Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The AI Demand Bubble

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 160 posts

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#51

Post by ofjcihen »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #17

This guy has zero zip nada null AI background. He is a videogame reviewer and PR guy. He is a pure influencer feeding on the AI backlash he helped to create. He has been predicting a crash for how many years now? And while I can totally see Anthropic and OpenAI going through some things on the way to post-IPO FMV, those things do not include AI going away. It truly doesn't matter whether closed source Frontier lab mo…

Your example article of a “more balanced take” actually supports what Zitron is saying.

>They are two-party round-trips: a hyperscaler invests in an AI lab that is also its cloud customer, so the investment comes back as cloud revenue.

They may not label as circular financing but this is still the exact same thing he’s bringing awareness to in his article.

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#52

Post by sixhobbits »

[off topic] I'm a writer too and I know people have to make their money but

- Huge subscribe CTA at top

- In-text subscribe CTA

- scroll through that get pop up in your face full page subscribe CTA

- close that and continue scrolling to yet another subscribe CTA

was enough to make me close the page and ask my agent for a summary rather.

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#53

Post by dofm »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #45
parineum wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you expect someone in the AI industry to predict the collapse of the AI industry? I'm sure there weren't a ton of bankers predicting the mortgage collapse of 2008 but I, a young programmer of mortgage software could see something was weird (but didn't realize that it wasn't the norm).

So in a couple years now, AI will be as gone as cabbage patch kids and pet rocks? IMO that's anti-AI Psychosis, the evil twin of believing GPT-4o was sentient. And a really bad case of it is labeling anyone who disagrees with you in any way as having AI Psychosis for doing so. And your first line sounds exactly like that to me. IMO coding agents alone have made AI viable. Healthcare applications have done the same, b…

> So in a couple years now, AI will be as gone as cabbage patch kids and pet rocks?

> IMO that's anti-AI Psychosis, the evil twin of believing GPT-4o was sentient.

IMO that’s a particularly scraggly straw man. Even Ed Zitron, who we can stipulate is among the most cynical, thinks that some value will be left after the bubble either deflates or bursts.

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#54

Post by jackb4040 »

no_multitudes wrote: post #37
an0malous wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said: > I am hypothesizing that for OpenAI to survive for longer than two years, it will have to (in no particular order): And listed various things like a technological breakthrough or more fundraising. I would bet he’s right that they’ll fundraise by the end of the year if they can’t IPO and pass the bag to retail investors. What the AI bulls don’t seem to understand is that AI could be a great technological ach…

For the record, I agree that the generative AI industry might collapse. But I think Ed Zitron is ideologically committed to this belief in a way that is not a reflection of the evidence, and doesn't seem to update this belief based on new evidence. >What the AI bulls don’t seem to understand is that AI could be a great technological achievement AND an impending economic collapse This doesn't seem to be Ed Zitron's po…

This is his position, he doesn't have time to say it on corporate media that give him 5 minutes but he starts basically every podcast with (paraphrasing) "LLMs are rightfully a boring several-hundred-million-dollar business that will be important in some industries like coding but the vast majority of the population won't care about".

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#55

Post by vonneumannstan »

GolfPopper wrote: post #39
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #17

This guy has zero zip nada null AI background. He is a videogame reviewer and PR guy. He is a pure influencer feeding on the AI backlash he helped to create. He has been predicting a crash for how many years now? And while I can totally see Anthropic and OpenAI going through some things on the way to post-IPO FMV, those things do not include AI going away. It truly doesn't matter whether closed source Frontier lab mo…

Yeah, it's not like there are AI-focused hedge funds crashing and burning right now.

Its up 80% on the year. How do your investments compare?

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#56

Post by jackb4040 »

pydry wrote: post #18
no_multitudes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His history of predictions about LLMs is not great and he generally seems ideologically committed to pretending they're almost useless and teetering on the edge of collapse. For example, this article claims: "Every single story you’ve read about the “incredible growth” of these cloud platforms is an embarrassing misread of three companies that are misleading investors that will more than likely be forced in the next…

>In july 2024, Zitron wrote at length about how the economics of OpenAI were likely to collapse in the next 1 to 2 years [1]. One of my clearest memories of the first tech bubble was of a number of people who accurately identified that it WAS a bubble and then predicted it would go pop 12-18 months before it did. They attracted plenty of scorn and derision for being 80% right from people who were 100% wrong. Some als…

Is that the prediction they're claiming is "wrong"? The year's nowhere near out yet.

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#57

Post by maleldil »

dgellow wrote: post #50
semiquaver wrote: post #16

Has ed zitron ever accounted for the fact that his predictions literally never come true? In most jobs such a poor track record would be disqualifying.

His predictions don’t matter… what matters is the thesis and what it is based upon. Literally nobody can predict to the month or even year when a bubble will pop. But you can identify and document that a bubble exists, and what the actors are doing. When reading an article you’re supposed to analyze the actual thesis, not just evaluate if the person is an oracle or not

If you fervently posit a theory but its predictions fail, why would anyone believe it?

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#58

Post by cmiles8 »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #55
GolfPopper wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's not like there are AI-focused hedge funds crashing and burning right now.

Its up 80% on the year. How do your investments compare?

This is the most misquoted bit in that whole fiasco. He apparently had to sell every liquid thing in the portfolio. What’s left is allegedly just some highly illiquid paper assets that they’ve also been trying to unload. The present value of those is iffy at best and may well also plummet before they can be cashed in. That “80%” can’t be realized right now in any traditional sense.

No matter how you slice it the whole sequence of events last week was an unmitigated disaster. He’ll likely never manage other people’s money ever again.

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#59

Post by ElProlactin »

> The question I want to ask anyone reading this who might have invested in or in some way backed the hyperscalers and the greater AI industry:

> What is it you think you’ve gotten yourself into? Because I think you’re being sold a lie.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of realized gains.

And the question I want to ask to anyone paying $70/year for Ed's newsletter: what has throwing the AI baby out with the bathwater gotten you?

Re: The AI Demand Bubble

#60

Post by derdi »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #15
actapp80 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual risk that the author does not even broach upon for investors... the thing that will actually torpedo this massive investment are the open source open weight chinese models. The monopoly will likely then shift from the model to the compute, i.e. who has the GPUs to serve inference at scale from the open weight models. The cloud compute giants have basically bought everything that Nvidia, Broadcom etc. hav…

The hyperscalers already had the compute monopoly. They just spent a bunch of money on even more compute. Compute is OK because it's reasonably general purpose to reallocate for what comes after chatbots (e.g. consumer robotics which is reasonably likely to take off in the next 4 years).

What kind of robots are we talking about? What will robots do for me five years from today?
Post reply on HN