I see lots of talk on Lemmy about the AI bubble bursting. That AGI isn’t going to happen in the near-term, maybe it won’t ever happen. And so the the AI bubble will burst; ala the dot-com bubble.
But what exactly will burst? OpenAI and Claude? Those are private companies so maybe they will downsize or merge, but that’s not a bubble? NVIDIA & Microsoft? I don’t really see those companies imploding. They have a pretty large and diversified customer base. Besides, Apple and AWS are already moving away from NVIDIA by making their own hardware. I genuinely don’t understand where the big implosion is. Can someone help me understand this?
ETA: Is there an example analogous to pets.com for this AI bubble?
Or we work lul
Investors have invested lots of money into these companies. This means in some form or another these companies have agreed to pay back these investors in some way. You can answer this by quite literally thinking of money like a river, and the motion of that river is what gives energy to businesses so they can do their things.
In a normal not-bubble market, there is a flow of cash that goes from investors, into the company, and then back out to investors so they can do other things with it.
In a bubble market a lot of cash is flowing into the company, but little or no cash is flowing out back to investors. There are two possible things that happen here, either the cash eventually starts flowing again and we’re all good back to normal after some stabilization period, or people stop pumping cash into the business and the dam breaks. All that money is lost, or all that potential business energy is lost, or some combination of the two no matter how you slice it it’s wasted effort.
To keep with the water metaphor the AI market is like a hose that’s wound up in a box we can’t see into. We’ve pumped a ton of water into this hose and haven’t seen anything come out the other end. There could be a leak somewhere, or maybe we don’t have enough water to even get through the hose and people will want to use their water for other things instead. One thing we do know is that we’ve devoted so much water to this operation that if something does go wrong it has to go wrong spectacularly.
Colloquially, it means we’ll hopefully stop seeing “AI” shoved into every nook and cranny of every piece of software to tick a buzzword box.
there’s a lot of AI based startups promising their investors all sorts of outlandish results. eventually it’s going to become clear that those results are not coming and the investors will come calling.
It’s extra frustrating for those of us working in companies where ML is actually a useful tool that we’ve been leveraging for years.
I remember when I was arguing “It’s not ‘learning’, it’s algebra”.
Now the hype has gone from learning to intelligence.
It’s still algebra.
Well yeah - but technically everything is just algebra.
If it happens on a computer, it can be expressed in s expressions.
Sure, but I do think there’s a difference between your message arriving here, and MNIST recognition algorithms.
Yes. They don’t have to be public companies for investors to lose their shirts, and employees to lose their jobs.
The big players will likely continue to develop this tech. “The Bubble” is more about the marketing and speculative investing in anything with “AI” tacked onto it. There’s no reality where everything AI is being ham fisted into is going to be successful. There will be some winners, but there will be a lot of losers when the bubble bursts.
In the meantime, we have to put up with every company and product marketing that they now have “AI” in their product, whether it’s actually useful or different from it was before.
It’s the new squarespace for Uber AI on the blockchain, using ASIC GPT miners.
If anyone actually knew WHEN it would crash they wouldn’t tell be saying anything and instead placing bets via the stock market.
Back when Blockchain was first a huge hype bubble, there were companies that added “Blockchain” to their name, or announced a pivot into Blockchain tech, and watched their stock value soar by a few hundred percent (with market value being many times their revenue).
I had googled a list of news articles, until I found this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176519301703A noteworthy example: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-cap-adds-blockchain-to-name-and-stock-soars.html
Anyway.
That’s the bubble.
Over-valuation. People taking advantage of the hype. People jumping on any opportunity to “not be left out” or to “get in early”.AI has uses.
Everyone is throwing things at the wall to seeing what sticks. Not much of it will.
Marketing are capitalising on the hype.
