Technology

It’s not even that good at coding. It has to be heavily curated and focused to output somewhat “correct” code, it is full of gaps that lead to lots of bugs and missed scopes that a human would bring up if they wrote it themselves, and the output is incredibly verbose and inefficient (and harder for engineers to read).

It’s subpar at everything, there are no areas it shines.

Or, after a nasty hangover, it'll free up capital and people that can be put to more socially productive uses.

Yes the only thing propping up the USD is the AI bubble. A lot of it is held by non US investors who, in the event of a market crash, would sell dollars to repatriate back home, sending the dollar tanking, which would encourage foreign holders of US Treasuries like Japan to dump them as well. This would force up bond yields and create a US debt crisis.

Yes. When the bubble finally pops it means AI is here to stay and the remaining companies will probably climb 100x over the next two decades, but all the people currently invested will lose almost everything. The people not invested will still feel the effect as the layoffs and bankruptcies start rolling out, and anyone pension or retirement that is tied to bubble will lose a lot of value.

This will come right as the bond market is reaching the point of no return, and the US won't be able to pay back the debt. A lot of people are going to lose everything, including their retirements during the debt liquidation that is coming.

It hasn't been people hoping. There are quite a few analysis papers out there doing the math of the impossibility of achieving profitability of the current US model. Chinese models offering equivalent performance for 10x lower cost, and near frontier level open weight models to run in house for the cost of the hardware, and this hardware being way more modest, makes the bubble pop a certainty. As with data loss, the question is when, not if.

Are you suggesting that The End is not, in fact, Near? And OpenAI is not about to collapse into bankruptcy, ending the entire AI ecosystem?

Just need my failing GPU to hold on for a few more months...

Yeah, just like, after the Segway bubble burst, we're all riding them now.

The funniest part is that the dot com crash didn’t kill the internet. It killed a lot of terrible business plans. AI may follow the same script: useful tools survive, investors discover that a chatbot isn’t worth infinite money, and taxpayers get stuck with the data center power bill. The technology can be real while the valuation is pure casino. - PS: You didn’t mention the smartphone. And that’s exactly what people mainly use these days.

Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst - I think it didn't take more than a couple of years after that Crash for the "Web 2.0" to start being paraded around like some kind of new gold rush that everybody should jump into and, as clearly visible in the list of hype techs you wrote, they just kept doubling down on the hype and the fraud ever since.

I actually was in Tech in the 90s and during the Crash, and then came back to that industry and into startups almost 2 decades later, and my feeling is that the point when the entire sector turned into nothing more than a giant grift was either a bit after the crash or, at best, just when the boom before it was peaking - I remember very clearly that in the 90s startups mostly started with somebody having a cool idea for tech, whilst in the 00s and onwards they mostly started with somebody having a business idea which was generally about setting oneself up as an intermediary in a kind of business transaction already done for decades, using the Internet and/or Smartphones to come up with a new twist for it and some way of becoming an aggregator/middle-man between both sides of the transaction.

remember pets.com

I think pets.com is probably the best analogy to what will happen with this first round of AI companies. In hindsight pets.com's business model was fine and modern companies like chewy are doing the same thing successfully.

The problem was timing, internet adoption was low and most people didn't understand how to use the Internet or trust it. Combine that with a flood of speculative dollars that mostly gets funneled into marketing with no adoption to justify it and the business falls apart.

I think we'll see the same thing happen with some of these AI applications, the use case may be valid, but people, and the devs, won't know how to use AI and the people won't trust it so adoption will be low even with high marketing and the company will go bust. Then 10 years from now we'll make fun of that AI party planning app that went under while we all plan our parties through some new AI app.

AI IS a useful tool for some things, just not everything. So it ain't going away. Just as the "cloud" is still with us. Or email. Anyone remember when every ISP had their own email?

Every new idea goes through the process of catching on, stupid rapid growth, and then the weeding out of 90+ % of them, and finally the stabilizing the market for those that actually need and use it. Whether is cars, TVs, Cell phones, or AI, every hot new idea goes through this process.

No job! Only consume! ⚾🐕

I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I cant do that