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The AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI

34 points by polyphilz 1y ago

meshugaas 1y ago
> If they're talking about the 2023-2024 "chatbots = rich", that's a bad argument because hardly anyone believes that anymore Oh yes, this must be why chatbot companies announced $25 billion of new funding last week.
rvz 1y ago
It certainly is a bubble. EDIT: The fact that I'm downvoted for saying that tells you that not only we're in a massive bubble, but the author knows that he's personally invested in the bubble getting bigger. So of course he'll say "it isn't a bubble".
- mcv 1y ago
  The author does have a point that you need to specify what you think the bubble is. Obviously AI is real technology with interesting applications. The tech itself is not the bubble. The bubble is (as always) the inflated expectations. From the article: > But if they think the bubble is the idea that AI will cause foundational change in business, the economy, and human work, then—in my opinion—they're just wrong That's just the author's opinion, not a fact. People claiming it's a bubble disagree with this part. And they might be right. As far as I understand, no massive productivity gains have been detected yet. Some expected gains weren't there. Some kinds of work might benefit some, but so far, nothing that justifies the enormous investments. It's not the AI itself that's the bubble, but the "use more AI" attitude. The idea that the AI is a genius and better than people. Every company doing something with AI because they need to be seen doing something with AI. That's the bubble. After it pops, there will still be AI, and some companies will be wildly successful with it, just like many .coms survived the .com crash. But investors will finally see that it's not going to meet the inflated investor expectations.
bediger4000 1y ago
Miessler went all in on LLMs as AI very early on.
mergy 1y ago
I appreciate the author trying to address this. The only issue is the author didn't define what 'pops' in the bubble. The 'what' that pops, probably, IMHO, is the investment and resources ecosystem dumped, poured, thrown, redirected, etc. to AI. Just like the .com boom, the costs and money thrown at AI are outsized and will 'pop" as it matures. A 'pop" and leveling down to something perhaps not so outrageous is coming. As the author states, .com popped but left the Internet still around and expanding. AI is exactly that kind of bubble.
- danielrm26 1y ago
  Hi, I tried to address that in the video version. I think what pops is the false belief. .com -> going online will save you AI -> adding a chatbot will save you To me, those are what qualify as bubbles. And the other stuff is just overheating, disruption, and other effects.
  - meshugaas 1y ago
    A financial bubble has a clear definition. You're just changing the meaning to be a different strawman so you can refute that. Are there lots of companies that are overvalued because of their AI offerings, and will those companies fail when they don't provide acceptable returns? If yes, bubble.
  - ghc 1y ago
    > I think what pops is the false belief. Then you're inventing your own term. Bubble is shorthand for the Economics term "speculative bubble" or "economic bubble" and has described the behavior of many markets over the centuries. What collapses is asset prices, not ideas. It's definitional...just ask your friendly neighborhood economist. Edit: Here, I went and found the origin for you (via wikipedia). The South Seas bubble spawned the term: "The metaphor indicated that the prices of the stock were inflated and fragile – expanded based on nothing but air, and vulnerable to a sudden burst, as in fact occurred."
  - vannevar 1y ago
    I think what pops is the Ponzi-like financial structure underlying the huge investments. The projected profits simply don't come fast enough to justify incremental investment, and the pyramid runs out of incoming money. Yes, AI is huge. But the Internet was also huge. And it still couldn't sustain the levels of investment that were being made in 1999 and 2000, even in the big players.
api 1y ago
It can be very useful and powerful and also be a bubble. See: dot-com bubble. It reminds me a lot of that.
- TaupeRanger 1y ago
  Please read the article before commenting - your comment is literally what the article is addressing.
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago
    I read the article and it certainly doesn't address this well. > The .com bubble was the belief that if you took your mid-ass business to the internet, you would instantly become rich. That is what popped. And currently there's a belief in the market that if you just add AI to it it's going to the moon. I don't see how there's a difference here.
diamond559 1y ago
Says a man personally invested on this bubble inflating more, are we really just going to take these people at their words still? After seeing GPT 5?
danbruc 1y ago
But if they think the bubble is the idea that "Modern AI will significantly transform business and the global economy, and that it'll lead to massive unemployment for knowledge workers", then—in my opinion—they're just wrong. AI will one day transform the world but I do not believe modern AI will make that happen, that will have to wait for futuristic AI. I guess that makes AI not a bubble but I can still label modern, i.e. current, AI a bubble, right?
harryf 1y ago
Better to talk about the Gartner Hype cycle and it's stages compare it to technologies that clearly followed that cycle such as; - Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training - Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones - 3D printing: back in 2013 we were expecting "a 3D printer in every home" ... today valuable in industrial prototyping Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."
- catigula 1y ago
  That's a nice story but without any advancements proper leverage of currently existing AI models can indeed remove many, many jobs from the labor pool, probably double digit percentage-wise. The idea that these tools won't at all improve from where they are now isn't a widely held position.
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago
    Pareto principal. We've seen the 80% but that last 20% is going to be really tough (and expensive). GPT5 illustrates this - it wasn't really better than GPT4o and in some ways worse.
    - catigula 1y ago
      Regardless you have no way of knowing where you are on the curve at any given point. That all being said I strongly disagree that GPT-5 isn't categorically better, I just think it's less obvious because we're starting to hit human cognitive ability to even assess that limits.
    - qgin 1y ago
      AI doesn't have to replace human jobs as they exist today 1:1. In many situations, the work is not indivisible. If AI can handle 80% of the work, then a company can let AI handle that 80%, fire 80% of their people, and consolidate the remaining 20% still-human-work with whoever is left.
PotenRoyal 1y ago
Suggested background reading for what economists mean when they talk about an asset bubble. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
catigula 1y ago
Part of why AI is concerning is that literally nobody can actually predict what the outcome of these models is going to be even a couple of years out, the decision tree just instantly blows out and becomes impossible to track. Anybody telling you otherwise is lying to you.
grzracz 1y ago
I really dislike the title and the article. You are basically stating that AI is not a bubble, but everything around AI is a bubble, which people obviously mean when they say AI is a bubble. Same was the case with dot com crash, where people didn't LITERALLY mean .com domains would crash, but everything around the domains (& Internet) would crash. Does not help that the author is overinvested into the AI space.
- danielrm26 1y ago
  It's like the entire thing was written just for you.
bgwalter 1y ago
So we are in the "it will be useful later" phase. Here is a little stock chart from the dotcom bubble until today: https://companiesmarketcap.com/juniper-networks/stock-price-history/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/juniper-networks/stock-price-...
lispisok 1y ago
>Do people actually believe that if you just "add AI" to what they have, they'll instantly become millionaires? Looking at recent YC batches, YC seems to believe so. He says bubbles are false beliefs about reality that everybody figures out is false. The claim that "[AI] will displace tens or hundreds of millions of knowledge workers in the next 3-10 years" is that false belief inflating the bubble. Big tech and investors are dumping money into AI thinking at least a sizeable portion of the white collar workforce is going to be replaced with $2000-$4000/month subscriptions to AI agents (I am so sick of the term "agent") acting almost autonomously. We're hitting the wall with what's feasible with LLM scaling laws even if you're dumping countries GDP worth of money into making bigger and better models. Is spending $500 billion to $1 trillion dollars to get something that performs marginally better than the best LLM today worth it?
velieroglu 1y ago
Oh really, just look into internet and recent investments and valuations then we will talk about later, cluely is enough to prove ai bubble
CagedCoder 1y ago
Why should I trust someone that's making money from AI to tell me that AI isn't a bubble? Especially when the entire argument seems to hinge on the author's dislike for the word Bubble. The bubble that pops isn't the actual thing, it's the money that was propping the thing up...
audunw 1y ago
I don’t feel like this article addresses the question of whether we’re seeing an AI bubble or not at all. To me this is very simple: certain companies have invested billions upon billions in AI data centres that need to see a very high return on investment in the years ahead to avoid a “pop”. I think nvidia is also being valued is if it’s a certainty that we will continue to build many such data centres every year for the foreseeable future. These expectations are now being faced with the reality that AI isn’t making us that much more productive, and the improvements in LLMs are slowing down, so it’s not clear there will be a continued will to pay expensive subscription for these AIs, and certainly not clear that companies are willing to accept higher prices that may be need to get ROI. There’s another way this could go down: I have a sneaking suspicion that we can get 90% of the productivity benefits of LLMs with models that can run locally. A combination of an algorithm breakthrough, better tuned models, better software tooling around them, and better hardware in the hands of end users, may get us to that 90%. That could end up making a lot of AI companies redundant.
ath3nd 1y ago
1. The leading companies in LLMs: Anthropic and OpenAI are both not profitable and rely on huge amount of continuous investment (from "successes" like SoftBank who continuously invested in WeWork) to even stay afloat. 2. Each model from GPT3.5 to GPT 4 to 5 has been 10x more expensive to train. However, we have long ago entered the era of diminishing returns where 4 was a big improvement from 3.5 but 5 was a mediocre improvement (and to some, a regression) from the previous model. That suggests, unless a miracle occurs, 6 will be extremely expensive to train to imperceptible improvements. 3. The latest "features" from OpenAI: - study mode https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ - the rumor for an office suite https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-for-microsofts-jugular-its-office-productivity-suite.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-fo... show that they are running out of ideas what to do. 4. Anthropic is settling on huge cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142885 while struggling with usage vs monetization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44715471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44715471 5. Anthropic are very early in their journey to be already scraping the barrel, yet they recently 180 on their ToS and admit that they, in fact, will be training on your chats (suggesting that they can't get more/quality data elsewhere): https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms. 6. OpenAI and Anthropic are both connected to CoreWeave, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google. What is funny is that CoreWeave is also connnected/dependent on Nvidia, and so is Microsoft and Google. Those companies' stocks are a major part of the US economy at the moment. https://www.reuters.com/business/dominant-ai-trade-confronts-test-bellwether-nvidia-reports-earnings-2025-08-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/dominant-ai-trade-confronts.... "Meanwhile, the combined market cap of the 10 biggest AI plays, including Nvidia, Broadcom and Microsoft -- stood at $18 trillion, BCA said in a note last week. That amounts to about 33% of S&P 500 stock market capitalization, up from around 15% in late 2022, according to BCA." 10 companies in the same sector, comprising 33% of the S&P capitalization is a 100% bubble, and if anything, one of the biggest ever to exist. And I, for one, can't wait for it to pop so I don't have to read hype booster articles like this on the front page of HackerNews.
snowwrestler 1y ago
The bubble is AGI, which was pitched as imminent (it’s even part of the OpenAI-Microsoft agreement language). It will pop when people realize it’s not remotely near. “AI will change how business is done” is not a bubble because every innovation changes how business is done, it’s just a matter of degree. Various forms of AI have been changing businesses for a decade at least.
lukev 1y ago
This is just "no true scotsman" for AI. Because something could very easily pop soon, but this article is just laying the groundwork for an argument that "it wasn't AI popping, that was the belief you could run a AI adoption program and fire half your staff popping." At some point, what's the difference? Obviously LLMs are here to stay in some form or another. What the stock market does with that is an entirely different animal and honestly I'm not optimistic.
d0ublespeak 1y ago
This article feels self defeating. It’s rewriting the meaning of the word bubble itself. There is a speculative asset bubble. Whilst I think there is some correctness in saying that drawing parallels with the Dotcom boom/bust is intellectually lazy I still think this acts as a notable precedent. Is there potential for AI usefulness long term? Yes, will it take exactly the same form as now or do the products and services exist now? No. So there is some utility in comparing the two. Either way this article reads like a bit of cope.
brazukadev 1y ago
I have the impression that a new winter is coming. The amount of threads about a bubble is surpassing the discussions about AI
tim333 1y ago
The article says a bubble is something that pops but in the context of AI I think most people mean a financial bubble as in "a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify". Which we probably have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble)
satisfice 1y ago
A bubble that will pop is the one where they say that AI will replace creative humans. This is certainly wrong, because it requires consumers to stop being fans of actual people. Consider XKCD. Will I lose interest in Randall Munroe because an AI thing will auto-generate any number of XKCD-style comics? Of course not. The proliferation of AI has been compared to the proliferation of polyester.
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34 points by polyphilz 1y ago

> If they're talking about the 2023-2024 "chatbots = rich", that's a bad argument because hardly anyone believes that anymore Oh yes, this must be why chatbot companies announced $25 billion of new funding last week.

rvz 1y ago

It certainly is a bubble. EDIT: The fact that I'm downvoted for saying that tells you that not only we're in a massive bubble, but the author knows that he's personally invested in the bubble getting bigger. So of course he'll say "it isn't a bubble".

mcv 1y ago
The author does have a point that you need to specify what you think the bubble is. Obviously AI is real technology with interesting applications. The tech itself is not the bubble. The bubble is (as always) the inflated expectations. From the article: > But if they think the bubble is the idea that AI will cause foundational change in business, the economy, and human work, then—in my opinion—they're just wrong That's just the author's opinion, not a fact. People claiming it's a bubble disagree with this part. And they might be right. As far as I understand, no massive productivity gains have been detected yet. Some expected gains weren't there. Some kinds of work might benefit some, but so far, nothing that justifies the enormous investments. It's not the AI itself that's the bubble, but the "use more AI" attitude. The idea that the AI is a genius and better than people. Every company doing something with AI because they need to be seen doing something with AI. That's the bubble. After it pops, there will still be AI, and some companies will be wildly successful with it, just like many .coms survived the .com crash. But investors will finally see that it's not going to meet the inflated investor expectations.

bediger4000 1y ago

Miessler went all in on LLMs as AI very early on.

mergy 1y ago

I appreciate the author trying to address this. The only issue is the author didn't define what 'pops' in the bubble. The 'what' that pops, probably, IMHO, is the investment and resources ecosystem dumped, poured, thrown, redirected, etc. to AI. Just like the .com boom, the costs and money thrown at AI are outsized and will 'pop" as it matures. A 'pop" and leveling down to something perhaps not so outrageous is coming. As the author states, .com popped but left the Internet still around and expanding. AI is exactly that kind of bubble.

danielrm26 1y ago
Hi, I tried to address that in the video version. I think what pops is the false belief. .com -> going online will save you AI -> adding a chatbot will save you To me, those are what qualify as bubbles. And the other stuff is just overheating, disruption, and other effects.
- meshugaas 1y ago
  A financial bubble has a clear definition. You're just changing the meaning to be a different strawman so you can refute that. Are there lots of companies that are overvalued because of their AI offerings, and will those companies fail when they don't provide acceptable returns? If yes, bubble.
- ghc 1y ago
  > I think what pops is the false belief. Then you're inventing your own term. Bubble is shorthand for the Economics term "speculative bubble" or "economic bubble" and has described the behavior of many markets over the centuries. What collapses is asset prices, not ideas. It's definitional...just ask your friendly neighborhood economist. Edit: Here, I went and found the origin for you (via wikipedia). The South Seas bubble spawned the term: "The metaphor indicated that the prices of the stock were inflated and fragile – expanded based on nothing but air, and vulnerable to a sudden burst, as in fact occurred."
- vannevar 1y ago
  I think what pops is the Ponzi-like financial structure underlying the huge investments. The projected profits simply don't come fast enough to justify incremental investment, and the pyramid runs out of incoming money. Yes, AI is huge. But the Internet was also huge. And it still couldn't sustain the levels of investment that were being made in 1999 and 2000, even in the big players.

api 1y ago

It can be very useful and powerful and also be a bubble. See: dot-com bubble. It reminds me a lot of that.

TaupeRanger 1y ago
Please read the article before commenting - your comment is literally what the article is addressing.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  I read the article and it certainly doesn't address this well. > The .com bubble was the belief that if you took your mid-ass business to the internet, you would instantly become rich. That is what popped. And currently there's a belief in the market that if you just add AI to it it's going to the moon. I don't see how there's a difference here.

diamond559 1y ago

Says a man personally invested on this bubble inflating more, are we really just going to take these people at their words still? After seeing GPT 5?

danbruc 1y ago

But if they think the bubble is the idea that "Modern AI will significantly transform business and the global economy, and that it'll lead to massive unemployment for knowledge workers", then—in my opinion—they're just wrong. AI will one day transform the world but I do not believe modern AI will make that happen, that will have to wait for futuristic AI. I guess that makes AI not a bubble but I can still label modern, i.e. current, AI a bubble, right?

harryf 1y ago

Better to talk about the Gartner Hype cycle and it's stages compare it to technologies that clearly followed that cycle such as; - Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training - Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones - 3D printing: back in 2013 we were expecting "a 3D printer in every home" ... today valuable in industrial prototyping Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."

catigula 1y ago
That's a nice story but without any advancements proper leverage of currently existing AI models can indeed remove many, many jobs from the labor pool, probably double digit percentage-wise. The idea that these tools won't at all improve from where they are now isn't a widely held position.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  Pareto principal. We've seen the 80% but that last 20% is going to be really tough (and expensive). GPT5 illustrates this - it wasn't really better than GPT4o and in some ways worse.
  - catigula 1y ago
    Regardless you have no way of knowing where you are on the curve at any given point. That all being said I strongly disagree that GPT-5 isn't categorically better, I just think it's less obvious because we're starting to hit human cognitive ability to even assess that limits.
  - qgin 1y ago
    AI doesn't have to replace human jobs as they exist today 1:1. In many situations, the work is not indivisible. If AI can handle 80% of the work, then a company can let AI handle that 80%, fire 80% of their people, and consolidate the remaining 20% still-human-work with whoever is left.

PotenRoyal 1y ago

Suggested background reading for what economists mean when they talk about an asset bubble. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

catigula 1y ago

Part of why AI is concerning is that literally nobody can actually predict what the outcome of these models is going to be even a couple of years out, the decision tree just instantly blows out and becomes impossible to track. Anybody telling you otherwise is lying to you.

grzracz 1y ago

I really dislike the title and the article. You are basically stating that AI is not a bubble, but everything around AI is a bubble, which people obviously mean when they say AI is a bubble. Same was the case with dot com crash, where people didn't LITERALLY mean .com domains would crash, but everything around the domains (& Internet) would crash. Does not help that the author is overinvested into the AI space.

danielrm26 1y ago
It's like the entire thing was written just for you.

bgwalter 1y ago

So we are in the "it will be useful later" phase. Here is a little stock chart from the dotcom bubble until today: https://companiesmarketcap.com/juniper-networks/stock-price-history/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/juniper-networks/stock-price-...

lispisok 1y ago

>Do people actually believe that if you just "add AI" to what they have, they'll instantly become millionaires? Looking at recent YC batches, YC seems to believe so. He says bubbles are false beliefs about reality that everybody figures out is false. The claim that "[AI] will displace tens or hundreds of millions of knowledge workers in the next 3-10 years" is that false belief inflating the bubble. Big tech and investors are dumping money into AI thinking at least a sizeable portion of the white collar workforce is going to be replaced with $2000-$4000/month subscriptions to AI agents (I am so sick of the term "agent") acting almost autonomously. We're hitting the wall with what's feasible with LLM scaling laws even if you're dumping countries GDP worth of money into making bigger and better models. Is spending $500 billion to $1 trillion dollars to get something that performs marginally better than the best LLM today worth it?

velieroglu 1y ago

Oh really, just look into internet and recent investments and valuations then we will talk about later, cluely is enough to prove ai bubble

CagedCoder 1y ago

Why should I trust someone that's making money from AI to tell me that AI isn't a bubble? Especially when the entire argument seems to hinge on the author's dislike for the word Bubble. The bubble that pops isn't the actual thing, it's the money that was propping the thing up...

audunw 1y ago

I don’t feel like this article addresses the question of whether we’re seeing an AI bubble or not at all. To me this is very simple: certain companies have invested billions upon billions in AI data centres that need to see a very high return on investment in the years ahead to avoid a “pop”. I think nvidia is also being valued is if it’s a certainty that we will continue to build many such data centres every year for the foreseeable future. These expectations are now being faced with the reality that AI isn’t making us that much more productive, and the improvements in LLMs are slowing down, so it’s not clear there will be a continued will to pay expensive subscription for these AIs, and certainly not clear that companies are willing to accept higher prices that may be need to get ROI. There’s another way this could go down: I have a sneaking suspicion that we can get 90% of the productivity benefits of LLMs with models that can run locally. A combination of an algorithm breakthrough, better tuned models, better software tooling around them, and better hardware in the hands of end users, may get us to that 90%. That could end up making a lot of AI companies redundant.

ath3nd 1y ago

1. The leading companies in LLMs: Anthropic and OpenAI are both not profitable and rely on huge amount of continuous investment (from "successes" like SoftBank who continuously invested in WeWork) to even stay afloat. 2. Each model from GPT3.5 to GPT 4 to 5 has been 10x more expensive to train. However, we have long ago entered the era of diminishing returns where 4 was a big improvement from 3.5 but 5 was a mediocre improvement (and to some, a regression) from the previous model. That suggests, unless a miracle occurs, 6 will be extremely expensive to train to imperceptible improvements. 3. The latest "features" from OpenAI: - study mode https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/ - the rumor for an office suite https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-for-microsofts-jugular-its-office-productivity-suite.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-fo... show that they are running out of ideas what to do. 4. Anthropic is settling on huge cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142885 while struggling with usage vs monetization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44715471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44715471 5. Anthropic are very early in their journey to be already scraping the barrel, yet they recently 180 on their ToS and admit that they, in fact, will be training on your chats (suggesting that they can't get more/quality data elsewhere): https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms. 6. OpenAI and Anthropic are both connected to CoreWeave, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google. What is funny is that CoreWeave is also connnected/dependent on Nvidia, and so is Microsoft and Google. Those companies' stocks are a major part of the US economy at the moment. https://www.reuters.com/business/dominant-ai-trade-confronts-test-bellwether-nvidia-reports-earnings-2025-08-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/dominant-ai-trade-confronts.... "Meanwhile, the combined market cap of the 10 biggest AI plays, including Nvidia, Broadcom and Microsoft -- stood at $18 trillion, BCA said in a note last week. That amounts to about 33% of S&P 500 stock market capitalization, up from around 15% in late 2022, according to BCA." 10 companies in the same sector, comprising 33% of the S&P capitalization is a 100% bubble, and if anything, one of the biggest ever to exist. And I, for one, can't wait for it to pop so I don't have to read hype booster articles like this on the front page of HackerNews.

snowwrestler 1y ago

The bubble is AGI, which was pitched as imminent (it’s even part of the OpenAI-Microsoft agreement language). It will pop when people realize it’s not remotely near. “AI will change how business is done” is not a bubble because every innovation changes how business is done, it’s just a matter of degree. Various forms of AI have been changing businesses for a decade at least.

lukev 1y ago

This is just "no true scotsman" for AI. Because something could very easily pop soon, but this article is just laying the groundwork for an argument that "it wasn't AI popping, that was the belief you could run a AI adoption program and fire half your staff popping." At some point, what's the difference? Obviously LLMs are here to stay in some form or another. What the stock market does with that is an entirely different animal and honestly I'm not optimistic.

d0ublespeak 1y ago

This article feels self defeating. It’s rewriting the meaning of the word bubble itself. There is a speculative asset bubble. Whilst I think there is some correctness in saying that drawing parallels with the Dotcom boom/bust is intellectually lazy I still think this acts as a notable precedent. Is there potential for AI usefulness long term? Yes, will it take exactly the same form as now or do the products and services exist now? No. So there is some utility in comparing the two. Either way this article reads like a bit of cope.

brazukadev 1y ago

I have the impression that a new winter is coming. The amount of threads about a bubble is surpassing the discussions about AI

tim333 1y ago

The article says a bubble is something that pops but in the context of AI I think most people mean a financial bubble as in "a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify". Which we probably have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble)

satisfice 1y ago

A bubble that will pop is the one where they say that AI will replace creative humans. This is certainly wrong, because it requires consumers to stop being fans of actual people. Consider XKCD. Will I lose interest in Randall Munroe because an AI thing will auto-generate any number of XKCD-style comics? Of course not. The proliferation of AI has been compared to the proliferation of polyester.

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