi wrote: post #17
handbanana_ wrote: post #9

>While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping. Developers who learned their craft in the age of pull requests and sprint planning sneer at their security failures, not realizing that 'best practices' are about to flip again. The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're deploying to production. Shipping where? What production? What kids? I've yet to see this. I see the tools…

What would qualify as proof? If somebody builds a good product and ships it it will just look like a good product. People will call it vibe coded slop when it fails spectacularly.

I mean they would provide it--you would think this is something the AI coding businesses would be highlighting. "Here's an app tends of thousands use every day built with our AI tools!"

Heck they did it with languages for the longest time. Here's twitter, we built it on Rails, everyone use Rails! Facebook, built on PHP, everyone use PHP! Feels weird that if these AI tools are doing all this work that no one is showing it off.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#57

Post by chromanoid »

exasperaited wrote: post #55
chromanoid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have an agenda here. I am sure there are many many visions of special effects and story arcs that could never be realized because of not being able to pull it off. This will change now. Green screens and sophisticated SFX tech will not be necessary to create fantastical images. You may call these kind of movies low brow entertainment but I am very curious to see indie movie interpretations of my favorite…

An agenda? I just give a shit about the creative people (indie filmmakers, photographers, artists, actors, models) I know, and I fail to see what AI brings them that their creativity does not already; special effects are such a tiny part of filmmaking, for example. I don’t mean to say I don’t think there are any uses but I think the main misunderstanding here is that what holds indie filmmakers back isn’t access to t…

Well, at least I assume that currently indie movies are also somewhat defined by budget and technical limitations. With GenAI you will be able to film an action scene with your smartphone in an empty warehouse that will later look like an authentic full street in Medieval Bagdad. GenAI will remove constraints. Constraints that may have led to creativity by themselves, but those constraints also led to constraints in audience and artistic outcome. Imagination will be the limit. And I don't think we will need labels like "organic" to make collaborative efforts with actual actors more accepted than AI only productions, because good actors bring more to the table than just their face and stature.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#58

Post by ankit219 »

Somewhat related to the article, but mostly anecdotal. In SF, i have had chats with (~15) engineers who after some prodding admitted that they feel the whole AGI thing is passing them by (not that it is close). In a sense that they want to be doing something deeper, build/research something which is more than an API call (paraphrasing and not disparaging making API calls), and want to build where the action is (read: train models or be at the forefront). I understand you need a specific skillset to be in that position, just that it's slightly off putting that to do any meaningful work in this field you need a lot of compute. I understand they raised funding and what not, yet want something more than they are working on. I am not sure of the solution, but the cause sure seems to be the hype that is created currently.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#59

Post by fourthark »

upghost wrote: post #15

> Within weeks I built a serverless system processing 5 million social media posts daily, tracking topic clusters and emerging narratives in real-time. Then brand monitoring dashboards. Then a "robojournalist" that could deep-dive any trending story. Then hardware and firmware specs for a coffee machine. Then my first mobile app. I call bullshit. Let's see some repos.

This is all stuff for private use. It's credible that the author built these things with LLMs, not that they are secure or robust.

Re: A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

#60

Post by xsmasher »

cj wrote: post #45
zmmmmm wrote: post #16

I think a key point from this article that I agree strongly with is the simple point that it is crucial that everyone recognise we are currently in an AI bubble . I often find people contest this with the non-sequitur of "No, it's not a bubble, there is real value there. We are building things with it". The fact there is real value in the technology does not contradict in any way that we are in a bubble. It may even…

I agree, although bubbles don’t always have to pop in huge ways like it did in the dot com crash. E.g. crypto displayed many, many characteristics of a bubble for a number of years, but the crypto bubble seems like it has just slowly stopped growing and slowly stopped getting larger, rather than popping in a fantastical way. (Not to say it still can’t, of course) Then again, this bubble is different in that it has en…

Cryptocurrencies have survived and thrived, but anyone who went all-in on NFTs or blockchain gaming (or anything other than currency on the blockchain?) has been zeroed out.
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