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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
- mattnewton 1y agoSeems like a measured approach- my read is him saying it’s probably a bubble in that bad ideas are being funded too, but there are a lot of really good ideas doing well. Also nit: Typo right in the digest I assume, assuming “suring” is “during”, does cnbc proofread their content?
- mistrial9 1y agoirony level IV
- DonsDiscountGas 1y agoApparently not. An LLM proofread would've definitely caught that
- hiccuphippo 1y agoTypos are proof something wasn't Ai written. Everyone should make at least one tyop in their writing.
- saalweachter 1y agoOnly worms until the typos get into the training data. You need to say at least one thing no one has ever said before in every post.
- square_usual 1y agoR9k wins again
- danielbln 1y ago"Claude, make sure to sprinkle at least one typo in here. And no em dashes you hear?"
- Loughla 1y agoFaculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from using them. One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing." I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?" Blank stares. I hate it.
- baobun 1y agoThe writing is a mandatory part of the learning process. Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or upwork before LLMs. Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.
- robotresearcher 1y agoThe sad difference that makes a difference is that banning graphing calculators from proctored exams is enforceable in practice. Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best. Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat on exams simply does not generalize. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/18/51-west-point-cadets-caught-cheating-must-repeat-a-year/ https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/18/51-west-... edit: good on West Point for actually following up on the cheating. I've witnessed another institution sweeping it under the rug even when properly documented and passed up two or three levels of reporting. As an academic director and thus manager of professors this was infuriating and demoralizing for all concerned.
- smj-edison 1y agoTime to crack out the faraday cage!
- watwut 1y agoI dont see anything reason at all to expect West Point to have less cheating then anywhere else. Army people dont commit crimes less then civilians either.
- threecheese 1y agoI see what ya did tbere :)
- janalsncm 1y agoThen it’s a market for lemons. Buyers can’t (or choose not to) tell a good AI idea from a bad one.
- hyghjiyhu 1y agoA market for lemons means there is an information asymmetry. Sellers know what they have and try to offload their lemons on clueless buyers. I don't think that's the case here.
- SrslyJosh 1y agoIt is indeed hard to tell how many of the people selling this stuff are True Believers. It's also a bit scary, given how incredibly implausible some of these stuff they're saying is.
- Insanity 1y agoI think most level-headed people can see this is a giant bubble which will eventually burst like the dot-com crash. And AI is technology that's hard to understand to non-technical (and even some technical) investors. But of course, every company needs to slap AI on their product now just to be seen as a viable product. Personally, I look forward to seeing the bubble burst and being left with a more rational view of AI and what it can (and can not) do.
- arisAlexis 1y agoHow is AI hard to understand when you enter a cafe and everyone is chatting with their LLM?
- redwood 1y agoWhere do you see that?
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoIn some Hollywood reality, probably. (Like those people that casually assume that everyone has a therapist or a lawyer.)
- bombcar 1y agodotcom bubble had tons of activity, too. it was making money off those idea at the valuations expected that was problem. the Internet really did revolutionize things, in substantial ways, but not to the tune of millions of dollars for pets.com
- ramesh31 1y ago>dotcom bubble had tons of activity, too. The difference now is that this is all (or mostly) idle cash being invested. The massive warchests built up by FAANG over the last decade are finally being deployed meaningfully rather than sitting in bonds or buying back stock. Much different scenario than companies with non-viable business models going IPO on a wish and a dream.
- pseudosavant 1y agoWhat is going on with AI right now could be a bubble just like there was the dotcom bubble. But it isn't like the internet went away after the dotcom burst. The largest companies in existence today are internet companies or have products that wouldn't make sense without the internet. Sure, many of these "thin prompt wrapper around the OpenAI API" product "businesses" will all be gone within a few years. But AI? That is going to be here indefinitely.
- janalsncm 1y agoThings like recommendations, ads, and search will always be around because they were money printers before VCs found out about AI and they will continue to be long after.
- surgical_fire 1y agoThis is always a bad take. The dotcom bubble was not about "the internet" itself. The Internet was fine and pretty much already proven as a very useful communication tool. It was about business that made absolutely no sense getting extremely high valuations just because they operated - however vaguely - over the internet. Generative AI have never reached the level of usability of the Internet itself, and likely never will.
- gizajob 1y agoThe bubble is in the valuations on the stock market, not in the technology.
- coffeecoders 1y agoEvery bubble looks obvious in hindsight. The dot-com crash left behind Amazon and Google. The crypto crash left behind Coinbase and a few real revenue generating companies. If this is the AI bubble, then the survivors are going to look very obvious in a decade, we just don’t know which ones yet.
- rhetocj23 1y agoBut google and amazon were obvious to those in the know, in terms of what they delivered. S Jobs called it back in 1995-97 - he referred to it as shopping for information and shopping for good and services. Nobody has this crystal clear, tangible vision re. LLMs. Nobody at all. That is a big problem. I found the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSfFcaluHc&t=1700s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSfFcaluHc&t=1700s
- yeasku 1y agoPersonally I never tougth of Google as a dotcom era company. Most of those were landing pages with news and chat rooms. It was more of web 2.0 company.
- mkl 1y agoIt was founded 1998, very much dotcom era, and had no significant web 2.0 products for years after that.
- yeasku 1y agoAnd the term 2.0 was coined in 1999.
- mkl 1y agoRight, but the term and the concept didn't really take off until years later. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0: > The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her January 1999 article "Fragmented Future" [...] her "2.0" designation refers to the next version of the Web that does not directly relate to the term's current use. > The term Web 2.0 did not resurface until 2002. Google's first big Web 2.0 products were GMail (beta launched in 2004, just before Google's IPO) and Google Maps (2005).
- csours 1y ago"Commodity Tokens"
- righthand 1y ago> “That is what is going to happen here too. This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.” As an owner of a web host that probably sees advantage to increased bot traffic, this statement is just more “just wait AI will be gigantic any minute now, keep investing in it for me so my investments stay valuable”.
- dang 1y ago[stub for offtopicness] (title fixed now)
- arisAlexis 1y agoTotally wrong title
- coffeecoders 1y ago@dang Title needs to be changed to something like "Bezos says AI is in industrial bubble yet promises huge benefits"
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoTagging doesn't work on HN.
- artninja1988 1y agoVery misleading clipping of the headline imo
- blast 1y agoHe's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.
- zerosizedweasle 1y agoThe biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has very short shelf life. I think AI will be huge, I don't doubt the endgame once it matures. But the bubble now, spending huge amounts on these data centers using debt without a path to profitability (and inordinate spending on these chips) is dangerous. You can think AI will be huge and see how dangerous the current manifestation of the bubble is. A lot of people will get hurt very very badly. This is going to maim the economy in a generational way.
- hibikir 1y agoIf you look at year over year chip improvements in 2025 vs 1998, it's clear that modern hardware just has a longer shelf life than it used to. The difficulties in getting more performance for the same power expenditure are just very different than back in the day. There's still depreciation, but it's not the same. Also look at other forms of hardware, like RAM, and the bonus electrical capacity being built.
- lomase 1y agoIn 1998 to transfer a megabyte over telephone lines was expensive and 5 years later is was almost free. I have not seen the prices of GPUs, CPU or RAM going down, on the contrary, each day it gets more expensive.
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- EcommerceFlow 1y agoHere's a link to the full interview Bezos had yesterday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0x3UZDKSNo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0x3UZDKSNo
- jmclnx 1y agoMy translation of what Jeff says: "AI is in a bubble but billionaires will get 'gigantic' benefits" I see no benefit to anyone unless you can live off your stock portfolio and can easily ride through periods where your portfolio can suffer a 50% loss.
- ozmodiar 1y agoHonestly, during the dotcom bubble at least workers were getting paid and jobs were abundant. Things didn't start getting bad for workers until it popped. We're supposed to be in the 'positive' part of the AI bubble and people already seem desperate and out of hope. Everyone not directly involved seems to want AI to pop. I'm not sure if that says anything about its longevity. Not very fun to have a bubble that feels bad on both sides.
- somewhereoutth 1y agoMy understanding is that the cost of training each next model is very very large, and a half trained model is worthless. Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People will continue using the old models, but they will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not much more than historical artifacts. My point is that the threshold for continuing this process (new models) is very big (getting bigger each time?), so the 'pop' will be a step function to zero.
- wmf 1y agoModels don't become out of date now that deep research exists.
- Duralias 1y agoSo with every prompt you are expected to wait that long? I highly doubt general people will be willing to wait, it also doesn't seem entirely viable if you want to do it locally, less bandwidth and no caching akin to what a literal search engine of data can do.
- Workaccount2 1y agoIf they stop getting returns in intelligence, they will switch to returns in efficiency and focus on integration, with new models being trained for new data cutoffs if nothing else. Even today there is at least a 5-10 year integration/adoption period if everything halts tomorrow. There is no reality in which LLMs go away (shy of being replaced).
- ares623 1y agoIs adding new data to a model a full retraining from scratch? Or can it be added on top of an existing model? If it costs $10B to add 1 year of data to an existing model, every year, that doesn’t sound too good.
- SrslyJosh 1y ago> If they stop getting returns in intelligence, they will switch to returns in efficiency I don't think we can assume that people producing what appear to be addictive services are going to do that, especially when they seem to be addicted themselves.
- dmix 1y agoI'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.
- RoyTyrell 1y agoThose companies are also likely still in the red. They're banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm sure one of them will be.
- dmix 1y agoHN said the same thing about Uber forever.
- pessimizer 1y agoUber didn't invent anything, they drove taxis out of business then jacked up the prices, squeezed the workers, and now everybody is riding around in regular people's crappy cars for more than a cab cost. And now I need a phone and to maintain my relationship with these two crappy companies rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.) That was literally what everybody said would happen.
- jfengel 1y agoI think Uber invented (or at least made widely available) taxi-by-app. Having scores of cab companies, accessed by telephone call, was supremely user-hostile. If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too late.
- taormina 1y agoTaxi-by-app existed pre-Uber, the innovation was making the taxi actual show up. Austin had the apps, and I would order one, and the taxis would get distracted on the way to my house and pick up other fares, so I couldn't go where I wanted. They had every chance to not be outcompeted by Uber, but they couldn't stop being taxis. And, here we are.
- throwaway314155 1y agoHe may be right, everything points to that conclusion. My main issue is - why the fuck do we care what Bezos thinks on this matter? His ML efforts all lag behind the competition and he’s certainly not an expert in the field of deep learning. Why?
- sudohalt 1y agoIf you're asking yourself why hasn't the bubble burst when everyone is calling it a bubble it's because no one wants to stop dancing until the music stops. If you told an investor the market will collapse tomorrow with 100% certainty they will invest today like there is 0% certainty of it happening tomorrow.
- harmmonica 1y agoDo I have this right that there have been no or at least very few pure AI IPO's during this cycle (I can't actually think of a single one)? So it's dissimilar to dotcom in that regard because during that time countless dotcoms went public with sky-high valuations and then failed. A bunch of reputable companies also went or were already public during that time and those saw huge valuation drops so that's more analogous to what could happen in the public market (NVDA, for instance, could pull a Cisco and drop "catastrophically," but survive just fine). That would cause a lot of pain for those shareholders, but would that be somewhat contained given the public "AI" companies for the most part have strong businesses outside of AI? Or are these market caps at this point so large for some of these AI public companies that anything that happens to them will cause some kind of contagion? And then the follow up is if the private AI companies collapse en masse is that market now also so big that it would cause contagion beyond venture capital and their investors (fully aware that pensions and the such are material investors in VC funds, but they're diversified so even though they'd see those losses maybe the broader market would keep them from taking major hits). Not giving an opinion here, though my knee jerk is to think we're due for a massive drop, but I've literally been saying that for so long that I'm starting to (stupidly) think this time is different (which typically is when all hell breaks loose of course).
- missedthecue 1y agoThere aren't very many IPOs in general. There were about 8000 publicly traded companies in the US in Jan 2000. Today there are about 3950. A lot of the AI related IPOs have been the infra like CoreWeave and Nebius.
- mrosett 1y agoIPOs aren't what they once were. The burden of being a public company has increased (SOX and related public company costs are $5-10M/year), so companies are far more likely to stay private. That has created a positive feedback cycle as the private funding ecosystem has become increasingly robust, which is why you see so many $100B+ private companies. Also keep in mind that the biggest companies during that bubble had peak market caps of ~500B and then lost ~90%, so 400-500B in losses each and total internet related losses of a couple trillion. If NVDA lost 90%, it would be down 4 trillion dollars, or twice that total just by itself. AI company valuations collapsing would have meaningful impacts on the broader market. Big pension/mutual funds are important sources of capital across every sector, and if they're taking big losses on NVDA, GOOG, and a portfolio of privates, it will have a chilling effect on their other activity.
- akagusu 1y agoThe big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?
- brookst 1y agoWhich of those did the Internet benefit?
- lomase 1y agoIs AI at the same level of global instant comunication and gigabites of bandwidth?
- strombofulous 1y agoDoes it have to be for the analogy to work?
- anthem2025 1y ago[dead]
- lemonlearnings 1y agoProbably. The the internet was more clear cut. Moores law all the things. Governments investing in pipe etc. AI harder to tell. Will 2026 models kick 2025 ass or just be slightly better. Who knows.
- Retric 1y agoIs the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem. The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc. Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erode the net benefit.
- Ericson2314 1y agohttps://www.billjaneway.com/productive-bubbles https://www.billjaneway.com/productive-bubbles this is a good essay on this topic
- chris_wot 1y agoJust like how sending Katy Perry to space hugely benefitted society. Could some let Bezos know that he doesn’t truly represent society in any way?
- DrNosferatu 1y agoSociety as a whole, or one percenters like him?
- MountDoom 1y agoBezos is a 0.0001-percenter. Most of people on HN are probably in the top 1% to 5%. You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nemomarx 1y agoare most people on HN making 170? I feel a bit less privileged now.
- MountDoom 1y agoEntry-level total comp for SWEs in the SF Bay Area is probably $250k. A senior dev at a public tech company can easily clear $400k. Really senior engineers at FAANG routinely clear $1M.
- eBombzor 1y agoI need to move back to the Bay
- NaomiLehman 1y agoit's possible to work remotely, albeit harder to land a job. Still if you makea bit less and live in a LCoL area that's a great deal.
- MountDoom 1y agoFor senior engineers with some fiscal discipline, it's great, although it's more great to work remotely. On the more junior end, that $250k goes about as far as $100k in a less expensive region. Keep in mind that the average 1-bedroom rent is $3k+/mo, the average home for a family with kids is $2M, the average PG&E bill for a house is probably $400+, any repairs or remodels will cost you 2x as much as in most other places... and state income taxes are 10% on top of federal. Most CoL estimates put the cost of living in San Jose at 2x the national average. And that's San Jose.
- ripvanwinkle 1y agoThis shouldn't be a surprise - capitalism always overshoots. Anything worth investing in will generally receive too much investment in because very few people can tell where the line is. And that's what causes bubbles but at this point it should be clear that AI will make a substantial impact - at least as great as the internet, likely larger
- ivape 1y agoAs FB IPO’d at 100bn, and marched to over 1T, when would you have considered it a bubble? You can ask the LLM if you need to … catch my drift?
- Archonical 1y agoI'm not sure I see the point. The march to $1T took 10 years with available financial statements.
- ivape 1y agoYou made the point for me. That 100bn doubled every 2-3 years. It wasn’t a bubble, but it absolutely looked like one. This will be a bitter lesson too.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anthem2025 1y ago[dead]
- more_corn 1y agoThere’s a typo. “Society” should be written as “five billionaires”
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- taeric 1y agoI see that my Echos want me to enable the new Alexa. I confess a great deal of trepidation on these. Fairly confident that this is not going to go smoothly. And again I'm baffled on how they would light such good will and functionality on fire.
- theartfuldodger 1y agoUntil costs of utilities, food, medical, insurance are dropped by technology, there are no societal gains, just loss of human jobs.
- smrtinsert 1y agoAI is in a bubble like we don't need more than 16kb.
- yeyeyeyeyeyeyee 1y agoPeople in the comments seem to have forgotten about, or never lived through, the dot com bubble. Amazon’s shares fell from $113 to $6 in 2000. So yes, the internet survived and some companies did well after, but a lot of people were hurt badly.
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y agoThis seems obviously and trivially correct to me...
- ulfw 1y agoOh if Jeff Bezos says it then it must be true
- platevoltage 1y agoI feel better knowing that someone that is as in touch with society as he is, is saying this.
- khana 1y ago[dead]
- muldvarp 1y agoI'd love to see those "gigantic benefits". Currently, the only positive thing about LLMs I hear regularly is that it made people more productive. They don't get paid more (of course), they're just more productive.
- draw_down 1y ago[dead]
- james_oofou 1y agomore productivity at same cost = more stuff, cheaper
- mgol94 1y agoSoo where is that deflation? Bc from what I see all of that extra productivity is landing in the pockets of shareholders
- james_oofou 1y agoRight, so not a bubble then
- neuronic 1y agoThis lie is still being spread in economics classes?
- james_oofou 1y agoNo clue
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- muldvarp 1y agoMore productivity at same cost = More profit for companies. Also, the cost of most of the stuff I (have to) buy (i.e. rent, groceries, ...) is not dominated by the wage of knowledge workers. Or to put it differently: If AI makes me lose my job but doesn't decrease my rent, I'm in a really bad position.
- gsky 1y agoYesterday, I asked an LLM to create a browser plugin and it got 98% correct in its first try.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sema4hacker 1y agoHow many people can recognize that 2% is wrong? Of those, how many can fix the 2% without introducing more errors?
- asadotzler 1y agoYesterday someone's uncle tried the same thing and now his bank account's drained because the 2% that wasn't working was the 2% that prevented his password store from being posted online. See how that works? A few nerds think it's great while everyone else gets screwed by it.
- gsky 1y agoYou are talking like no company lost passwords to hackers till now. I would use AI to create extensions for my use than trust someone else's.
- hulitu 1y ago> Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits Yes. Cheap, second hand, datacenters.
- thrown-0825-1 1y ago[flagged]
- sylware 1y agoPlease, Mister Bezos: fix amazon shop to work again with noscript/basic (x)html browsers (like lynx). (oh, and keep on eye on all those 'internet scanners', 'script kiddies' using AWS for scans/attacks, honey pot time?).
- crnkofe 1y agoGotta say I'm pessimistic about the future of AI. At least until its adopted by public sector, schools and societies. Right now its just enhancing what we already have. More "efficient" meetings with auto-note-taking so we can have more meetings. More productivity so we can make less people do more, increase the workload and make them burn out faster. Better and more sophisticated scammers. More sophisticated propaganda by various legal and illegal actors. Cheaper and more grotesque looking vidz and music. More software slop. Not to mention all the "cool" improvements coming our way in the form of smart rockets, bombs and drones and of course I drool for all the smart improvements in surveillance capitalism 2.0. They call it a revolution but for now its just a catalyst for more of all the things we "love".
- m000 1y ago"During bubbles, every experiment or idea gets funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real." Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas? The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the needs of the society and the current technological reality. If the investors aren't the gurus we make them to be, we might as well do with a planning committee. We could actually end up with more diversified research. "Under socialism, a lot of experimental ideas get funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And the planning committee have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real."
- cladopa 1y agoThere is a very important difference: real investors risk their own money, the money they saved over their entire life making decisions. Under socialism bureaucrats risk someone else's money. We are not in a pure capitalistic society, we also have States, central Banks with central planning expending over half the money in Europe and USA and more than half in Asia. As a European myself that see the public money being wasted by incompetent people and filling the pockets of politicians, specially marxist ones. For example, the money Spain received after COVID filled so many socialist pockets and has not given information back to Europe as of how it was spent(it was spent on their own companies of friend and family).
- tliltocatl 1y ago>> There is a very important difference: real investors risk their own money, the money they saved over their entire life making decisions. Except for the "institutional investors".
- foxglacier 1y agoEven then, the people the money came from voluntarily chose those institutions. If you don't like risky investments, there are lower risk institutions or products you can put your money in. It's still ultimately the will of the individual what they do with their money, and the consequences of bad choices are still mostly contained to the individuals who make them. But when it's done with tax money, everyone's dragged into it and has no personal choice in the matter. Even worse, when it's tax money without democracy, even if the majority of people don't like how it's used, they even collectively have no choice in the matter.
- JCM9 1y agoAll the smartest people I know in finance are preparing for AI to be a huge bust that wipes out startups. To them, everyone in tech is just a pawn in their money moving finance games. They view Silicon Valley at the moment salivating on what there plays are to make money off the coming hype cycle implosion. The best finance folks make the most money when the tide goes out… and they’re making moves now to be ready. Take that for what it is.
- amelius 1y agoEspecially startups in AI are at risk, because their specific niche projects can easily be outcompeted when BigTech comes with more generalized AI models.
- james_oofou 1y agoI'll take it for finance people being totally clueless, right? Have you talked to these people about AI?
- Archonical 1y agoMy experience has gone the other way than OOP: Anecdotally, I have had VCs ask me to review AI companies to tell them what they do so they can invest. The VC said VCs don't really understand what they're investing in and just want to get in on anything AI due to FOMO. The company I reviewed didn't seem like a great investment, but I don't even think that matters right now.
- JCM9 1y agoTo be clear when I said “finance folks” I wasn’t really referring to VCs. I’m talking more family office types that manage big pools of money that you don’t know about. The super wealthy class that has literally has more money than the King but would be horrified if you knew their name. Old money types. They’re well aware of the “dumb VC” vibe that just throws money after hype. The finance folks I’m talking about are the type that eat failed VCs for lunch.
- qqxufo 1y ago[dead]
- ripped_britches 1y agoPoor Jeff gonna miss that sweet AGI gravy
- Flatcircle 1y agoIf you listen to the speech it's a bit more nuanced than that headline.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoIt's very hard to find anything other than half saying AI is in a bubble, and we will pop any day now, and the other half declaring AGI by 2029, when a new revolution will begin. If you follow the hard science and not the money, you can see we're somewhere in-between these two takes. AI datacenters requiring new power plants is unsustainable for long-term growth. Meanwhile, we have LLMs accepting bullshit tasks and completing them. This is very hard to ignore.
- slaterbug 1y ago> Meanwhile, we have LLMs accepting bullshit tasks and completing them. Would you mind elaborating on that? I’m not quite sure what you mean.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoBullshit tasks are the modern TPS reports. Tasks that create no real value to anyone, but are necessary because management likes to think it is progress.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoBy society, he means the oligarchy will get more power and control. Yeah, sure some side benefits to people. AI is still a nuclear weapon against labor in the capital - labor (haves - haves not), and will start pushing wealth inequality to the Egyptian pharoah. The only good news for plebians is that virtual reality entertainment means you just need a little closet to live in. Overall, this just leads up to further demographic decline, which as an environmental malthusian I would welcome in the initial stages to get us down from our current level, but I also suspect it would turn into an economic downward spiral, especially with AI, where the oligarchs have such total authoritarian control and monopoly on resources that humanity basically stops having kids at all.
- WhyOhWhyQ 1y agoSeems like society isn't going to benefit much, but the ultrawealthy will benefit enormously.
- taberiand 1y agoOf course they will, the ultra wealthy are too big to fail. In a bubble like this, they just invest in pretty much everything and take the losses on the 99% of failures to get the x1000 multiples on the 1% of successes. While the rest of us take the hit.
- christiangenco 1y agoTo those who have everything more will be given; from those who have nothing everything will be taken.
- gtsop 1y agoAdding to that, I love how his analysis is completely detached from the consequences this burst will impose on the working man. As it did in the dotcom bubble.
- captainkrtek 1y ago“Billionaire known for exploiting workers says ‘trust me, you all will benefit from this’”
- fithisux 1y agoAI is a solution searching for a problem. This is what he acknowledges.
- rickcarlino 1y agoOnion Headline 2026: “Unemployed data scientist glad society is benefiting from AI without him after layoffs.”
- Jgoauh 1y agoWell I say nuh-huh