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AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

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61–70 of 83 posts

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#61
post #3

During most of the dot-com boom, there was not a broad consensus that a bubble existed, whereas today’s AI boom is widely accompanied by media warnings about an AI bubble, making public awareness much higher than it was in the late 1990s. I don't think a single person hasn't heard the "circular financing" talking points from multiple people who think they're being insightful. Or Burry who thinks a GPU should be trash…

There was, at least towards the end. FED chair at the time described it as 'irrational exuberance'. Warren Buffett made an excellent speech in front of most Silicon Valley titans at the time - telling them that their wealth is about to be blown up. This isn't rocket science - do anybody sane believe that OpenAI will spend what, 1.5 Trillion $ they project ? Quite a big chunck of Oracle, Nvidia and others projections…

Warnings today are mainstream and widely understood, unlike late‑90s dot-coms where Buffett was largely ignored. Buffett explicitly says he doesn't invest in complicated businesses, finances aside. Plus, core AI players are profitable and funding capex from real earnings, valuations are concentrated in a few mega-caps, revenues are real, and financing is healthier. So while parts of AI may be overvalued, it’s structurally very different from the 1999 bubble.

And is it really overvalued if AGI is achieved? Sounds like risk:reward profile is already priced in the gamble, and the valuation is appropriate....But I guess if you take it to the logical conclusion... if AGI is achieved, everyone will be out of a job, so scarcity-based economics, based on scarce labor input, itself will have to be redone. Wild speculation there.

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#62

Its silly to talk about a bubble when all of the major AI companies just recieved 3-5yrs runway in VC. I normally hate the term FUD, bit in this case it's proveably true. Even if these companies collapse in 5 years, thats a lifetime away in tech years, not an immediate bubble.

Could you show me proof of the 3-5 year runway thing? I’m not saying it’s outlandish but I’m skeptical.

Just look at recent funding rounds?

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#63
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that isn't true

We're at a record number of subprime borrowers falling behind on car loans, which historically is a really bad economical sign, consumer sentiment is at an all time low and the labor market isn't looking great either. Anecdotally, prices have risen sharply and people are getting sharply priced out of basic necessities due to rising costs.

The last financial crisis was 2008. Are you saying there was a tech bubble in 2008? The economy can do bad in lots of sectors while others are gaining traction.

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Jeffery Gundlach is wrong when he just said literally everything is overvalued? Everyone knew it was a bubble in 2001 and in 1929, that's part of being a bubble, it doesn't make sense but it just keeps going up ignoring all risks. Is there liquidity for a little more yeah maybe, but when everyone is long and highly leveraged there is only one way for things eventually to go.

That person is not even an academic. At least google Eugene Fama so you don't embarrass yourself like this. What does Ja Rule think about bubbles? Ask him why markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

I do know who he is, why do you assume I don't, just so you think you can appear smart on the internet? Pretty pathetic. Gundalach has better investing success than you and Fama, you should listen to what he says instead of just assume he's wrong, that's called being intellectually dishonest.

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That person is not even an academic. At least google Eugene Fama so you don't embarrass yourself like this. What does Ja Rule think about bubbles? Ask him why markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

I do know who he is, why do you assume I don't, just so you think you can appear smart on the internet? Pretty pathetic. Gundalach has better investing success than you and Fama, you should listen to what he says instead of just assume he's wrong, that's called being intellectually dishonest.

Yeah I guess you fundamentally misunderstand the difference/significance between someone who is seeking objective peer-reviewed truth and someone who tries to seduce investors to put money into their fund for fees on the internet with wild theories and anecdotal gambling success. It's not your fault, you must be a teenager or something.

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#67
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs don’t really reason Do you have a test for this? Or is it based on the presumption that reasoning skills cannot evolve, it can only be the result of "intelligent design"?

I have been spent many hours with them on coding tasks. As things currently stand once context or complexity reaches a certain point they become completely incapable of solving problems and that point occurs on very simple things. They appear completely brain dead at times although they are magnificent liars at making you think they understand the problem. Although, I recently got chatGPT 5 to solve a problem in a co…

>> the presumption that reasoning skills cannot evolve

> I don’t know how to address the evolve part. LLMs don’t directly mutate and have selective pressure like living organisms.

Sorry, that was poorly worded. I meant "can reasoning skills not be evolved through the neural net training phase?"

Sure, once you deploy an LLM, it does not evolve any more.

But let's say you have a person Tom with 5-minute short term memory loss, meaning he can't ever remember more than 5 minutes back. His reasoning skills are completely static, just based on his previous education before the memory loss accident, and the last 5 minutes.

Is "5-minute Tom" incapable of reasoning because he can't learn new things?

> They appear completely brain dead at times

Yes, definitely. But they also manage to produce what looks like actual reasoning in other cases. Meaning, "reasoning, not pattern matching".

So if a thing can reason at some times and in some cases, but not in other, what do we call that?

An LLM is a lot like a regular CPU. A CPU basically just operates step by step, where it takes inputs, a state memory, and stored read-only data, puts those into combinatorical logic to calculate new outputs and updates to the state memory.

An LLM does the same thing. It runs step by step, takes the user input+its own previous output tokens and stored readonly data, puts those into a huge neural network to perform processing to generate the next output token.

The "state memory" in an LLM (=the context window) is a lot more limited than a CPU RAM+disk, but it's still a state memory.

So I don't have a problem imagining that an LLM can perform some level of reasoning. Limited and flawed for sure, but still a different creature than "pattern matching".

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> llms can make the promise of robots real I think this is a very large overstatement. Many large problems still exist in robotics which can not be papered over with LLMs. I’m familiar with problems in manipulation and affordable sensing, which will not be solved via llms, and are fundamentally necessary for reliable and safe interaction with the real world. I’m confident there are many others. LLMs probably will hel…

More on that in an article posted in October: "Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922

Thanks for linking this! Rodney Brooks is great, in fact I was trying to remember his name to link some of his stuff, but somehow couldn't, lol.

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#69
post #12

I am split on this, this is definitely a bubble but I don’t know if it’s going to crash or wipe out countries. The problem here is the tech is real and has great promise. This is not AGI but llms can make the promise of robots real, by it may take a long time for it to materialize just like with self driving cars. So the hype can subside but it needs an impetus to slide. It may or may not happen and even if it does,…

the tech is real. The problem is that it doesn't have any of the promise it's hyped up to have. We've just about reached their limits.

The problem (for the companies) is that although the problem is real and the solution is good, nobody wants to pay a lot of money for that - especially with open models. That would still be a great profitable tech if ad spending growth was eternal but it is not and google already captures whatever growth.

Re: AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All

#70
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the tech is real and has great promise. This was very true of the dotcom bubble. The entire "web" was new, and the promise was everything you use it for today . Pets.com was a laughing stock for years as an example of dotcom excess, and now we have chewy.com, successfully running the same model. Webvan.com, was a similar example of "excess" and now we have Instacart and others. I looked up webvan just now--the post…

Isn't openAI already profitable on inference? I understand training is still costly, but it's not unimaginable for it to turn profitable as well if you think believe they'll generate trillions in value by eliminating millions of jobs.

> Isn't openAI already profitable on inference?

Probably not, but the numbers they've released are too opaque to tell.

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