I feel like literally everybody knew it was a bubble when it started expanding and everyone just kept pumping into it.
How many tech bubbles do we have to go through before we leave our lesson?
I get that people who sell AI-services wants to promote it. That part is obvious.
What I don’t get is how gullible the rest of society at large is. Take the norwegian digitalization minister, who says that 80% of the public sector shall use AI. Whatever that means.
Or building a gigantic fuckoff openai data centre, instead of new industry https://openai.com/nb-NO/index/introducing-stargate-norway/
Jared Diamond had a great take on this in “Collapse”. That there a countless examples of societies making awful decisions - because the decisionmakers are insulated from the consequences. On the contrary, they get short term gains.
We know that our current way of economic growth and consistent new “inventions” is destroying the basis of our life. We know that the only way to stop is to fundamentally redesign the social system, moving away from capitalism, growth economics and ever new gadgets.
But facing this is difficult. Facing this and winning elections with it is even more difficult. Instead claiming there is some wonder technology that will safe us all and putting the eggs in that basket is much easier. It will fail inevitably, but until then it is easier.
what lesson? it’s a ponzi scheme and whoever is the last holding the bag is the only one losing.
And that’s why it’s being done. Everyone hopes that they make it out at just the right time to make millions while the greater fools who join too late are left holding the bag.
Bubbles are great. For those who make it out in time. They suck fo everyone else including the taxpayer who might have to bail out companies and investors.
Always following the doctrine of privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Plus everyone else that pays taxes as they will have to continue to pay for unemployment insurance, food stamps, rent assistance, etc (not the CEOs and execs that caused it that’s for sure).
Never. Some people think the universe owes us Star Trek and are just waiting for something new to happen.
You don’t believe in the quantum block chain 3D printed AI cloud future mining asteroids for the private Mars colony (yet with no life extension)?
Luddite.
SSSSIIIIIIIGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH…
Looks like I’ll have to prepare for yet another once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse.
How many does this make now, 6? 7? I lost track after Covid broke my understanding of time and space.
Covid really fucked everything up. My sense of time and recent-ish history went to shit.
If I was China, I would be thrilled to hear that the west are building data centres for LLMs, sucking power from the grid, and using all their attention and money on AI, rather than building better universities and industry. Just sit back and enjoy, while I can get ahead in these areas.
never interrupt your enemy while he is making a big mistake
It’s going to be great when the AI hype bubble crashes
I didn’t have the US becoming a banana republic on my bingo card tbf
why not
Yeah ten years seems like plenty of notice
So is it smart to short on the ai bubble ? 👉👈
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Yup. If you have money you can AFFORD TO BURN, go ahead and short to your heart’s content. Otherwise, stay clear and hedge your bets.
The question is when, not if. But it’s an expensive question to guess the “when” wrong. I believe the famous idiom is: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Best of luck!
Did you think it was strange when tech bubble burst in 2001 ? And the housing market and San Jose, Tech capital of the world went up.
Open models are going to kick the stool out. Hopefully.
GLM 4.5 is already #2 on lm arena, above Grok and ChatGPT, and runnable on homelab rigs, yet just 32B active (which is mad). Extrapolate that a bit, and it’s just a race to the zero-cost bottom. None of this is sustainable.
I did not understand half of what you’ve written. But what do I need to get this running on my home PC?
I am referencing this: https://z.ai/blog/glm-4.5
The full GLM? Basically a 3090 or 4090 and a budget EPYC CPU. Or maybe 2 GPUs on a threadripper system.
GLM Air? Now this would work on a 16GB+ VRAM desktop, just slap in 96GB+ (maybe 64GB?) of fast RAM. Or the recent Framework desktop, or any mini PC/laptop with the 128GB Ryzen 395 config, or a 128GB+ Mac.
You’d download the weights, quantize yourself if needed, and run them in ik_llama.cpp (which should get support imminently).
https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp/
But these are…not lightweight models. If you don’t want a homelab, there are better ones that will fit on more typical hardware configs.
You can probably just use ollama and import the model.
It’s going to be slow as molasses on ollama. It needs a better runtime, and GLM 4.5 probably isn’t supported at this moment anyway.
Ooowee, they are setting up the US for a major bust aren’t they. I guess all the wealthy people will just have to buy up everything when it becomes dirt cheap. Sucks to have to own everything I guess.
Willing to take real life money bet that bubble is not going to pop despite Lemmy’s obsession here. The value is absolutely inflated but it’s definitely real value and LLMs are not going to disappear unless we create a better AI technology.
In general we’re way past the point of tech bubbles popping. Software markets move incredibly fast and are incredibly resilient to this. There literally hasn’t been a software bubble popping since dotcom boom. Prove me wrong.
Even if you see problems with LLMs and AI in general this hopeful doomerism is really not helping anyone. Now instead of spending effort on improving things people are these angry, passive, delusional accelerationists without any self awareness.
I mean we haven’t figured out how to make AI profitable yet, and though it’s a cool technology with real world use cases, nobody has proven yet that the juice is worth the squeeze. There’s an unimaginable amount of money tied up in a technology on the hope that one day they find a way to make it profitable and though AI as a technology “improves”, its journey towards providing more value than it costs to run is not.
If I roleplayed as somebody who desperately wanted AI to succeed, my first question would be “What is the plan to have AI make money?” And so far nobody, not even the technology’s biggest sycophants have an answer.
The profit of ai lies in this: mass surveillance and ads. Thats it.
The revenue of AI lies in mass surveillance and ads. But even going full dystopia, that has not been enough to make AI companies profitable.
Millennials are killing the mass surveillance and advertising industry!
AI is absolutely profitable just not for everybody.
AI as a technology is so far not profitable for anybody. The hardware AI runs on is profitable, as might be some start ups that are heavily leveraging AI, but actually operating AI is so far not profitable, and because increasingly smaller improvements in AI use exponentially more power, there’s no real path that is visible to any of us today that suggests anyone’s yet found a path to profitability. Aside from some kind of miracle out of left field that no one today has even conceived, the long term outlook isn’t great.
If AI as a technology busts, so does the insane profits behind the hardware it runs on. And without that left field technological breakthrough, the only option to pursue to avoid AI going completely bust is to raise prices astronomically, which would bust any companies currently dependent on all the AI currently being provided to them for basically next to nothing.
The entire industry is operating at a loss, but is being propped up by the currently abstract idea that AI will some day make money. This isn’t the “AI Hater” viewpoint, it’s just the spot AI is currently in. If you think AI is here to stay, you’re placing a bet on a promise that nobody as of today can actually make.
Absolute delusion right here
Delusion? Ok let’s get it straight from the horse’s mouth then. I’ve asked ChatGPT if OpenAI is profitable, and to explain its financial outlook. What you see below, emphasis and emojis, are generated by ChatGPT:
—ChatGPT—
OpenAI is not currently profitable. Despite its rapid growth, the company continues to operate at a substantial loss.
📊 Financial Snapshot
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Annual recurring revenue (ARR) was reported at approximately $12 billion as of July 2025, implying around $1 billion per month in revenue.
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Projected total revenue for 2025 is $12.7 billion, up from roughly $3.7 billion in 2024.
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However, OpenAI’s cash burn has increased, with projected operational losses around $8 billion in 2025 alone
—end ChatGPT—
The most favorable projections are that OpenAI will not be cash positive (That means making a single dollar in profit) until it reached 129 billion dollars in revenue. That means that OPENAI has to make more than 10X their annual revenue to finally be profitable. And their current strategy to make more money is to expand their infrastructure to take on more customers and run more powerful systems. The problem is, the models require substantially more power to make moderate gains in accurate and capability. And every new AI datacenter means more land cost, engineers, water, and electricity. Compounding the issue is that the more electricity they use, the more it costs. NJ has paved the way for a number of new huge AI datacenters in the past few years and the cost of electricity in the state has skyrocketed. People are seeing their monthly electric bills raised by 50-150% in the last couple months alone. Thats forcing not only people out of their homes, but eats substantially into revenue growth for data centers. It’s quite literally a race for AI companies to reach profitability before hitting the natural limits to the resources they require to expand. And I haven’t heard a peep about how they expect to do so.
You use one company thats is spearheading the entire industry as your example that no AI company is profitable. Either you are argueing in extremely bad faith or you’re invredibly stupid I’m sorry.
Of course I used the company that is the market leader in AI as an example that AI companies are not profitable you donut, that’s how that works.
They’re not the only AI company that’s not profitable, like I said none of them are. You can take your pick if you don’t like OpenAI as an example.
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Dotcom was a bubble too and it popped hard with huge faillout even though the internet didn’t disappear and it still was and is a revolutionary thing that changed how we live our lives.
Overvalued doesn’t mean the thing has no value.
The value a thing creates is only part of whether the investment into it is worth it.
It’s entirely possible that all of the money that is going into the AI bubble will create value that will ultimately benefit someone else, and that those who initially invested in it will have nothing to show for it.
In the late 90’s, U.S. regulatory reform around telecom prepared everyone for an explosion of investment in hard infrastructure assets around telecommunications: cell phones were starting to become a thing, consumer internet held a ton of promise. So telecom companies started digging trenches and laying fiber, at enormous expense to themselves. Most ended up in bankruptcy, and the actual assets eventually became owned by those who later bought those assets for pennies on the dollar, in bankruptcy auctions.
Some companies owned fiber routes that they didn’t even bother using, and in the early 2000’s there was a shitload of dark fiber scattered throughout the United States. Eventually the bandwidth needs of near universal broadband gave that old fiber some use. But the companies that built it had already collapsed.
If today’s AI companies can’t actually turn a profit, they’re going to be forced to sell off their expensive data at some point. Maybe someone else can make money with it. But the life cycle of this tech is much shorter than the telecom infrastructure I was describing earlier, so a stale LLM might very well become worthless within years. Or it’s only a stepping stone towards a distilled model that costs a fraction to run.
So as an investment case, I’m not seeing a compelling case for investing in AI today. Even if you agree that it will provide value, it doesn’t make sense to invest $10 to get $1 of value.
there’s an argument that this is just the targeted ads bubble that keeps inflating using different technologies. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, but this time it seems like they are betting big on a single technology for a longer time, which is different from what we have seen in the past 10 years.
Sort of agreed. I disagree with the people around here acting like AI will crash and burn, never to be seen again. It’s here to stay.
I do think this is a bubble and will pop hard. Too many players in the game, most are going to lose, but the survivors will be rich and powerful beyond imagining.
Recognizing from history the possibilities of where this all might lead, the prospect of any serious economic downturn being met with a widespread push of mass automation—paired with a regime overwhelmingly friendly to the tech and business class, and executing a campaign of oppression and prosecution of precarious manual and skilled laborers—well, it should make us all sit up and pay attention.
Your kids will enjoy their new Zombie Twitter AI teacher with fabulous lesson plans like, “Was the Holocaust real or just a hoax?”
propo dabogda
