The entire US economy right now is 7 companies sending a trillion fake dollars back and forth to each other, but it's totally not a bubble according to grampa Powell.

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[–] 9 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

Nvidia probably has earnings since they're making a real commodity that they sell for real money to fuel this bubble. When the other companies collapse they'll be fine.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    But there will be no demand for their “product”. They may have money in the bank but no future business model.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Incorrect. The internet didnt go away over night just cause the dotcom bubble burst. AI still has value, just not the value these companies are overinflating. Many fields of science have been able to use AI for major advancements in their fields. They just dont need chatgpt or grok to do it because those models arent very focused and specialized. Even recent research from Anthropic pointed out how little effort it takes to poison models that rely on public information as training data, vs models that use heavily curated data.

    That and its not like gaming or digital design is going to suddenly stop existing. Graphics cards were valuable before the bubble, and will continue to be after.

    Demand will certainly decrease, but its not gonna go away. Nvidia can easily fall back on their older business model of being a GPU company, while still supplying parts of the AI market that survive the collapse. All the other companies, however, might have a very bad time.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Nvidia will be screwed if China actually does cut rare earths supplies to the west. Those are used heavily in chip production process, and without rare earths there's not gonna be much of that happening going forward.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's definitely a problem for them but it's one that's independent of the bubble itself - in fact, it's one that would be solved by the bubble popping! When the bubble pops Trump will be forced to end the trade war, and then China will go back to selling rare Earths to US companies because the trade war is fueled entirely by US aggression.

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  • 53 comments in c/usa@midwest.social view that post
    [–] 45 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    And all of our retirement accounts are tied to this not-a-bubble

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Speak for yourself, money bags

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Of course there's earnings. It's just you don't know the company that's making money. It goes to another market so you wouldn't have seen it before.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

    but they actually have earnings.

    Of course they have. But the spendings are bigger.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Oracle and Intel are all profitable. They might not be worth as much, but still.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Those are all shovel sellers. People stop buying shovels when the gold rush goes bust.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    more like, they are hoping IRON pyrite(fools gold) would be innovating as good as normal good or better.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes. It will all fall apart when all the regular businesses (not AI companies) realize that AI is just wasting their money and creating a big mess, not actually increasing their profits. These are supposed to be the big customers for AI and they’re really not benefiting from it at all.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    the customers being only other CEOs and middle managment, whom try to reduce headcount/excuse to fire people. on some of the subs they discussed how the offshored tech indian teams are not as good as the ones in the west(EU, South america, and USA)

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It is Palantir. I bet they are doing evil shit. The way Israel targeted public option and media to navigate what should have been quickly shut down by overwhelming public sentiment, was very abnormal from the abstract overview perspective.

    Knowing all the stuff I have seen messing with my offline AI server on my hardware over the last two years, the amount of data scraped and collected by google for everyone on the internet should be more than enough to actively manipulate everyone both logically and emotionally. There is enormous political capital in that manipulative power.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    We are experiencing the equivalent of the invention of the nuclear bomb for propaganda. Artificial agents that can manipulate people in ways we won't understand fully for decades. We are fighting for the human mind right now and no one is talking about it except j4k3.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I wonder how much Powell invested in the Ai bubble to say that. Dotcoms and subprimes had revenue too during their bubbles.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Hmm, when people like Powell start explaining that it's not a bubble, I hear that it's going to pop sooner rather than later. Especially when he cites "trust me, bro" as evidence.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I believe all pyramid schemes have earnings. The problem is that the bag has so far been shown to be pretty empty and somebody is going to be left holding it.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    That's the exact type of thing you hear near the peak of a bubble.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    These fools are lying so often and obviously that they are starting to finally lose their base. They can't even keep their own lies straight.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    Pretty sure Pets.com had earnings, too.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    Are the earrings in the room with us now?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Nah this is a legit shell game I swear.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Sure, these companies have earnings, but then they go burn all of it plus more on training and inference and data centers and whatever the fuck else. It's not profitable and it never will be. And yet they're willing to bankrupt the country on this egregore that Sam Altman and his ilk have created.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's worse than that. The revenue of all except for NVIDIA (which supplies the graphics chips) is by selling subsidized products. It's the classic Silicon Valley model of "growth at any cost" and then enshittifying; except the product they're offering is intolerably expensive.

    The AI products are not just losing money as a corporation; They're losing money on making their revenue. Most will not pay $200 for a month of chatbot interactions. Most will not pay $200 to generate a handful of sloptok videos. The number of users of these AI programs is so high because the product is sold at a loss -- and is being shoved in everyone's face, all the time. It's free/cheap entertainment for lonely and bored people. Once it hits their wallet, those commonfolk are gone.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yup, the only real winner here is Nvidia, for selling the shovels for the gold rush. All the "AI" companies are just spending money to lose money. But I guarantee that - somehow - all of us commonfolk will be left holding the bag, not Clammy Sammy Altman.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    We need bag holders and we need them NOW!

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    from what ive read, it could be retail that would be left holding the bag, and when that happens people in those industries will start losing jobs.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Not sure what you mean by "people in those industries". In investment parlance, "retail" isn't an industry, its individual investors. Y'know, people on the Robin Hood app YOLOing their life savings into Nvidia. So which industries are you referring to?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Those things are not mutually exclusive, JP!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    people were discussing this on reddit they said, the AI companies are hoping a retails(investors) sucker would be holding the bag, after they all cashed out.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    It’s a dome

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Understanding the economics of it is beyond what I can reasonably know at this time but I did read that Ryan McBeth argued that the increasingly likely war involving China in 2027 or 2028 will become instant demand for AI services under military use.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah. Okay. Just cut the interest rate, and shut up.

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  • 20 comments in c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se view that post
    [–] 18 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    I still have yet had anyone be able to tell me exactly what value AI brings to the table, other than as customer facing chat bots they can use while firing their actual CS departments

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Personally I have enjoyed using AI for logic and decision making processing and comparing items. It's been useful but not a trillion dollar industry and it doesn't provide enough value for what is expected.

    I could have it taken away tomorrow and not care too much, but I have used it quite heavily lately.

    As far as running a business department or decisions, heck no. And as we've said all along, computers cannot make major decisions as they cannot be held accountable, so unless people are wanting a scapegoat for the horrible things they plan to do, then it should never be used solely for decision making.

    AI has got to be a bubble and it will surely burst.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    That’s ridiculous. It’s possible to recognize the technology has many good uses, but complain how it has been hyped too much.

    For example: AI-driven materials discovery uses machine learning to analyze chemicals and materials, allowing scientists to find and design new compounds much faster than humans could through traditional trial and error.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Machine learning is not why companies are dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into building data centers so they can earn tens of billions of dollars; it’s specifically large language models. Machine learning existed before the LLM boom and had real benefits, but has barely seen a fraction of the investment into it that LLMs have, because it didn’t have a bunch of tech bros speculating that artificial superintelligence would make them trillionaires.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

    That's ML involving tightly constrained iterative processes and neural networks, and was happening long before LLMs. This whole bubble is LLM bullshit and assuming a word probability machine is capable of "discovering" anything is silly.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    LLMs have plenty of good uses. They are as skilled as the person using them, however, which is the problem.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    But it seems that someone who is proficient in writing ultimately doesn't benefit in a matter of time or effort, as both are still taken in correcting the output. And if you're so curious, there's been a number of studies on this exact phenomena already.

    The problem, truly, is cognitive debt and the overall expansion of people lending themselves to the dunning kruger effect in the name of trusting and living vicariously through their AI model of choice.

    My last employer was pushing hard for LLMs in a field they dont do shit for, one of the project managers was convinced by his AI of choice (gemini) to actually propose replacing himself with another AI tool. IT wasnt having it because it would screen read potentially sensitive info. He was laid off with a sheriff escort not 2 months later. Now is on linkedin posting some truly schizophrenic shit, otherwise having been normal ish

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    There have also been a number of studies that say that if a person knows how to use an LLM and provides it with a good prompt that it can give them something they can use.

    The biggest issue that I’ve seen with LLMs is that nobody knows how to write a prompt. Nobody knows how to really use it to their benefit. There is absolutely a benefit to someone who is proficient in writing. Just like there is absolutely a benefit to someone who is proficient in writing code.

    I’m guessing you belong in the category that cannot write a good prompt?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    No, I've done my actual work while people convinced they have "good prompts" weighed my whole team down (and promptly got laid off). We've burnt enough openai token and probed models on our own hardware to assertain their utility in my field. Manual automation with simple systems and hard logic is what the industry has ran on, and certainly will continue to.

    Explain to what makes a prompt good. As long as you're using any provided model and not using sandbox you're stuck to their initiating prompt. Change that, and you still have their parameters. Run an OS model with your own parameter tunings, you still are limited by your tempterature. What is a good temperature to use for rigid logic that doesn't result in unexpected behavior but can adapt to user input well enough? These are questions every AI corp is dealing with.

    For context, all we were trying to do was implement some copilot/gpt shit onto our PMS to handle customer queries, data entry, scheduling information and notifications, and some other opened ended suggestions. C suite was giddy, IT not so much, but my team was to keep an open mind and see what we could achieve.. so we evaluated it, as of about 6 months ago or so is when finally Cs stopped bugging since they had bigger fires to put out, and we had worked out a powerautomate routine (without the help of copilot.. its unfunnily useless even though it's implemented right into PA), making essentially all the effort put into working the AI from a LLM to an "agentic model" completrly mute, despite the tools the company bought into and everything.

    I'm guessing you belong in the category who hasn't actually worked at a facility which part of your job is to deploy things like AI, but like to have an affirmative stance anyway.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yawn. Let’s do this, it’s even better: You tell me a task that you need to accomplish. Then you tell me the prompt you would give an LLM to accomplish that task.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I agree with you. There is a knee-jerk “AI bad” when the real answer is it’s overhyped. There are good uses for it. I use it nearly daily for work, and, like anything other tech, it’s just a tool. It doesn’t replace me. It just makes me faster. Anyone that claims it can replace people might as well say that a hammer can replace a person.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Right, Hammer, Forklift. Tools that people use.

    But right now we have a bunch of idiots spinning in circles on forklifts throwing hammers. Yes, you can do that… Yes, it’s probably fun, but ultimately that is not what the forklift is really good for.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I was reading a synopsis of the amount of expected AI revenue (@90B/yr) vs the capital outlay to reach that point (@1T) on assets that depreciate far faster than other capital assets, usually in 18 - 36 months. There is no way for this to be a sustainable business with that sort of economics.

    We're seeing inference costs skyrocketing because the expected reductions in tokens with greater LLM efficiency and better models needed isn't happening at anything close to the curve that was expected. IE: AGI isn't happening, it's not going to happen, and unless it does, the models aren't going to get exponentially better as is needed to make this all work.

    So the AI companies make money selling rocks to each other in the desert, and someone is going to be left holding the bag. Guess who that's going to be? Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

    Unsurprisingly, a guy that should probably have retired about 20 years ago is getting smoke blown up his ass by his advisors about a technology he hasn't the foggiest clue about.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    He's not. He knows who has the earnings: Nvidia and AMD.

    And anyone selling hardware/tooling.

    "During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business."

    • Mark Twain
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