> Here’s what’s never happened before: everyone knows the script.
I'm don't think this is unique, most bubbles historically as far back as the South Sea bubble have had a lot of people aware of the irrationality, but investing in an attempt to profit from it.
I'd even go so far as to say, this is exactly what makes bubbles so volatile as opposed to normal "market corrections". If the dotcom boom had been all people who really believed they were sensibly evaluating the internet's financial potential, I don't think we'd have seen them jump ship quite so quickly.
I won't predict the future, but another point about historic bubbles: they almost all go on much further than people think they will before collapse.
LarsDu88 · 2h ago
I had the same thoughts as much as 2 years ago on how this will play out. Unlike with railroads and fiber optic cable however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years.
Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US.
Long term, I think the real winners are going to be in robotics. Still an unsolved field, but Waymo proves that even a nearly 20 year slog to the finish line is viable. And robotics infrastructure may be more robust to obsolescence than the underlying compute. I find it odd so many companies are making humanoid robots though... Over engineering that reeks of bubble economics and possible fraud.
ehnto · 2h ago
I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans.
If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, in all degrees of motion a human has etc.
xg15 · 1h ago
Completely off-topic: I find it odd that we easily use this argument for humanoid robots (and also self-driving cars), but handicapped people are still bound to wheelchairs and have to constantly fight to change the environment and make it wheelchair-accessible.
If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.
Freak_NL · 31m ago
For disabled people who can use their arms and propel themselves, a wheelchair is low-maintenance, dependable, repairable, self-powered, and generic enough for there to be a healthy market and not too much vendor lock-in. Wheelchairs are not necessarily low-tech, but they are fully understandable. If the user of a wheelchair is unable to move themself for whatever reason, any able bodied person can step in and push. These things matter in any situation I think, but they matter even more in an emergency or a war zone.
Exoskeletons can't match that.
fhd2 · 54m ago
Much like wheelchairs vs exo skeletons, the simpler (and cheaper) tech tends to win. I'd imagine in a future where robots are everywhere, they'll use whatever cheap locomotion is appropriate for their tasks, probably predominantly wheels. It's a fun vision to imagine bipedal robots everywhere like in old sci movies, but I'm not convinced that's how it'll play out, the economics don't make that much sense.
Bipedal robots are more expensive to develop, build and maintain, more limited in their payloads, and because of the additional complexity, less reliable.
mcny · 47m ago
> If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.
Knowing the kind of markup on wheelchairs that means a YouTuber wheel chair look like a bargain (see Jerry rig everything wheelchair), I can't imagine how much the US healthcare "industry" would charge for a "medical grade" exoskeleton.
lm28469 · 22m ago
I love how most people can't even afford a car without taking loans but we're talking about personal robot assistants as if it was right around the corner and the natural evolution of things
dijit · 2h ago
The half-life of iron is pretty low too, the advantage of the rail system is what it allowed us to do when it was cheap enough.
All the investment in AI should help bring infrastructure up to a higher level, power distribution and cooling for example are at a much higher level than would have otherwise been.
Who knows what use that might have if it suddenly becomes incredibly cheap.
(this is my silver lining thinking)
fhd2 · 1h ago
> however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years.
Is it all about the actual GPUs though, is that the only "infrastructure" being built? A list from the top of my head of things that I'd say do last:
1. Data center buildings (take a while to build, contents completely aside).
2. Organisations and processes for running operations and procurement in said data centers - doesn't take decades to build for sure, but it's something worthwhile to already have.
3. Advances in the actual chips, i.e. more powerful processing units.
4. Advances in chip fabrication.
5. Chip fabrication facilities and organisations (similar to #1 and #2).
So sure, GPUs are highly temporary. But a lot of the things being developed and built around them much less so.
I do think one possible bubble burst scenario is that we'll have cheap compute available for decades but not a lot of great ideas of what to do with it. That is not unlike the 2000s I suppose.
bostik · 32m ago
Consider the second order effects of building all those data centers.
The GPU hardware rots and becomes obsolete in a matter of years, but the national infrastructure required to support the physical sites isn't going away. Things such as...
- improved power distribution networks
- logistics arrangements to build and support the DC sites
- lots and lots of new fibre interconnects to support the massive bandwidth needs
- hopefully: better power delivery planning laws
- plumbing infrastructure, because all that hardware requires cooling
Some of the DC sites will be decommissioned from their initial use, but given the physical security requirements, might morph into handy higher-security industrial facilities with only small repurposing. Such reuse cases would especially benefit from improved logistics (see above).
willvarfar · 2h ago
Yes the thing that might be missed in the point about how the big buildout of GPU compute is going to be the backbone of the future etc is that, unlike railroads and dark fibre, the GPU compute gets obsolete really really quickly. So it's not the same.
I had a friend who got a Sun cluster for basically free when the 2000 dot com bubble burst. And when we were doing recreational math contests a couple of years later it was slower than our laptops.
So it is very likely that a load of today's GPU compute is very competitive next year or the year after?
The AI bubble bursting will kill investment in the next gen hardware in the west.
But china will come to market with its first gen that it is currently building to replace its dependency on the west and will leapfrog the west etc. China isn't really completely dependent on competing in our AI bubble, its using AI for its own things and will plough on even when the west bubble bursts. Seems obvious?
Still, there has been so much talk about the AI bubble bursting last week and this is the the best writeup.
Negitivefrags · 1h ago
I do agree with you, but I think there a non-zero chance the situation might be different now.
We are not getting the same insane gains from node shrinks anymore.
Imagine the bubble pops tomorrow. You would have an excess of compute using current gen tech, and the insane investments required to get to the next node shrink using our current path might no longer be economically justifiable while such an excess of compute exists.
It might be that you need to have a much bigger gap than what we are currently seeing in order to actually get enough of a boost to make it worthwhile.
Not saying that is what would happen, I'm just saying it's not impossible either.
xg15 · 2h ago
> The speculation democratized investing in a way never seen before. Clerks, shopkeepers, and domestic servants, people who had never owned stocks before, mortgaged their homes and borrowed money to buy railway shares.
I like the term "democratize investing" here. "We're granting the masses the privilege of dumping their lifesavings into this overhyped project, so we can make a clean exit".
senko · 1h ago
Several paragraphs later, the article argues this time is different:
> Yes, retail can buy Nvidia, but they can’t access pre-IPO rounds where the real speculation happens. This concentration among professional investors won’t prevent a bubble, but it might prevent the kind of widespread financial devastation that followed previous crashes.
cantor_S_drug · 1h ago
> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. The data centers kept humming after Webvan went dark. All that ‘wasted’ investment had already transformed into something physical. The pipes, servers, and networks that would become the foundation for Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and the digital transformation that actually did change everything. The bubble’s victims unknowingly funded the future. They just paid a decade too early.
The flow of money to spur innovation is exactly like "Cambrian Explosion". We should do this more often, with biotech and future fields to come.
flohofwoe · 58m ago
> Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did.
OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;)
I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an organism being propped up that wouldn't survive on its own in a competitive environment.
cantor_S_drug · 15m ago
Paradoxically, I think Cambrian Explosion happened because of innovation of eyes. Maybe the tech that currently was developed for VR headsets could find home in smart glasses (i.e. google glass)
layoric · 1h ago
> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did.
I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives it at the other side of the transaction. It is still in circulation, it can still be used to outbid people for real things, just by different people.
Also, pets.com still exists, it just forwards to petsmart.com.
starwatch · 40m ago
Money can be "lost", and "created". In fact, it regularly is by commercial banks; this is the cornerstone of the modern economy. The bank of England wrote a pretty accessible document on money being created and destroyed [1]. For a slightly deeper dive (but equally accessible) check out "Can’t We Just Print More Money?" by Rupal Patel, et al. [2] which describes the different kinds of money.
The 2014 doc was a pretty wild read for me when it came out - it changed my perspective quite a bit.
"capital" in the economic sense isn't money at all - it's tools, infrastructure, knowledge; from this point of view, you're correct. A bubble bursting on the stock market doesn't destroy capital.
On the other hand, the monetary value of the stock market (and other assets) going up and down does create or destroy "money". From a financial point of view, it's not a zero sum game.
cjfd · 46m ago
This is incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation . A bubble bursting is the inverse process of money creation. Money isn't paper bills or metal coins. It is mostly numbers in a computer.
raldi · 2h ago
> Anthropic raised $450 million at a $4.1 billion valuation despite negligible revenue
What year is this from? The author might want to do a recent news search.
aurareturn · 1h ago
Isn’t Anthropic worth hundreds of billions by now and their revenue is doubling every 6 months?
No comments yet
chrischen · 1h ago
4.1 billion is nothing these days.
aurareturn · 1h ago
FYI, Altman also said OpenAI is planning to invest “trillions” into AI in the “near future”. He said this at the same time as saying AI is bubbly.
This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.
xg15 · 1h ago
Self-contradictory communication seems to become his style.
"AI is an existential risk for humanity, that's why we have to dump all resources we have into building it".
"It's critically important that AI as an industry is regulated, but also we'll pull out of the EU if they try to regulate us"
dandanua · 50m ago
It's a feature of any fascists-like personality. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
ivape · 1h ago
He’s saying it’s bubbly because he can’t get good prices to buy out startups. He’s a buyer, first and foremost. No one wants to have to pay $20bn for some of these companies. They don’t believe it’s a bubble on any level, and I do think anyone in involved sees it as an infinite investment until the very end of the world (not kidding). It’s the end-game for software tech, especially if you are willing to be humbled by what stuff like Genie3 will become.
There is absolutely nothing else left to invest in when it comes to software development, this is it.
aurareturn · 1h ago
Yep. Agreed. He said this to knock down price on AI startups for acquisition and to stop the ballooning talent war costing hundreds of millions.
It’s so painfully obvious but so many AI doomers use it as evidence.
He doesn’t want a talent war with Meta and Apple. And Meta has responded by signaling a truce in the talent war by saying they’re freezing AI hiring.
linotype · 4h ago
Citing Ray Dalio makes me question the credibility of the whole article.
teapot7 · 20m ago
My ex boss read too much Ray Dalio and it ate his brain.
adinhitlore · 25m ago
this was widely docummented BEFORE the "ai bubble", there's well known academic term for it, it's called:
I knew about since like 2010 or before, anti-tech Luddite will act like it's never a thing, shatup.
FinnLobsien · 2h ago
I think this is directionally correct. But we tend to remember the technologies which became mainstream after the bubble burst and forget those that fizzled or found a much less world-changing niche.
Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.
Ekaros · 2h ago
VR is good example of money being burned and middling adoption to a not that big population. For average person it has ended up something cool, but in the end not common and forgettable. And I am not sure if it even was a bubble, but selected players just investing in it.
FinnLobsien · 1h ago
Exactly. Right now it’s easy to look at it as a relatively niche thing.
But at the time it was going to be the next big thing transforming everything.
Same as 3D printing. Certainly cool and useful in some niche contexts, but it has not disrupted manufacturing.
gligorot · 1h ago
I would argue it disrupted engineering. So many videos on YouTube can be found of people cutting out expensive molds (for example) and getting a product to market faster and cheaper. And this is happening in companies as well (Prusa released an enterprise grade printer not long ago).
At the same time, Printables and MakerWorld are flooded with…toys. They gamified their platforms and a ton of “thingy” models, ex. generic planter pots (some of them just renders, never even printed!) is the result.
This certainly hides the benefit but I very much think it’s there.
FinnLobsien · 30m ago
This is precisely what I mean though. It's a technology that has found its place and is definitely useful and a value-add to society.
But if we look at the types of predictions made in the early days (print a house in a day for under $5k, print any food you want at home, obviating factories you can make anything at home...), almost none of that has come through.
And that doesn't mean it's a bad technology. Most technologies don't revolutionize the average person's life, but can still change corners of civilization.
But compare that to the internet, which has literally changed how we do basically everything in our daily lives.
I think the point is that most technologies are like 3D printing while the current narrative is that AI will be more like the internet.
Ekaros · 57m ago
There is places and things that work for 3d printing. Very small scale manufacturing. Prototypes. But actually selling those is somewhat hard and not scalable market. And home printing... Yeah that sounds like hobbyist to me with corresponding market.
On other side you get to complex topologies and very specialised parts. Again pretty hard to scale and limited demand.
In the end it is manufacturing and manufacturing is huge. But also generally does not have great margins. It has lot of competition. So 3D printing would end up there with others say makers of CNC machines, various presses and so on. Multi-billion dollar industry, but not tech.
ivape · 2h ago
Influencers, streamers, crypto …
Housing is back …
Dotcom came back…
Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it.
So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years.
AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able to do what it’s doing today. We could only dream of it.
kortilla · 1h ago
Eventually coming back doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bubble that popped.
FinnLobsien · 28m ago
Precisely the article's point. AOL may not have been the successful company it could've been, but it did get millions of households online, which became infrastructure for the successful companies we all know today.
WA · 1h ago
> AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able to do what it’s doing today. We could only dream of it.
Sure, but do the math. It doesn’t work out yet. This stuff burns money and energy. Either revenue has to go up A LOT or costs do have to come down A LOT (or quality has to suffer by using smaller models).
oezi · 1h ago
If we assume that every American will pay 20 USD per month for AI that's already 100bn per year.
Electricity will become very cheap during the day at least with solar continuing its declining trajectory.
esseph · 47m ago
Except we're killing all solar and wind projects in the US :(
FirmwareBurner · 59m ago
>Housing is back … Nothing was a bubble.
Ironic how you can contradict yourself without realizing. The fact that something "came back", meant it WAS a bubble that popped.
FinnLobsien · 7m ago
I think there's a big difference between things that have always been bought and sold (housing, oil, food, minerals, etc.) and actual net-new technology that may or may not pay off on its promise.
The former can be overvalued (see housing pre-2008), but we'll never come to the conclusion that it's useless or only needed in niche use cases. In that case, the item itself isn't really the bubble. The bubble is in what enables the irrational prices (e.g. subprime mortgages).
The latter can definitely be a bubble where the technology just isn't useful for a given use case (or at all).
Ekaros · 54m ago
Also nothing says that same thing can't be a bubble over and over again. Especially something as fundamental and old as housing. Those in power might even want it to be boom and bust cycle.
hahahacorn · 2h ago
I recently gave an unprompted tirade about bubbles creating pockets of fake economic activity with no “real” economic output or value creation tied to them, and how sometimes, the circulatory systems in those bubbles feed into themselves.
E.g. someone borrowing against their higher property value(s) to put a down payment on another property.
Leverage is the amplifier. And I don’t see many self-circulating capital flows. I expect contractions to be reasonable for this bubble, or more realistically industry stagflation.
Mostly agree with the author. But I also believe that this is very emergent tech and we’re still figuring out the best way to actually make use of it
The clearest example is in AI generated visual content. If you dig through what people are doing, its clear that only a very small % of users are actually getting truly high-quality, ready-for-production content, while the rest are just prompting in pure slop. There is a skill level to this that hasn’t really permeated the mainstream
Once that happens, we might see some of that 95% waste figure change to, maybe, 50% waste
jstummbillig · 55m ago
There is hubris, but calling it a bubble simply does not check out, for one reason alone: If AI did absolutely nothing from here on out but give maybe a somewhat better version of current claude code (and it confuses me to no end that some people still refuse to see what is going on there, which admittedly are increasingly few of those who try, which makes sense because stuff gets better) that leads to, say, a ~2x dev speed up it, given the size of the market and how much software is missing still, AI as a whole would still be undervalued.
Of course, assuming that this would be the only thing where economic gains come from is already such a laughably bearish vision. It's just that that's all you need for the bubble-thesis to fall flat.
I'm don't think this is unique, most bubbles historically as far back as the South Sea bubble have had a lot of people aware of the irrationality, but investing in an attempt to profit from it.
I'd even go so far as to say, this is exactly what makes bubbles so volatile as opposed to normal "market corrections". If the dotcom boom had been all people who really believed they were sensibly evaluating the internet's financial potential, I don't think we'd have seen them jump ship quite so quickly.
I won't predict the future, but another point about historic bubbles: they almost all go on much further than people think they will before collapse.
Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US.
Long term, I think the real winners are going to be in robotics. Still an unsolved field, but Waymo proves that even a nearly 20 year slog to the finish line is viable. And robotics infrastructure may be more robust to obsolescence than the underlying compute. I find it odd so many companies are making humanoid robots though... Over engineering that reeks of bubble economics and possible fraud.
If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, in all degrees of motion a human has etc.
If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.
Exoskeletons can't match that.
Bipedal robots are more expensive to develop, build and maintain, more limited in their payloads, and because of the additional complexity, less reliable.
Knowing the kind of markup on wheelchairs that means a YouTuber wheel chair look like a bargain (see Jerry rig everything wheelchair), I can't imagine how much the US healthcare "industry" would charge for a "medical grade" exoskeleton.
All the investment in AI should help bring infrastructure up to a higher level, power distribution and cooling for example are at a much higher level than would have otherwise been.
Who knows what use that might have if it suddenly becomes incredibly cheap.
(this is my silver lining thinking)
Is it all about the actual GPUs though, is that the only "infrastructure" being built? A list from the top of my head of things that I'd say do last:
1. Data center buildings (take a while to build, contents completely aside).
2. Organisations and processes for running operations and procurement in said data centers - doesn't take decades to build for sure, but it's something worthwhile to already have.
3. Advances in the actual chips, i.e. more powerful processing units.
4. Advances in chip fabrication.
5. Chip fabrication facilities and organisations (similar to #1 and #2).
So sure, GPUs are highly temporary. But a lot of the things being developed and built around them much less so.
I do think one possible bubble burst scenario is that we'll have cheap compute available for decades but not a lot of great ideas of what to do with it. That is not unlike the 2000s I suppose.
The GPU hardware rots and becomes obsolete in a matter of years, but the national infrastructure required to support the physical sites isn't going away. Things such as...
- improved power distribution networks
- logistics arrangements to build and support the DC sites
- lots and lots of new fibre interconnects to support the massive bandwidth needs
- hopefully: better power delivery planning laws
- plumbing infrastructure, because all that hardware requires cooling
Some of the DC sites will be decommissioned from their initial use, but given the physical security requirements, might morph into handy higher-security industrial facilities with only small repurposing. Such reuse cases would especially benefit from improved logistics (see above).
I had a friend who got a Sun cluster for basically free when the 2000 dot com bubble burst. And when we were doing recreational math contests a couple of years later it was slower than our laptops.
So it is very likely that a load of today's GPU compute is very competitive next year or the year after?
The AI bubble bursting will kill investment in the next gen hardware in the west.
But china will come to market with its first gen that it is currently building to replace its dependency on the west and will leapfrog the west etc. China isn't really completely dependent on competing in our AI bubble, its using AI for its own things and will plough on even when the west bubble bursts. Seems obvious?
Still, there has been so much talk about the AI bubble bursting last week and this is the the best writeup.
We are not getting the same insane gains from node shrinks anymore.
Imagine the bubble pops tomorrow. You would have an excess of compute using current gen tech, and the insane investments required to get to the next node shrink using our current path might no longer be economically justifiable while such an excess of compute exists.
It might be that you need to have a much bigger gap than what we are currently seeing in order to actually get enough of a boost to make it worthwhile.
Not saying that is what would happen, I'm just saying it's not impossible either.
I like the term "democratize investing" here. "We're granting the masses the privilege of dumping their lifesavings into this overhyped project, so we can make a clean exit".
> Yes, retail can buy Nvidia, but they can’t access pre-IPO rounds where the real speculation happens. This concentration among professional investors won’t prevent a bubble, but it might prevent the kind of widespread financial devastation that followed previous crashes.
The flow of money to spur innovation is exactly like "Cambrian Explosion". We should do this more often, with biotech and future fields to come.
OTOH all the VR headsets gathering dust now didn't turn out to be quite as useful as those fiber optic cables. And I'm not sure what will remain after the AI bubble pops except for a massive matrix multiplication overcapacity ;)
I also wouldn't call all the money being funneled into a single technology a "Cambrian Explosion", it's the opposite of that, an organism being propped up that wouldn't survive on its own in a competitive environment.
I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives it at the other side of the transaction. It is still in circulation, it can still be used to outbid people for real things, just by different people.
Also, pets.com still exists, it just forwards to petsmart.com.
The 2014 doc was a pretty wild read for me when it came out - it changed my perspective quite a bit.
[1]:https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58796370-can-t-we-just-p...
On the other hand, the monetary value of the stock market (and other assets) going up and down does create or destroy "money". From a financial point of view, it's not a zero sum game.
What year is this from? The author might want to do a recent news search.
No comments yet
This article is based off of the Altman bubbly comment.
"AI is an existential risk for humanity, that's why we have to dump all resources we have into building it".
"It's critically important that AI as an industry is regulated, but also we'll pull out of the EU if they try to regulate us"
There is absolutely nothing else left to invest in when it comes to software development, this is it.
It’s so painfully obvious but so many AI doomers use it as evidence.
He doesn’t want a talent war with Meta and Apple. And Meta has responded by signaling a truce in the talent war by saying they’re freezing AI hiring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
I knew about since like 2010 or before, anti-tech Luddite will act like it's never a thing, shatup.
Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.
But at the time it was going to be the next big thing transforming everything.
Same as 3D printing. Certainly cool and useful in some niche contexts, but it has not disrupted manufacturing.
At the same time, Printables and MakerWorld are flooded with…toys. They gamified their platforms and a ton of “thingy” models, ex. generic planter pots (some of them just renders, never even printed!) is the result.
This certainly hides the benefit but I very much think it’s there.
But if we look at the types of predictions made in the early days (print a house in a day for under $5k, print any food you want at home, obviating factories you can make anything at home...), almost none of that has come through.
And that doesn't mean it's a bad technology. Most technologies don't revolutionize the average person's life, but can still change corners of civilization.
But compare that to the internet, which has literally changed how we do basically everything in our daily lives.
I think the point is that most technologies are like 3D printing while the current narrative is that AI will be more like the internet.
On other side you get to complex topologies and very specialised parts. Again pretty hard to scale and limited demand.
In the end it is manufacturing and manufacturing is huge. But also generally does not have great margins. It has lot of competition. So 3D printing would end up there with others say makers of CNC machines, various presses and so on. Multi-billion dollar industry, but not tech.
Housing is back …
Dotcom came back…
Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it.
So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years.
AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able to do what it’s doing today. We could only dream of it.
Sure, but do the math. It doesn’t work out yet. This stuff burns money and energy. Either revenue has to go up A LOT or costs do have to come down A LOT (or quality has to suffer by using smaller models).
Electricity will become very cheap during the day at least with solar continuing its declining trajectory.
Ironic how you can contradict yourself without realizing. The fact that something "came back", meant it WAS a bubble that popped.
The former can be overvalued (see housing pre-2008), but we'll never come to the conclusion that it's useless or only needed in niche use cases. In that case, the item itself isn't really the bubble. The bubble is in what enables the irrational prices (e.g. subprime mortgages).
The latter can definitely be a bubble where the technology just isn't useful for a given use case (or at all).
E.g. someone borrowing against their higher property value(s) to put a down payment on another property.
Leverage is the amplifier. And I don’t see many self-circulating capital flows. I expect contractions to be reasonable for this bubble, or more realistically industry stagflation.
The clearest example is in AI generated visual content. If you dig through what people are doing, its clear that only a very small % of users are actually getting truly high-quality, ready-for-production content, while the rest are just prompting in pure slop. There is a skill level to this that hasn’t really permeated the mainstream
Once that happens, we might see some of that 95% waste figure change to, maybe, 50% waste
Of course, assuming that this would be the only thing where economic gains come from is already such a laughably bearish vision. It's just that that's all you need for the bubble-thesis to fall flat.