7 ms·

Waking up to the bubble predicted by many, observed by many, ongoing as we speak.

• malux85 2y ago
  Yep, so profit off it then? (The following is a general comment not directed at you OP) The human trait of disconnected intellect always fascinates me. People will predict something very publicly, never shut up about it, and then loudly proclaim “I told you so” when it happens, and then I say “well, how did you act on this knowledge to benefit yourself” and I always get crickets. It’s like people are too afraid to actually commit because if they are wrong it would imply their world view is wrong (and the intellectual gap between them and their couch is narrowing) but if they are right they can ignore that little inconvenient thing about their predictions having survivable bias and walk around with a smug sense of satisfaction. I have always thought it extremely odd how someone can proudly exclaim their predictions and then have nothing to show for them, humans confuse me a lot.
  • esperent 2y ago
    I assume you're talking about investing? In which case, you need a sizeable amount of surplus capital, which most people don't have, and an interest in investing, which most people don't have. Only a small fraction of people have both of those. But supposing that you are one of the lucky few, how would you propose to go about profiting from a bubble like this?
    • piaste 2y ago
      > But supposing that you are one of the lucky few, how would you propose to go about profiting from a bubble like this? Buying put options on NVidia & co.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • ryandrake 2y ago
        The shovel-makers are a good bet during a gold rush. I'd love a way to financially profit from my belief that "AI will not be earth shattering" in a way that doesn't bet against the AI toolmakers. Are there any pure AI companies that are publicly traded yet? I would buy puts on OpenAI today if I could.
        • randomdata 2y ago
          > Are there any pure AI companies that are publicly traded yet? Google's cash cows are pure AI. Is that close enough? They do provide shovels too, but that amounts to only around 10% of their business. If they have to subsist on their shovel business the stock price will still plummet. You don't have to see complete bankruptcy in a company to win.
  • teqsun 2y ago
    Speaking for myself, I can't reasonably think of a way to have "acted on this knowledge to benefit myself" other than warning others in my personal life about the limitations of Machine Learning and the bubble I'm observing. In my encounters, the people making money off the AI boom (that I feel is a bubble) are large entrenched corporations, and the AI start-ups that have flourished I've encountered had critical factors that would be impossible for me to replicate (Harvard/Princeston grads who have VC investment connections from their family). The large corporations leveraging it haven't rocketshipped their stock price, and the start-ups that have really increased in valuation are all pre-IPO and aren't exactly inviting me to join in their series A funding rounds. So all that's left to my observation to "act on this knowledge" would be to try to bafflegab some LLM snakeoil amongst the 1000s or 10ks of identical attempts, and honestly I don't see the LLM bubble being any more viable than any of the previous things (crypto, etc.) So, is there something I'm missing on how to "capitalize on the knowledge" that the current AI trend is a bubble?
    • teqsun 2y ago
      Just wanted to tag off my comment and say that the parent commenter wrote (and I guess subsequently deleted) a very smug "I'm laughing so hard at these replies, don't expect me to share my secrets if you're not smart enough to figure it out yourselves" reply. Given they have their AI company in their bio, I guess they thought better of it and deleted it (https://atomictessellator.com https://atomictessellator.com) Given their reticence in actually addressing the comments, I would presume they're happy that the company they founded long before the LLM boom that leverages AI is getting additional attention and/or funding thanks to it, despite being completely unrelated to LLMs. That's good fortune and catching the wake of ChatGPT thanks to the general public's ignorance on the tech. Nothing to warrant such a smug, condescending tone on his part.
      • sungho_ 2y ago
        Oh then his words were valid
      • malux85 2y ago
        Would you like some chips with that salt?! I think your characterisation above of AI companies as either entrenched, nepotism or snake oil speaks a lot to how you perceive the world. Yep! I could see the rise of AI so I put my personal money where my mouth was, just like I did with crypto before that, and fat/thin client computing before that. And I do see the futures ahead of time and I do act on them with my own money, taking the risk upon myself. Correct, I’m not going to share info on competitive zero-sum opportunities with strangers for no reason. I’m not ashamed of what I’m saying, that’s why there’s public information on who I am and what I’m doing on my profile (unlike you), my last comment was very sloppy as it’s midnight here, I deleted it because I couldn’t be bothered going down the rabbit hole. And yes, I find these threads (mostly people’s expectations in them) enormously funny. Oh and a minor correction: we actually use LLMs a lot! They are hugely helpful for writing esoteric input files for quantum chemistry packages, and we also have a custom LLM trained to produce crystal structures (this LLM has already made a new discovery in electric battery tech that has been verified in a lab!), so “unrelated to LLMs” as you wrote is very wrong, we consume their output and produce entirely new crystal structure generating LLMs!
  • randomdata 2y ago
    Implying that the hilarity of the silly reactions received like "but, but, how did you benefit?" isn't payoff enough?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • rightbyte 2y ago
    You are essentially suggesting "Yep. So time the market then"? The easy money are for the entrenched.
  • Rury 2y ago
    >so profit off it then? Many already have, as they're the ones that sold to investors. And for any that chose to remain on the sidelines, not footing the risk can be pay off enough. Shorting however, isn't about predicting a bubble, but predicting if/when it bursts. And that's not an easy prediction to make as investors can choose to sit on unrealized losses indefinitely, if they're not over leveraged or needing to realize them.
  • janice1999 2y ago
    > Yep, so profit off it then? Selling shovels during a goldrush is a great idea but not really feasible with AI unless you're NVidia.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• Spivak 2y ago
  If that's your bar then you might as well not do anything. You can find plenty of people who believe anything new is a fad, people believed that about computers for a long time. Not saying it isn't a bubble, but people thinking it's one isn't evidence.
  • piva00 2y ago
    I lived through the later phase of people thinking computers were a fad, or would end up as just gaming machines, just to see that view turning around and be a touted as a revolution. Right after that the internet came, and the cycle repeated, I heard many people saying the WWW was just a fad, and here we are.
    • randomdata 2y ago
      Presumably computer here means personal computer? Wouldn't it be fair to say that they have, for all intents and purposes, become little more than gaming machines? Of course there is a small segment of the population doing other things with them, but if you look at the typical person they're just trying to push "internet points" around. Same goes for the WWW. The dream of everyone keeping their own website full of useful information, all helpfully linked together, hasn't really materialized. As with before, a few people are doing that, but it never swept the world. The WWW for most people merely provides a way to load their games.
      • piva00 2y ago
        > Presumably computer here means personal computer? Wouldn't it be fair to say that they have, for all intents and purposes, become little more than gaming machines? Of course there is a small segment of the population doing other things with them, but if you look at the typical person they're just trying to push "internet points" around. Nope, not at all. Relative to the people I know I'd say only about 10% have a personal computer for gaming, all the others use it for work or hobbies that do not involve gaming. > Same goes for the WWW. The dream of everyone keeping their own website full of useful information, all helpfully linked together, hasn't really materialized. As with before, a few people are doing that, but it never swept the world. The WWW for most people merely provides a way to load their games. My point has never cited anything about the WWW being skeptically viewed as a fad as the dream of everyone having their own website. That wasn't the view at the time, it was the view of companies not wanting to start a website because the WWW would be just a fad, it was people browsing the internet once, and saying they didn't want to waste time on something that would disappear in a few short years.
• fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >observed by many Some elephants are more difficult to see in some rooms than others. It can depend on how good the bifocals are ;) Or if the only thing that can block the view is piles of cash, it might take so much cash to be unattainable by almost anybody, but if it happened bifocals won't be able to help in that room, and the only thing that might be able to get any attention is a bigger elephant. At least until the cash has dwindled :( Most computer programs (almost all?) are not supposed to be worth money to begin with. It can require quite a reality-distortion effort to build positive sentiment on a case-by-case basis. As we have seen, after some people get that good at building sentiment, they can choose to do so without anything of value underlying their effort, whether integrity is intentionally being compromised or not. The odds to be played here are one of the things that makes it more of a crap-shoot and defines an investment landscape where all the duds need to be offset by a single home run out of the park, but which one will be the heavy-hitter is never very well identified in advance of going viral. For that one outfit, it can be like printing money, for everyone else the default is a black hole. AI of some kind (probably ramen kind) may be possible to leverage without putting a black hole onto steroids, but otherwise I could only imagine that if sustainable research was still required beforehand, the most suitable structure might just be a non-profit organization. Who would think of that unless there really weren't enough organic profits to be leveraged like a financially sound investment should have? With some of the more challenging or nearly-unattainable projects, almost all approaches are not going to be profitable enough to provide a return for shareholder-style investment, most things like that are just too expensive to be justified except as an indulgence, which is where pride can be taken without anticipating a financial return. So money used to fund the effort is most accurately categorized as donations not investments and another reason that a non-profit structure, and resulting not-profitable outcome should be considered ideal. Or maybe one particular approach is all wrong only because it is too expensive, overpriced, not-profitable or all of the above. OTOH could be an approach is too expensive, overpriced, not-profitable or all of the above, because it is all wrong to being with. But what difference does it make if the final outcome is the same?
  • 1992spacemovie 2y ago
    [flagged]