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The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

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Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#91

Post by vachina »

SoftTalker wrote: post #58
TrackerFF wrote: post #16

The thing is, the models do work. They add value to me each and every day, to a degree almost no other tech has done before. But that doesn't take away the fact that this is extremely expensive stuff (not for me, but for the companies pushing the envelope), far too expensive. And it is really taking its toll on other resources, like electricity.

But are you paying for them commensurate with the value they create? That's the problem. Tons of money being invested/borrowed on technology with not nearly enough revenue to justify it. Same thing that happened in the late 1990s.

Of course not, that’s what make vibe coding “fun”.

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#92

Post by bluGill »

bix6 wrote: post #35
JCM9 wrote: post #4

The current bubble is getting scary. When this thing pops the blast it’s going to be a real mess. The big tech firms will hurt, fire some execs in a show of “making changes,” do a bunch of layoffs across “AI” teams to show the market they’re pivoting and getting costs in order, and move on. The startups ecosystem will suffer extensive and catastrophic damage. The funding ecosystem will be set back years as this wipes…

> but the most experienced trusted folks I know are already repositioning themselves to weather the upcoming storm. Repositioning in what way?

The same way they always do every single year: they re balance their portfolio so they are never heavily invested in any one thing.

If you believe in AI and want to bet strongly in it - which some experienced folks do - you take 5% of your portfolio and bet that in AI. The other 95% is invested in a diversified portfolio.

There are many inexperienced investors. Anyone can ride a bubble up and make a lot of money. There is no reason to think you can call the top of a bubble (or if there is a bubble!) consistently enough to bet on it.

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#93

Post by tencentshill »

diggan wrote: post #74
EcommerceFlow wrote: post #54

- ChatGPT still lags for me daily and I'm on a PRO subscription. - SORA is usable but extremely slow and constrained. - Image gen same thing, but getting a bit quicker and less constrained. This is with agents not having taken off yet, and the vast portion of the world economy not interacting with LLM Ai? Agents alone will require ungodly amounts of compute. Bullish

> ChatGPT still lags for me daily What exactly are you referring to? Their UI seems to have troubles to load the list of conversations since like a week back, otherwise it seems fine? I mean, UX could be a lot better, but I'm experiencing anything I'd describe as "lag".

>list of conversations

How many bytes could that entire list possibly be? Surely less than your average webpage ad.

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#94

Post by DougN7 »

diggan wrote: post #52
qsort wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I kind of hope you're right. I couldn't care less if big tech gets knocked down a peg, but in many quarters the AI boom is what's keeping the lights on. A market correction of that magnitude would mean a lot of pain for a lot of normal people, it's not exactly something I'm cheering on...

As someone who've jumped on previous hype-trains, most of us who get involved with "frontiers" know it's over-hyped, have more realistic perspective of it and are more-or-less ready for what eventually will come. I'm sure most people heavily invested into AI (energy, money or time-wise) know the consequences of the bet they've done, they're not exactly just trying to earn a living. If the crash/bubble-pop would have…

I don’t know. I’ve read the AI bubble/spending is so big (new data centers, power plants, etc) that it’s propping up GDP. If that all went away plenty of normal people could get hurt. Still, probably better sooner than later. Well, maybe after the power plants are done so we have excess capacity.

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#95

Post by rtp4me »

squidbeak wrote: post #83
diggan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope I’m wrong I kind of hope you're right. Any "hyped" industry/sector is bound to eventually needing to get back to reality, and focus on things that actually work, rather than spraying and praying prototypes and over-hyping them. The individuals and companies building real products that actually improve something will stick around, either as they are, or at least as ideas, and most of the interesting stuff ten…

Hard disagree. The correction you envisage to something smaller and more focused won't happen because this is also a race between nation states. The bubble is in the startups, and you're right to suggest many are doomed. But the AI giants have strategic national importance now, and won't be denied funding and resources while their foreign rivals continue to grow.

In my naïve of opinion, AI is not necessarily about coding or making things better, it's more about creating a system to control the message to the masses. Just like Facebook controlled the message during the Clinton/Trump campaigns, AI is going to control the message for the vast majority of easily swayed people. Especially now since it is very hard to detect between real and AI generated persons/data (see Tilly Norwood).

This relates directly from your post about nation states. Those who control the message control the people.

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#96

Post by bix6 »

bluGill wrote: post #92
bix6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the most experienced trusted folks I know are already repositioning themselves to weather the upcoming storm. Repositioning in what way?

The same way they always do every single year: they re balance their portfolio so they are never heavily invested in any one thing. If you believe in AI and want to bet strongly in it - which some experienced folks do - you take 5% of your portfolio and bet that in AI. The other 95% is invested in a diversified portfolio. There are many inexperienced investors. Anyone can ride a bubble up and make a lot of money. The…

And what about in the private markets? YCs entire recent cohort was AI alongside many of the “top” firms.

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#97

Post by throw219080123 »

infecto wrote: post #76
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Am I rich? What are you even on about. The only people I find harping on about some amorphous "value" floating around in the air are typically people with portfolios. >I can again spend a few dollars and turn unstructured data into structure. Saving 5 seconds on a 10 second task using an infinite amount more energy is not "value", it's garbage propped up by VC money and regular people are going to be paying for it w…

You’re confusing your frustration with some half-baked React scaffolding with the entire field. “Saving 5 seconds on a 10 second task” is just a strawman, there are workloads where it saves weeks, even months. If you can’t see that, fine, but don’t pretend your blind spot is universal truth. And spare me the VC boogeyman. The fact that capital flows into bad bets doesn’t erase the actual wins. We’ve had garbage propp…

To save months the output would have to be reliable, but it isn't. It saves very little, especially at data input and coding.

It does save time for tasks where the output is easily checked, such as image generation and translations. But the quality is often mediocre.

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#99

Post by bluGill »

bix6 wrote: post #96
bluGill wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way they always do every single year: they re balance their portfolio so they are never heavily invested in any one thing. If you believe in AI and want to bet strongly in it - which some experienced folks do - you take 5% of your portfolio and bet that in AI. The other 95% is invested in a diversified portfolio. There are many inexperienced investors. Anyone can ride a bubble up and make a lot of money. The…

And what about in the private markets? YCs entire recent cohort was AI alongside many of the “top” firms.

I'm not 100% sure how YC works, but generally places like that are invested in by people who use it as the risk portion of the portfolio. So you while YC might be 100% in AI, the people behind YC or only 5% in and so it works out. If you have 100% in any company then you are diversified and need to fix your portfolio.

It is generally best for a company to specialize in something they do well. It is possible that YC has picked winners because their specialize in this, and thus even though the AI bubble collapses they are okay. Who knows - but this is something specialists can do in some cases

Re: The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt

#100

Post by infecto »

throw219080123 wrote: post #97
infecto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re confusing your frustration with some half-baked React scaffolding with the entire field. “Saving 5 seconds on a 10 second task” is just a strawman, there are workloads where it saves weeks, even months. If you can’t see that, fine, but don’t pretend your blind spot is universal truth. And spare me the VC boogeyman. The fact that capital flows into bad bets doesn’t erase the actual wins. We’ve had garbage propp…

To save months the output would have to be reliable, but it isn't. It saves very little, especially at data input and coding. It does save time for tasks where the output is easily checked, such as image generation and translations. But the quality is often mediocre.

I cannot say for your work but for classification steps and data structuring it’s quite accurate and this is with regular testing. I cannot speak for your work but for mine and folks in adjacent industries, LLM are fantastic and adding a lot of value to our workflows. You’re honestly holding on to this dead idea that LLM outputs are full of hallucinations. Throwaway account with throwaway comment.
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