Our 401k will go down a bit, a bit of money will be transferred from retail investors to the big players, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. You won’t see so many ads for dumb AI services that literally no one wants. The big players will be fine, maybe, maybe, a few data centers shut down, but most of them don’t.

I think it will be triggered by the massive overvaluation of many AI labs. Investors will sell. In the meanwhile, other sectors will still have to adjust to the new reality of token generators, so the wider economy is impacted.

LLMs will not disappear, just like real estate did not disappear after 2008,and the internet did not disappear after the dotcom bubble burst.

But I can imagine the end of hyperfocus on the "AGI race".

Considering from where the bubble grows, my wisest guess as to when it will start showing cracks (and I'm not very wise, by the way) would be Republicans doing bad at next elections.

As of now it seems that any losses from AI industry would simply be tanked (Nvidia's capitalization, for example, still ain't a joke, they've got a lot of money to burn) or socialized. Little bits of regulations or opposition to socializing of losses may actually move the loss needle beyond pain point, where we can hope for panic to ensue.

If bubble pops - AI is here to stay anyway. Chinese have shown with their DeepSeek that you can run decent sized models locally, and the main gatekeeper of local AI is, you guessed it, Nvidia. Prices for server GPU's are disproportionately high and one of the reasons is to not allow plebs like us to have that. But with further optimization of AI models they'll become more and more accessible on hardware consumers already have.

My second guess of when though would be investors getting tired of AGI promises as it is AGI that has to magically turn money pit of AI into unprecedented profits.

The industry will end up with one or two winners and a lot of losers. Very hard to predict these things (smart money in 1997 was that Apple was about to file bankruptcy). One or two companies will have success and the rest will evaporate or be absorbed. Then the AI product itself will be priced up (and dumbed down) significantly.

AI will not go away, but will be far more limited and specialized. The day of free general access to powerful chatbots will be up.

Internet was the "AI" of the dotcom bubble. It didn't go anywhere after the bubble burst and neither will AI. What will go away are the companies with only hype but no product. Amazon and eBay came about during the dotcom bubble and now companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be equivalent ones.

The bubble bursts when investors start losing faith that the company they have invested into will become profitable so they pull out, which makes other investors get scared so they pull out too and then the company goes under.

Anybody thinking AI goes away is just wishfully thinking, and/or ignorant.

GenAI is here to stay in one form or another, with long term impacts.

I wager the bubble will pop when OpenAI finally admits they have no path to making good on their purchasing commitments. They aren't the whole bubble and Altman has made what should be obviously the worst financial moves, however the broader market will be more bearish on anything they vaguely think to be OpenAI like.

I suspect it'll be with a year from now, based on what I've read.

The companies will never stop doing the GenAI things, but they may be less utterly obnoxious about it. I suspect Google and Anthropic have the highest chances of enduring a pop, anthropic for being well regarded in the field and Google because they get to make most phones go to them automatically whether requested or not.

I think GenAI will persist in obnoxious ways, but at least more bearable without folks desperately needing it to be adopted for the sake of their wealth.

You'll be able to buy LLM hardware (video cards and RAM) for cents on the dollar as companies fail. The NASDAQ will drop a bit, the number of LLMs will reduce

Better than the GFC where all we got was Enron corporate branding and expensive houses

Comparable to dot com where loads of nerds bought $5 servers

I think part of the process is going to be the enshittification of AI services. (Temporary, until the technology for sustainable infrastructure catches up.) Tokens will cost a premium, and a lot of businesses that depend on AI will turn to China's cheaper offerings.

Hobbyists will turn more to home-grown AI systems.

In recent news, Chinese AI is catching up to Anthropic. It'll be interesting if the Trump administration tries to block the Chinese AI offerings in order to bolster US ones. Trump and the AI tech bros are familiar bedfellows after all.

The AI bubble will pop the same way the dotcom bubble popped. A lot of money lost and the hype will die down, but the technology will remain and reach a homeostasis at the level where it's actually a helpful tool.

When the dotcom bubble popped the internet didn't disappear, it just became what it was supposed to be. When the AI bubble pops the technology will still be there for use cases where it's actually appropriate and useful.

Dogs and cats living together etc.

Social media companies will fill the gaps, continuing to spread their toxicity through society unchecked. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is starting to look more like a cautionary tale.

I think the AI bubble will pop when another part of the economy needs capital, sucking up the capital going to AI.

AI burning money for market share isn't new to Wall Street, that's been tech for the past generation. The issue is going to be liquidity to not test these valuations. Once they are tested, they are going to collapse.

Ai is here to stay. There will be winners

Many companies will take huge losses but the real losses will be communities with huge dead buildings and unrewarded tax incentives. Power companies with wasted investments trying to feed datacenters that no longer exist and the rate payers that have to pay for it

I think there will continue to be a free tier: Apple is a great example of using small local ai to do useful things for their customers. However the latest models will be have to be much more expensive to cover the business case. Scale matters, so there’s a good chance the winners won’t just dominate in a country but globally

One change for me is celebrating on the anniversary of an AI company shutting down.

Big tech will keep their AI. Like others here have said, AI companies without another income stream will go belly up.

Some data centers will be sold and repurposed. Others will sell off their hardware to the consumer market.

Lower temperatures and less noise near the former data centers.

I don't see property values going back to where they were unless a data center is dismantled and the water table recovers.

Probably:

• GenAI continues to be used for marketing, and anything else where form matters more than substance
• anything where meaning is really critical might still use it, but will require solid oversight/governance. Software, research, medicine, teaching, etc.

Maybe:

• AI bubble bursts, with ripple effects into the broader economy, particularly in the US. This will be a huge problem if big banks are heavily leveraged for their AI investments (not sure this is the case, but it seems likely). If this happens, the collapse will be much worse than the GFC, perhaps worse than the great depression.
• Political spillover.. No idea what this will look like, but it's a big trigger...