Man I cannot fucking wait until this stupid goddamn bubble pops
Im so tired of this stupud fucking refrain. Cause we all know how housing got so mich better after 08 and how we dont have any more dot coms and how the internet got so much better since that bubble. You people have no idea what your even asking for.
Me too. I can then go back to 3D printing quantum blockchains out of room temperature superconductors in my private space station with Katy Perry.
I find that hard to believe right up until the point you mentioned Katy.
If she’s good enough for Justin, she’s good enough for me.
So what I am learning is that I should start vibe coding even the small scripts that are less than 10 lines.
Done. I will start doing that.
In other words, they want to hook up users and companies, make them dependent, and then rise up the prices severely while finding ways to process and incorporate all of the data they’ve gathered in ways that will probably involve automating the jobs of the users themselves.
aka enshittification
Basically, the only reason some of these vaguely functional AI tools actually work okay is because they haven’t been ruined with inevitable monetisation yet.
Already the cost is quite high. A prolific year can easily burn 100usd a day in tokens and they have not even started to enshitify.
Some of the cost to run these models will come down a bit if Nvidia gets some actual competition which I’m sure will happen in the medium to long term because the hyper scalers definitely don’t like paying Nvidia’s AI ransom and the Chinese don’t want to be beholden to a company the US can influence.
We will see which happens first.
Yes, this is part of the business model. The goal is to get everyone addicted to their service, then jack the price up to profitable margins. It’s the same model Netflix and Amazon used. Bothe services lost money for over 10 years before becoming profitable.
Venture capitalism is what it’s called, I think
It is not venture capitalism. Though it is fueled by venture capitalism. I am describing the type of car and you are calling it gasoline. They’re most distinctly not the same thing.
However it should be noted there both a part of the same corrosion of our society. Just how automobiles that run on gasoline are a corrosion on our atmosphere.
Venture capitalism is when you give somebody money to start a business in hopes that they make it big, giving you really valuable equity for relatively little money. What you’re thinking of is blitzscaling. Scale up in an unsustainable way in order to gain market dominance, so that you can use that to become profitable.
So much of the AI stuff we see today are boards reacting and worrying about being “left behind” in AI. In many cases, the goal is not to deliver value. The goal is to be able to attach a little sticker that says “AI” to their products to excite the shareholders.
Unfortunately in this case, some of the largest companies in the world haven’t been able to figure out how to run AI services at a profit.
This could change any day if some more efficient hardware arrives, but until then, most of the software world is just crossing their fingers it becomes profitable one day while they light dollar bills on fire in their datacenters.
If this isn’t “bubbleish” behavior I don’t know what is.
I was in a local bike store looking at red tail lights yesterday.
One brand Lezyne had several versions. There was an “AI Alert” one. I looked it up and it just has a sensor to detect when you brake and it changes to a different flashing mode at that time.
Thats barely even “smart” let alone “AI”.
The stupid thing is, because of this dumb claim they needed to confirm that it doesn’t collect and transmit any data about your riding habits. Its a light with no connectivity other than a charging port.
The dumbfuckery is astonishing.
Caveat: this applies to literally every new technology especially in the VC funded world.
Now I’m suddenly tempted to start using it. or at least coming up with a bot to keep it busy.
Holy crap, has anyone ever attempted to create an “AI fork bomb”? Go to one of these agent bots, and tell it to create accounts with the other agent code bots. These new accounts will all be told to create accounts on all the other code bots services. And do this recursively forever. So the flow would be 1 bot makes lets say 5 bots. Each of those 5 bots make 5 more bots. And each of those 5 bots make 5 more. So the total number of running bots becomes like 1 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5…
Obligatory, this is purely hypothetical, and you should never do this for legal reasons.
Sounds like a great idea, although no, commoners are not given the same privileges as capitalists. So I’m afraid there will be problems indeed.
Isn’t this just the tech industry. Run at a loss. Eat VC money. Wait. Wait.
Some how you become normalized and suddenly important Next thing you know you’re raking profit.
Like the guy that has no friends who nobody really likes. He won’t go away. He just sticks around. Nobody ever told him to fuck off. So he’s just part of the group.
after crypto, and Now AI, they will be chasing whatever faux tech that comes out next.
and then you go on linkedin and all the middle manager tech bros will hail it as the second coming.
first truly positive use for ai
oh no
when this bubble pops it’s gonna be horrific.
google, meta, ms, so many more leveraged out huge investments in datacenters. nvidia is propping up whole segments of the fucking economy.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/
it’d be fun to watch if I could isolate myself from the chaos that will ensue, but we’re all gonna get fucked by the aibros, it’s only a question of which segment of the economy blows up first.
A lot of startups whose entire business model relies on OpenAI’s small model API calls costing under $1/Mtok, are going to go bust when OpenAI finally runs out of money and ramps the cost up tenfold.
good point, it’s all been artificially priced to get users onboard then dedicated.
Yep it’s blitzscaling. Run it at a loss until it’s a necessity, then charge whatever the hell you want. They’re blitzscaling our right to intellectual property and our right to work.
How does it impact your right to work?
blitzscaling
TIL there’s a word for it. Thanks
ive seen a ton of billboards of startup AI comp in west coast, i assume every new one that appears on these billboards, the old ones go under.
It would be just cheaper to self-host something for the whole company then? Open-source AIs are there and they are very much competitive with proprietary solutions.
If you want OpenAI level response times you might be surprised how expensive self-hosting gets.
There is another factor in this which often gets overlooked. A LOT of the money invested right now is for the Nvidia chips and products based around them. As many gamers are painfully aware, these chips devalue very quickly. With the progress of technology moving so fast, what was once a top of the line unit gets outclassed by mid tier hardware within a couple of years. After 5 years it’s usefulness is severely diminished and after 10 years it is hardly worth the energy to run them.
This means the window for return on investment is a lot shorter than usual in tech. For example when creating a software service, there would be an upfront investment for buying the startup that created the software. Then some scaling investment in infrastructure and such. But after that it turns into a steady state where the input of money is a lot lower than revenue from the customer base that was grown. This allows to get returns on investment for many years after that initial investment and growth phase.
With this Ai shit it works a bit different. If you want to train and run the latest models in order to remain competitive in the market, you would need to continually buy the latest hardware from Nvidia. As soon as you start running on older hardware, your product would be left behind and with all the competition out there users would be lost very quickly. It’s very hard to see how the trillions of dollars invested now are ever going to be recovered within the span of five years. Especially in a time where so much companies are dumping their products for very low prices and sometimes even for free.
This bubble has to burst and it is going to be bad. For the people who were around when the dotcom bubble burst, this is going to be much worse than that ever was.
yeah datacenters never really aged well, and making them gpu dependent is going mean they age like hot piss. and since they’re ai-dedicated gpus, they can’t even resell them lol.
all this investment, for what? so some chud can have a picture of taylor swift with 4 tits?
fucking idiots
I don’t see why they can’t be resold. As long as there’s a market for new AI hardware, there will continue to be a market for the older stuff. You don’t need the latest and greatest for development purposes, or things that scale horizontally.
I didn’t say they couldn’t be resold, they simply won’t have as wide a potential user market like an generic GPU would. But think about it for a sec, you’ve got thousands of AI dedicated gpu’s going stale whenever a datacenter gets overhauled or a datacenter goes bust.
that’s gonna put a lot more product on the market that other datacenters aren’t going to touch - no one puts used hardware in their racks - so who’s gonna gobble up all this stuff?
not the gamers. who else needs this kind of stuff?
no one important puts used hardware in their racks
FTFY. Just about every msp I’ve worked for has cut corners and went with 2nd hand (or possibly grey market) hardware to save a buck, including the ones who colo in “real” data centers. I would not be surprised to find that we’re onboarding these kinds of cards to make a bespoke AI platform for our software customers here in a few years.
It will be good for nerds who want to run models locally. Definitely not a huge maker tho
too niche of the hundreds of billions they invested and will never get ROI from it.
Also depends how hard the AI runs them. A good chunk of the graphics cards that were used as miners came out on life support if not completely toasted. Games generally don’t run the piss out of them like that 24/7, and many games are still CPU bound.
yeah cooked hbf nand ain’t doing anyone any favors heh
I’m not sure that they’re even going to be useful for gamers. Datacenter GPUs require a substantial external cooling solution to stop them from just melting. Believe NVidia’s new stuff is liquid-only, so even if you’ve got an HVAC next to your l33t gaming PC, that won’t be sufficient.
not just those constraints, good luck getting a fucking video signal out of 'em when they literally don’t have hdmi/dp or any other connectors.
Who with what?
Hmm.
BBIAF.
FOUR TITS!? fuck whatever reservations I had, that’s worth it!
no wonder the ceo of nivida was so jovial and happy and has been in the news recently.
They’ll write this off as a loss and offset their corporate taxes
Also china is a great example that you do not need all the latest hardware, but it does help
Yeah I’m getting real dot com bubble vibes from all of this.
I think the fallout is going to be much larger.
It would probably be fine if there was someone competent in Whitehouse to manage the fallout.
But since there isn’t, you are very likely correct.
They will manage the fallout just like the sub-prime crash and PPP program, with huge cash transfers straight to the wealthy.
Yep, the only thing I’m 100% confident about in this whole mess is that Trump will find some heretofore unimagined way to make it worse.
the shitwad is consistent I guess…
fuck. and that idiot is all in on cryptocoin and other idiocy. fuck.
Came here to see if someone had mentioned Ed Zitron’s blog. His last two pieces on the AI bubble are fantastic reads.
pretty sure someone here linked it, it’s a long read and worth it.
Any chance you have a link,?
Thanks buddy!
Damn. We’re looking at another recession when this bubble bursts, aren’t we?
Just great.
recessions work themselves out. I’m worried it’ll pitch us into a worldwide depression coupled with trump’s tarriff bullshit.
it’s the 1920s all over again. smoot hawley fascists and clouds of war
The electrical industry is going to have a real bad time.
yeah secondary knockon effects - once nvidia realizes it’s not going to actually sell 5 gpus per human being, the datacenters for them evaporate, then the power production to feed those datacenters becomes pointless…
an effective administration would mandate all renewable energy for this purpose, so when it implodes they could at least derive a benefit from the expanded production… but no, trump will have them build coal plants for it all. or like grok, methane powered generators fml
and they are even considering extremely expensive nuclear plants to power them.
bringing old reactors online may end up an overall positive (say, if the ai bubble pops soon but the reactors still come online and displace fossil sources) but I’m dubious about smr’s still. it just seems like more chances for radionucleotides to get smeared everywhere if they become ubiquitous.
Hopefully sooner rather than later, and maybe Elon can stop poisoning a neighborhood in Memphis with Grok
yeah that’s one of the more egregious examples, basically a methane factory that eats prodigious amounts of water and power, all in process of giving us MECHAHITLER.
what’s not to love?
Good. Costs is the key point to get rid of it.
I’m skeptical of AI coding as it exists today, and while I’m bullish on long-term prospects for AI writing software, am very dubious that simply using LLMs is going to be the answer.
However.
Startups typically do lose money. They’ll burn money as they acquire a userbase — their growth phase — and transition to profitability later. I don’t think “startups in area X tend to be losing money” is terribly surprising.
you’re VERY justified in feeling skeptical, I’m seeing it first hand, you’re correct.
I’m a consultant/freelancer and I’m booked for the rest of the year and well into the new year with jobs that pretty much consist of me reviewing and cleaning up AI slop.
Most of my clients are startups and small companies that went full in on AI and vibe coding. Now they’re discovering that their attempts to save a few bucks by leveraging AI, cutting devs, etc is costing them more that what they envisioned on saving. The stuff they’ve built with AI doesn’t scale, is full of exploits, and breaks quickly. With the recent Tea App thing many of my clients are now in a panic because they essentially did the exact same thing. They don’t want their startup to be next in the news because some rando came across their house with the front door left open by AI.
the tech debt is massive, It’s costing many of these places more to fix their vibe coders/AI mistakes than what it would have originally cost if they just used a solid dev team. Make no mistake, I’m charging them a good amount also.
All if it could have been avoided though. They could have continued to use their LLM’s if they had all just kept a leash on it. if they dismissed the concept of vibe coding. A good chunk of it could have been avoided if the person feeding the prompts simply REVIEWED the code before hitting enter. I’m not kidding, IF they just LOOKED at what was being spat out things would be different. none of them did. they just trusted the AI to be smarter because they were lead to believe it was.
how do you book software work so far out? for some reason my software clients seem to all want their stuff yesterday
I’ve been doing it for like 20+ years now so I have a very solid client base and very solid referrals. All my new clients now are referred to me by previous/existing clients so it gives me the luxury of booking well in advance.
I appreciate your response!
Ok, but it isn’t just startups burning money here like there’s no tomorrow - it’s also major industry leaders (Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, Nvidia, etc.) dumping hundreds of billions into infrastructure and development of a tech that has, so far, shown 0 positive returns for anyone and everyone. Everyone involved is pouring in money like it’s going out of style, largely because they see this as a potential pathway to infinite profits down the line, just as long as THEY are the ones to get there first; consequences be damned. WHEN this bubble pops, not IF, it’ll be messy. Extremely messy.
Ed Ziltron has a good piece regarding whether the losses are “just another startup” or something more. I am very much leaning towards “burning money at an insane rate just to give the impression of growth”.
The issue is mostly energy costs though. Startups do lose money; to hiring new people, marketing, etc… But in this case the entire business case loses money a the moment, and without any significant breakthroughs they likely will keep losing money like that.
Greed for the future baby
