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A bubble that knows it's a bubble

craigmccaskill.com

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Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#51

Post by lm28469 »

ehnto wrote: post #6
LarsDu88 wrote: post #4

I had the same thoughts as much as 2 years ago on how this will play out. Unlike with railroads and fiber optic cable however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years. Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US. Long…

I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans. If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, i…

I love how most people can't even afford a car without taking loans but we're talking about personal robot assistants as if it was right around the corner and the natural evolution of things

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#52

Post by benrutter »

> Here’s what’s never happened before: everyone knows the script.

I'm don't think this is unique, most bubbles historically as far back as the South Sea bubble have had a lot of people aware of the irrationality, but investing in an attempt to profit from it.

I'd even go so far as to say, this is exactly what makes bubbles so volatile as opposed to normal "market corrections". If the dotcom boom had been all people who really believed they were sensibly evaluating the internet's financial potential, I don't think we'd have seen them jump ship quite so quickly.

I won't predict the future, but another point about historic bubbles: they almost all go on much further than people think they will before collapse.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#54

Post by cantor_S_drug »

flohofwoe wrote: post #34
cantor_S_drug wrote: post #28

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. The data centers kept humming after Webvan went dark. All that ‘wasted’ investment had already transformed into something physical. The pipes, servers, and networks that would become the foundation for Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Servic…

> Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;) I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an or…

Paradoxically, I think Cambrian Explosion happened because of innovation of eyes. Maybe the tech that currently was developed for VR headsets could find home in smart glasses (i.e. google glass)

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#55

Post by FinnLobsien »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #33
ivape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Influencers, streamers, crypto … Housing is back … Dotcom came back… Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it. So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years. AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able t…

>Housing is back … Nothing was a bubble. Ironic how you can contradict yourself without realizing. The fact that something "came back", meant it WAS a bubble that popped.

I think there's a big difference between things that have always been bought and sold (housing, oil, food, minerals, etc.) and actual net-new technology that may or may not pay off on its promise.

The former can be overvalued (see housing pre-2008), but we'll never come to the conclusion that it's useless or only needed in niche use cases. In that case, the item itself isn't really the bubble. The bubble is in what enables the irrational prices (e.g. subprime mortgages).

The latter can definitely be a bubble where the technology just isn't useful for a given use case (or at all).

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#56

Post by barchar »

layoric wrote: post #32

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives i…

Well, you need to pay taxes on each step.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#57

Post by jamilton »

layoric wrote: post #32

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives i…

A stock price decreasing essentially "vaporizes" the wealth of owners, that is not a straightforward transfer. Stocks aren't cash.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#58

Post by aredox »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #28

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. The data centers kept humming after Webvan went dark. All that ‘wasted’ investment had already transformed into something physical. The pipes, servers, and networks that would become the foundation for Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Servic…

We should just sacrifice more people's savings[0] to fund innovation. This is truly an efficient way of doing things.

[0] "millions of ordinary investors watched their retirement accounts and college funds evaporate. The same middle-class Americans who had been told they were foolish not to participate in the ‘new economy’ now faced financial ruin. Teachers’ pension funds were halved. Family savings meant for homes and education vanished"

And pray we don't enter a "lost decade" (which is closer to 30 years, now) like Japan.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#59

Post by Lionga »

aurareturn wrote: post #20
raldi wrote: post #8

> Anthropic raised $450 million at a $4.1 billion valuation despite negligible revenue What year is this from? The author might want to do a recent news search.

Isn’t Anthropic worth hundreds of billions by now and their revenue is doubling every 6 months?

5.6 billion loss in 2024 on $918 million in revenue.

When you are selling a 5 dollars for 1 dollar doubling revenue is easy. It just creates more losses, same with OpenAI

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