What Would Happen If an AI Bubble Burst? (msn.com) 166
The Washington Post notes AI's "increasingly outsize role" in propping up America's economic fortunes.
"Last week, the United States reported that the economy expanded at a rate of 1.6 percent in the first half of the year, with most of that growth driven by AI spending. Without AI investment, growth would have been at about a third of that rate, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis." The huge economic influence of AI spending illustrates how Silicon Valley is placing a bet of unprecedented scale that the technology will revolutionize every aspect of life and work. Its sway suggests there will be economic damage far beyond Silicon Valley if that bet doesn't work out or companies pull back. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are on track to spend nearly $400 billion this year on data centers...
Concern about a potential bubble in AI investment has recently grown in technology and financial circles. ChatGPT and other AI tools are hugely popular with companies and consumers, and hundreds of billions of dollars has been sunk into AI ventures over the past three years. But few of the new initiatives are profitable, and huge profits will be needed for the immense investments to pay off... "I'm getting more and more skeptical and more and more concerned with what's happening" with artificial intelligence, said Andrew Odlyzko, an economic historian and University of Minnesota emeritus professor who has studied financial bubbles closely, including the telecom bubble that collapsed in 2001 as part of the dot-com crash. Some industry insiders have expressed concern that the latest AI releases have fallen short of expectations, suggesting the technology may not advance enough to pay back the huge investments being made, he said. "AI is a craze," Odlyzko said...
[The Federal Reserve's August "beige book" summarizes interviews with business owners across the country, according to the article — and it found surging investments in AI data centers, which could tie their fortunes to other sectors.] That's boosting demand for electricity and trucking in the Atlanta region, a hot spot for the facilities, and creating new projects for commercial real estate developers in the Philadelphia region. Because tech companies now dominate public markets, any change in their fortunes and share prices can also have a powerful influence on stock indexes, 401(k)s and the wider economy... Stock market slumps can have knock-on effects by undercutting the confidence of American businesses and consumers, leading them to spend less, said Gregory Daco [chief economist at strategy consulting firm EY-Parthenon]... "That directly affects economic activity," he said, potentially widening the economic fallout...
Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a Sept. 4 note to clients that even if AI investment works out for companies like Google, there will be an "inevitable slowdown" in data center construction. That will cut revenue to companies providing the projects with chips and electricity, the note said. In a more extreme scenario where Big Tech pulls back spending to 2022 levels, the entire S&P 500 would lose 30 percent of the revenue growth Wall Street currently expects next year, the analysts wrote.
The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, according to estimates in a recent note from independent research firm the MacroStrategy Partnership (as reported by MarketWatch).
And "never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains somewhat unproven as a profit-making business model," writes Bloomberg, adding that OpenAI and other large tech companies are "relying increasingly on debt to support their unprecedented spending." (Although Bloomberg also notes that ChatGPT alone has roughly 700 million weekly users, and that last month Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work.)
"Last week, the United States reported that the economy expanded at a rate of 1.6 percent in the first half of the year, with most of that growth driven by AI spending. Without AI investment, growth would have been at about a third of that rate, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis." The huge economic influence of AI spending illustrates how Silicon Valley is placing a bet of unprecedented scale that the technology will revolutionize every aspect of life and work. Its sway suggests there will be economic damage far beyond Silicon Valley if that bet doesn't work out or companies pull back. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are on track to spend nearly $400 billion this year on data centers...
Concern about a potential bubble in AI investment has recently grown in technology and financial circles. ChatGPT and other AI tools are hugely popular with companies and consumers, and hundreds of billions of dollars has been sunk into AI ventures over the past three years. But few of the new initiatives are profitable, and huge profits will be needed for the immense investments to pay off... "I'm getting more and more skeptical and more and more concerned with what's happening" with artificial intelligence, said Andrew Odlyzko, an economic historian and University of Minnesota emeritus professor who has studied financial bubbles closely, including the telecom bubble that collapsed in 2001 as part of the dot-com crash. Some industry insiders have expressed concern that the latest AI releases have fallen short of expectations, suggesting the technology may not advance enough to pay back the huge investments being made, he said. "AI is a craze," Odlyzko said...
[The Federal Reserve's August "beige book" summarizes interviews with business owners across the country, according to the article — and it found surging investments in AI data centers, which could tie their fortunes to other sectors.] That's boosting demand for electricity and trucking in the Atlanta region, a hot spot for the facilities, and creating new projects for commercial real estate developers in the Philadelphia region. Because tech companies now dominate public markets, any change in their fortunes and share prices can also have a powerful influence on stock indexes, 401(k)s and the wider economy... Stock market slumps can have knock-on effects by undercutting the confidence of American businesses and consumers, leading them to spend less, said Gregory Daco [chief economist at strategy consulting firm EY-Parthenon]... "That directly affects economic activity," he said, potentially widening the economic fallout...
Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a Sept. 4 note to clients that even if AI investment works out for companies like Google, there will be an "inevitable slowdown" in data center construction. That will cut revenue to companies providing the projects with chips and electricity, the note said. In a more extreme scenario where Big Tech pulls back spending to 2022 levels, the entire S&P 500 would lose 30 percent of the revenue growth Wall Street currently expects next year, the analysts wrote.
The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, according to estimates in a recent note from independent research firm the MacroStrategy Partnership (as reported by MarketWatch).
And "never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains somewhat unproven as a profit-making business model," writes Bloomberg, adding that OpenAI and other large tech companies are "relying increasingly on debt to support their unprecedented spending." (Although Bloomberg also notes that ChatGPT alone has roughly 700 million weekly users, and that last month Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work.)
Imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Imagine (Score:4, Insightful)
This goes directly against Big Oil. Not only including oil companies, but also oil exporters.
Re:Imagine (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully, need for that stuff is on a downward trend.
As for the bubble, I think it extends way beyond AI. The US economy has been a mirage for some time now. I welcome the pop, so that the focus of the economy shifts to things that are real, and benefit the people. Maybe we'll even get a democratic system of government out of it, hard times can force people to work together on important tasks they don't have an incentive to when they're able to just cruise social media all day and get fat.
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No it's not? What are you talking about? Most cars by FAR are still ICEs and that's the main market for oil. A few first-world countries have a statistically significant amount of electric cars, but the rest of the world is still driving ICEs and will continue to do so for a long time.
It's not just the capital cost of an electric car, which is still ridiculous compared to an ICE (most electrics are premium and sold to high income "eco conscious" buyers who can afford to choose to pay more). Even if electric
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What are you talking about?
A trend. You recognize what this concept is, otherwise you wouldn't have speculated where the demand will be in 20 years.
Re: Imagine (Score:4, Informative)
It's not just the capital cost of an electric car, which is still ridiculous compared to an ICE (most electrics are premium and sold to high income "eco conscious" buyers who can afford to choose to pay more
Good points, if we disregard China, the largest auto market in the world.
In the West we could have State intervention to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels. It might even be cheaper than being customers to an oil cartel requiring permanent military presence.
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And, that drunk homeless guy could be President.
What would the State do... prevent people from driving ICE vehicles? What about people getting to work so they get their taxes?
As I've said before... power generation is nowhere near the level needed to (let's say) charge one EV per household... sure, charge at night when there's a "surplus" of power... except, not everyone has a garage, and not every 'office building' that the upper percent work at has a charger at every parking spot.
Wind works... if you hav
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The best we can hope for is that the air is let out slowly instead of the whole thing rupturing at once. What happens in hard times at the beginning is that everyone panics and is out for
Re:Imagine (Score:4, Interesting)
"Get rich quick" requires a bunch of money in circulation for people to skim off. The very scenario we're discussing is that excessive quantities of dollars stop circulating.
Amish have a bunch of weird religious stuff and beat their children, but the agrarian lifestyle does appeal to me. If there wasn't now a paywall to access that lifestyle, I'd be living it already.
Re: Imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
Or alternatively the U.S. spirals further downward into totalitarianism and decay and we end up with at least a lost decade or two, if not an outright century of humiliation.
But I guess this current path is already putting us down that route so not much left to lose anymore for the average American.
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Thankfully, need for that stuff is on a downward trend.
i don't think so. in the long run, yes, probably (possibly?), but fossil use is still increasing and hasn't spiked yet. actually, it's getting a boost for several reasons: geopolitics, various domestic economic woes and last but not least, profit.
caveat: you say "need". and in that regard you are absolutely right. we wouldn't really have so much "need" for it if spurious interest weren't involved, but here we are. so that's a whish, not the reality.
Re:Imagine (Score:5, Interesting)
After the 2008 crash. Central banks opened the faucet and started printing money like crazy. It was supposed to be temporary but it has continued. All this money went primarily to the financial industry which is flush with cash to invest in "the next big thing".
The result today is that there are just a small handful of companies (Meta, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Tesla) have a combined market cap of $19 Trillion. More than the GDP of Germany, Japan and India.
It's all a speculative bubble.
https://youtu.be/S7NHhYlb1Gk?s... [youtu.be]
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Re: Imagine (Score:2)
The US economy is an Potemkin exercise in QE. The Fed prints money and hands it to banks. Banks lend it out at a markup. Everyone pays various degrees of taxes to destroy that money. The cycle repeats.
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I was referring to the shenanigans, not their results.
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I don't know about the "people" but for me personally, I welcome a crash because it's very likely the only way asset prices drop. My job is very recession/depression resistant (grocery store, people always need food). I'm got a lot of cash in T bills, so fairly risk free but low reward as well. The crash will offer me a great chance to buy the dip or otherwise get back into the housing market.
The last crash in 2008 was how I got my first condo. I'm hoping for a repeat. What everyone else does isn't really m
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Don't worry, once Skynet takes over, it'll get the fusion reactors running in 5 minutes
Re:Imagine (Score:4, Interesting)
Why stop there? Healthcare, education, daycare for parents because a single income can no longer support a family. Install solar panels over the thousands of acres of parking lots. It’s free electricity being wasted. Don’t threaten me with a good time!
Re: Imagine (Score:2)
Run for public office and push these policy ideas
Re: Imagine (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately big companies are not interested in anything that doesn't bring short-term returns.
Re:Imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
Just imagine if this much money and effort had gone into nuclear fusion, securing clean energy for the rest of humanity's future.
Fusion is an unproven technology. Solar, wind and energy conservation are proven, cost effective and realistic technologies. We don't need to wait for fusion when we already have the real solutions being developed right now.
Re:Imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
"Solar, wind and energy conservation are proven, cost effective and realistic technologies"
Oh FFS, how many times does the word "baseload" have to be mentioned before people like you get it? Yes , solar and wind should be an essential part of the mix - but the sun doesn't shine at night or much at all during a northern winter and wind power often isn't much use when there's a slopw moving high pressure system sat above (which is pretty bloody often in a large part of the world). And no, you can't just rely on batteries, they can't store enough power for more than a few hours unless you have a storage unit the size of a small hill.
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I guess you're one of those "the glass is always empty" people. There are storage options beyond batteries, some work in the cold. And no one's building AI data centers in the artic, so I think it's safe to ignore your straw-man argument.
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No, it's called being realistic.
What exactly does AI-LLMs benefit the common layperson? Y'know, Joe the mechanic down the street, whose backyard was bought up and turned into a big solar panel that he can't use? Should we put up wind turbines on every baseball diamond in the country? Should we clear-cut all the forests the hunters frequent so we can turn all that land into a solar/wind farm?
How about driving your EV on the I-50 through the Nevada desert... where do you charge? Sure, they can install pan
Re: Imagine (Score:2)
AI will spend the next 10 years finding new and better ways to separate you from your hard earned money
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I saw an article the other day claiming that someone wanted to build AI data centres in northern Canada because it eliminates much of the cooling needs. For all I know it may have been made up by AI but it makes a certain amount of sense if they don't need to rely on solar panels to power it and have reliable power from somewhere like a nuclear reactor.
Re: Imagine (Score:3)
Who said anything about AI data centres? And sure, you can use hydro. Go any spare mountain valleys near you? No, me neither.
Re:Imagine (Score:4, Interesting)
I did the math for a 50 MW data center over at 15 hour winter night. Using Tesla Max-Power batteries (3.9 MW-Hr and 42 tons each) it comes out to about 8000 tons of battery to get through the night. That's about the weight of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer.
Due to horizon slop in the winter you now have 7 hours to recharge that battery bank while still powering the data center. Feel free to calculate the number of solar panels needed. That's on a clear day. On an overcast wanter's day the panels will put out 7% of nameplate rating, so divide by 14. Yes, that is worse than I was expecting but the data is the data. The cloud layers during the temperature inversions are brutal, and it's also dead calm so forget about wind.
The local data centers are powered from the hydroelectric dams in the Columbia River. That source is tapped out. There is room for one more in the Hanford Reach but the environmentalists will go nuts if you try to build it.
Re:Imagine (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. Where I live we get about 1/4 as much power from solar in the winter as summer if using the year-round optimal alignment for the panels. By biasing it for winter use we can boost the winter power a bit but at the cost of losing summer power. We can also go 3-4 days without decent sunshine so that means sustaining power usage requires 3-4x as many batteries as you might otherwise calculate in order to cover those bad times.
Also don't forget the losses in the system which mean you probably then need to add some more to compensate for those. I don't know how big commercial systems compare but it's at least 20% in my home battery backup between the cables, charger and inverter.
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You are going to pump seawater into the reservoir? I hope your budget includes the liner for that reservoir or the seawater will pollute the local ground water.
Also, December is longer than three days. The local dunkelflautes last longer than a week, then you might get a couple days to recharge and you are becalmed and dark again.
Wind and solar in the winter in the Pacific Northwest are not really viable. Summer is no problem,
Re:Imagine (Score:4, Interesting)
Good thing about data centers is that data is much cheaper to send over long distances than electricity. Shut down the data processing at local nighttime and fire up the data center somewhere in the other hemisphere. Yes, this means there will be an overcapacity of data centers. Probably still cheaper than batteries attached to them and high power transmission lines.
Re: Imagine (Score:2)
Now account for the annual degradation of those solar panels
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You can cry "baseload" as often as you want. It still only shows that you have no clue and are willing to be aggressive about your incompetence.
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Oh FFS, how many times do I have to explain that the word "baseload" is only relevant for power plants that cannot do load following - coal and nuclear, essentially.
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Fusion is an unproven technology. Solar, wind and energy conservation are proven, cost effective and realistic technologies. We don't need to wait for fusion when we already have the real solutions being developed right now.
Fusion is a dispatachable energy source, solar and wind are not. With current technology there is no cost effective and realistic way of deploying 100% solar and wind.
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Fusion research is not fast and cannot be. Too many things have to be invented from scratch. Realistic projections for it having a real impact are currently around the 50 year mark and more money is not going to have much effect on that. These things take time.
But this amount of money going into reasonably mature renewables and storage would have made a massive difference. Greed, arrogance, stupidity and ignorance prevent sane used of money at this scale.
We've got clean energy (Score:2, Interesting)
I do not understand why old nerds are so obsessed with nuclear. It's just not a very good technology. It works but only under very specific social circumstances. The technology is extremely dangerous when not properly handled and since we as a society are obsessed with quarter to quarter profitability it's basically guaranteed that we are going to eventually cut the corners needed to keep it safe.
You can see t
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"Wind and solar have been able to provide base power for at least 15 years debatably longer."
Really? See the green line which is wind plus solar. Do you see anything base load about it?
https://transmission.bpa.gov/b... [bpa.gov]
Compare that to the cyan line, the one that is dead flat at 1100 MW.
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Nuclear fusion is only twenty years away and has been all my life. No amount of taxpayers' money thrown at it appears to make a difference to that timescale.
It will only become commercially viable when some company (NukeX?) needs it to be viable, and will likely be developed in a few years with a crash program and a lot of smart engineers who aren't tied to government funding to keep their pay checks coming in.
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Just imagine if this much money and effort had gone into nuclear fusion, securing clean energy for the rest of humanity's future.
The problem with these kinds of thought-experiments is that reality doesn't really work like that.
Likely, multiple decades of continued, large investments into this subject will be needed. There likely is no fast-path to success there.
AI hasn't received this kind of money for that long. Maybe for the last five years?
Re: Imagine (Score:2)
In reality this money will go into new and better ways to manipulate you into spending money on crap you dont need, or in finding new and better ways for us to debt finance ourselves into perpetual debt serfdom. Get ready for 1 cent per month payment plans for individual pop tarts
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Re: Imagine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Imagine (Score:2)
Here’s what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
The losses will be covered by the taxes you and I pay. Why do you think they all attended the inauguration?
Re:Here’s what happens (Score:5, Informative)
POP (Score:3)
It's going to be the POP heard around the world.
Re: POP (Score:2)
They will just pivot. Bitcoin drove the gpu prices up, nft, etc.. if AI pops, they will just figure out a way to reuse the "machines".
I do think there is way too much hype but the horse has left the barn and this will not just go away.
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. if AI pops, they will just figure out a way to reuse the "machines".
Finally, we can have ray tracing at a butter smooth 10 FPS.
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Just because some companies will vanish it doesn't mean the rest won't leave the GPUs running. Who has a high compute datacenter now will have a high compute datacenter then and be able to run AI others may no longer be able to run. Nvidia stock may fall for some time, though. It will also, if Huawei manages to build cards that can compete and they are trying their best to be able to do so soon.
GLD (Score:3)
GLD has been going up like crazy. 45% YTD. QQQ has made that money in 6 the last 6 months. SPY is a bit behind at 32%.
All I can say is, as soon as you start seeing ripples, it'll mean the AI bubble is bursting. Sell everything and run to GLD. This crash is gonna be stupid big and it won't be just "the market". The USD is taking a hit and oh boy it'll suffer when the AI bubble bursts.
Which is a shame because I've found actually great use cases for AI. For example, Adobe has this tool (Adobe Podcast) that takes bad microphone audio and provides you with instanely good quality audio. You can record with a lav mic out in the street near a construction site, and this tool makes your voice sound like like it was recorded at a proper studio with a condenser mic at short range. It's impressive.
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The AI that cleans up your audio isn't an LLM. The bubble is about LLMs.
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The bubble is about everything AI, specifically neural networks. LLMs make all the noise, but audio, video, and imagery are all going all for the ride.
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You know what company I think is poised to make a vast amount of money on AI? Waymo. (That is, Alphabet, as in google). I know, Alphabet is already valued at $3T which seems pretty insane...
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Only reason gold is going up is people buying "gold" coins and all that. A lot is going into processor manufacturing.
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Buying gold before the AI bubble bursts is still a good investment. Otherwise you're going to be left holding, not an empty bag, but a bag full of dollars.
You will probably recover in the long run, but gold will at least keep a value. Speculative or not, it won't just tank like the USD when the AI bubble bursts.
Buying GLD these days is not really about speculating with prices, but about holding the value of your life savings and not finding yourself 20, 30% down one day. Or more. Who knows.
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Maybe. People who bought gold in the 1970s bubble thought the same, but they probably still haven't made their money back in real terms. This time may be different, but gold still looks expensive to me.
The safe bet⦠(Score:2)
Not much (Score:2)
Nothing of value would be lost.
Real progress continues (Score:2)
Engineers and scientists continue to make great progress
The financial world is dominated by gamblers, hypemongers and other crystal ball gazers who foolishly believe they can predict the future
Financial gambles sometimes fail, sometimes spectacularly
Engineers and scientists survive and continue working
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Indeed. One thing I tell my IT/CS engineering students is that they need to plan for being unemployed/low employed for a couple of years on occasion, because the economics graduates are collectively stupid and panicky. The next thing I recommend is when things pick up again to sell themselves expensively to recover the loss or insist on other benefits. The economics morons will not have a choice.
Not a big issue, good engineers understand having reserves and fallback plans.
Why "if"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is "when". Seriously, stop hallucinating.
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While it is free, everybody is enthralled by the psychic.
Speak for yourself. I am not even disappointed, it is as crappy as I did expect.
You know what they say about assumptions (Score:3)
"Last week, the United States reported that the economy expanded at a rate of 1.6 percent in the first half of the year, with most of that growth driven by AI spending. Without AI investment, growth would have been at about a third of that rate, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis."
Or that same money would have been spent on something else instead. Maybe something that won't turn out to be snake oil.
AI centers get tariff exemption, not the taxpayers (Score:2)
Pollution would be reduced! (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuck your stupid money concerns about deluded billionaires, what about the environment? Bullshit computing because of AI uses a HUGE amount of electricity. If that were disappear then less energy would be generated. Since renewables are always generating electricity, it means that fewer fossil fuels would be burned.
I don't give a damn about people with delusions of building an AI god, I care about if people are going to die as a result of your delusions. Climate change is real, your AI gods/slaves are not.
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I don't give a damn about people with delusions of building an AI god, I care about if people are going to die as a result of your delusions. Climate change is real, your AI gods/slaves are not.
The two are are hardly inseparable. Turn the billionaires into fertiliser and both these problems go away.
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Apparently the AGI superintelligence will solve climate change for us. Which may well be true ... but if so, it will say "You morons already know how to fix climate change. Build renewable electricity generation, stop burning fossil fuels and tax the bil-- 503 Server Error"
Already prepared for it (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously the bubble is going to burst, so I'm preparing for it already.
First I stopped using AI-centered products. When the bubble bursts, my tools don't all stop working. Also helps if I don't use companies that rely too much on AI.
Second I changed my investments (401k, IRA, HSA, etc) away from big tech companies. There's plenty of index funds that don't have a heavy bias toward tech or AI. The whole market will dip, but if you're not in AI you won't feel it as bad.
Third I'm building out residential solar using the remaining tax incentives before they expire. Regardless of what happens with power companies (or even renewables) I will have stable and cheap energy for at least the next 12 years (warranties on the parts are 12-25 years).
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Obviously a good idea. But to be honest, I am not even tempted to use AI. For any potential use I have, it is more beneficial to do things myself.
Yes, I may do, say, 10 minutes of search with AI per month, but that is just me bein lazy and the damage form that will be very limited.
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We are going into a Great depression (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump and a heritage foundation that commands him wants a national sales tax. So he wants those tariffs to replace the taxes that he and his Rich buddies can't quite get out of paying. As a percentage it's not much but it's still tens of billions of dollars that they can make us pay.
Problem with the national sales tax is it's regressive. It disproportionally hurts people that work for a living. That reduces consumer spending and it just wrecks the economy.
While all this is going on they are doing massive amounts of deregulation and opening up the 401K programs to corruption and theft.
We fucked up and we're about to find out.
We put a guy who isn't allowed to run a charity because he stole from a children's cancer charity in charge of our finances.
bad things are going to happen now and they can't be stopped. If you are meeting this and you are under 65 you are fucked. If you are over 65 congratulations you just might die before the worst of it.
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Meh.... no one should be considered illegal on stolen land. Unless almost all of your ancestors come from Europe. Then yeah, no birthright citizenship for you! Mine came from here, 30,000 years+. Not 400 years like most of the colonial descendants. There used to be several hundred full nations here, that are never taught about in U.S. history books for the most part..
The Native Nations also did *NOT* ask for being force-ably absorbed into the U.S. via their "Manifest Destiny of Slaughter"...
The Native Nati
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I know about the Native Nations part... a great-uncle was a Chief around the Pennsylvania area (can't remember what tribe) (dad did the genealogy thing... The Geek Group took that drive when I left and never returned it).
I'm sure you'd love to have cartels cruising your neighborhood all the time, have to carry six clips of ammo just to check your snailmail, have to place claymores at every access point anytime you're not home. It'll just a a free-for-all!
While deporting people who don't have legal paperwo
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While deporting people who don't have legal paperwork to be here might sound harsh... there are legal channels that they can go through :-)
See, you just can't help yourself, the smile means you know that's not really true.
If that was the case then they wouldn't be going to courthouses to make arrests while people were going to their immigration hearings.
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How long were they here before the hearings? Are they bringing a ton of other people with them as "family"? Did all those other people arrive at the same time, or are they actually just friends who decided to become a family because of convenience? Are they the thousandth super-common name to come through today? If they haven't done the hearing thing (like you said, I don't know the system), then they shouldn't have a SSN, which means they shouldn't have their license, which means they shouldn't have a
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I'll admit, I don't know how the immigration process works.
So just accept that and not take a such a strong position? Those questions have answers.
Me personally I don't think it's right legally or morally that people going through the legal process are effectively black bagged and deported without due process.
I'll bet that it's a lot of an "advocate" taking care of the paperwork, checking all the right boxes and speaking for the person to make sure the person gets every single benefit you can imagine.
Yes and my entire life it's been known our immigration system is slow, opaque and overly burdensome. Whatever we're doing now sure isn't solving that either.
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How about, yes... because tons of the "legal" immigrants are totally gaming the system so they can get free cars and not pay taxes for a while and get apartments for supercheap, and get tons of food stamps and financial aid because "these are my six kids" even though 4 of the kids are someone else's.
If they're going through the _proper_ process (y'know... by the numbers), why would ICE arrest them for deportation? Maybe the immigration courts didn't grant them citizenship the first time because something w
logarithmic (Score:2)
The charts I saw looked logarithmic. In other words, each successive high is not just larger, but ten times larger.
That is, being 17x as dangerous as something that happened 20 years ago means the next problem should be at 100 x not 17x.
A better comparison would be against the most recent correction, not one a long time ago
tech religion (Score:2)
AI feels like Tech Religion. You either see the path or you don't. The AI folks need you to see the path. Ready to tithe?
The Investment Game: Backing The Survivor (Score:5, Interesting)
At some point, the AI bubble will burst. Most AI companies will go under, a few will survive. Those that survive will dominate in future. Investors are trying to back the companies that will survive the bursting of the bubble. Some will get lucky, others will not. That's the game. It's like betting on horses, just with weird horses.
May not pop (Score:3)
The headline poses the "What Would Happen If an AI Bubble Burst?" question but popping isn't really supported in any of the following text. Yes these companies are making huge investments and probably some of the low-tier businesses won't survive at some point but we are far from knowing if the over-all push will succeed.
I'm seeing that there has been huge adoption; "ChatGPT alone has roughly 700 million weekly users, and that last month Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work". That isn't chickenfeed.
I'm finding that using AI in my work is often amazingly effective. I've seen significant improvements in performance, accuracy, and thoroughness or the AI models just over the past few months and I expect the trend will continue. I find myself turning to the Perplexity browser more and more, it gives great search results.
It is entirely possible that many of the investments come to fruition, they make money, and working with AI will become just another facet of daily life.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite possibly. I suspect some forms of AI software will continue regardless because much of it is useful; if nothing else, I've used local AI software to restore ancient VHS home movies into something that looks decent in HD... but it can take days of running the GPU flat out.
The big question is whether big AI models can be financially viable if Moore's Law no longer applies. If the cost per computation doesn't drop substantially then it may never be profitable, particularly as they keep making models bigg
Re: (Score:2)
>> If the cost per computation doesn't drop substantially then it may never be profitable
I agree with you there, the current implementations appear to be inordinately expensive to buy and operate. I suspect this way of doing business will reach some limits pretty soon and there will have to be more focus on efficiency. Already I am hearing that the corpus of available training data has been exhausted. And I don't really mind that, I feel like we need time to adapt.
This article is nonsense about nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I walk into a store and buy a pizza for $20 then I've created $20 in revenue. That $20 counts towards the national GDP, makes sense, right? But if you use an app (company 1) to order a pizza from a restaurant (company 2) and pay with a digital payment system (company 3) that you're funding with your credit card (company 4) you've still only done $20 worth of business but now 4 different companies get to claim that $20 as revenue and now that single pizza pie might somehow get calculated as an $80 increase in GDP. When people describe tech "growing the economy"
GDP is a stat that means nothing. "Unemployment figures" mean almost nothing since they are curated in a way that excludes most unemployed people from the calculation.
For most people, "the economy" means grocery prices and housing costs and none of the stats we use to describe the economy actually have any meaningful way of reflecting. The "minigame" parts of the economy have completely replaced real business and America can no longer create productive business at a large scale specifically due to our choice to create metrics that correlate to value rather actually doing productive work.
Winners and losers (Score:5, Insightful)
When dotcom bubble burst, Netflix was a winner because it could leverage (mostly indirectly) all the dark fiber. Without the overbuilding of fiber, streaming in general might have been delayed 2-5 years.
On the other hand, Borders was a loser. They got lulled into thinking the Internet was a fad, overexpanded their bricks & mortar, and neglected online book distribution. And the direct losers of course were the telecoms, the ones who overbuilt all that dark fiber.
When the AI bubble bursts, the losers will be those who overinvested in infrastructure, and the winners will be the startup scavengers who take advantage of the spoils. Other losers will be those who fear AI and change in general and so console themselves with "I knew that AI thing was hype" without actually developing a rational AI strategy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Stunning success! (Score:2)
"Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work". What, 3/4 of every company in the world? Way to go, Anthropic!
So ... (Score:2)
Inflation adjusted? (Score:3)
The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy, and four times the subprime bubble
Are those figures inflation adjusted or absolute?
Debt (Score:2)
"OpenAI and other large tech companies are "relying increasingly on debt to support their unprecedented spending"
There is indeed a huge amount of debt being incurred for this AI expansion. However, it should be pointed out that a significant amount of AI spending comes from hyperscalars and other large companies that are not borrowing for this expansion. In fact, even with the AI spending, the bottom lines for these companies look very healthy. From the perspective of Nvidia, this large company spending
That depends on how much is real inside the bubble (Score:3)
Currently known AI is not zero-value. Even if it makes no progress from where it is now, it will profoundly change society over time. And there's no reason to believe that the stuff that's been made public is the "top of the line in the labs" stuff. (Actually, there's pretty good reason to believe that it isn't.)
So there's plenty of real stuff, as well as an immense amount of hype. When the AI bubble pops, the real stuff will be temporarily undervalued, but it won't go away. The hype *will* go away.
FWIW and from what I've read, 80% of the AI (probably LLM) projects don't pay for themselves. 20% do considerably better than pay for themselves. (That's GOT to be an oversimplification. There's bound to be an area in the middle.) When the bubble pops, the successful projects will continue, but there won't be many new attempts for awhile.
OTOH, I remember the 1970's, and most attempts to use computers were not cost effective. I think the 1960's were probably worse. But it was the successful ones that shaped where we ended up.
Relief and Rejoice (Score:3)
The sooner the better (Score:3)
The other day I asked chatgpt to dig up and till my garden so I can sow new dichondra seed, it went into infinite loop.
"if an"? (Score:3)
Why, are there more than one bubble? Grammar...
And "if"? You mean "when"? As if there aren't a growing flow of articles on the upcoming collapse?
And then there's the FACT that in the first (rejected) Anthropic lawsuit, it was noted that Anthropic has $5B in *revenue*... but is operating at a loss. ALL of them are burning VC, and 90%-95% of on-the-job implementations are considered failures.
The only question is will it burst this year or next.
Re: (Score:2)