Gone are the days of debating whether AI is an economic bubble. Having already fallen $800 billion short of turning a profit on the AI boom, some of the tech industry’s biggest players have accepted that the financial arithmetic on AI just doesn’t add up.
But here’s the catch: though the AI bubble objectively makes life harder for the rest of us, to the Silicon Valley elite, the economic consequences of its downfall could actually be a good thing.
The pro-Bubble stance has its roots in a 2024 book called “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation,” by tech investors Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart. These fellas argued that there are essentially two kinds of economic bubble: the good ones, like the Dot Com bubble, and the bad ones, like the 2008 subprime lending crisis.
As the venture capitalist James Thomason wrote last year: “Stop trying to make bubbles go away. Yes, bubbles create volatility. Yes, investors lose money. Yes, employees lose jobs when companies fail. But the alternative is underinvestment in transformative opportunities.”
Say_Echelon on
Then why don’t the publicly so? Not like anyone is going to hold their feet to the fire over it if they want to change an opinion over something important
fractaldesigner on
Who knows what they do quietly, but externally they certainly aren’t rooting for the poor.
donutseason on
Often the point of blowing a bubble is to watch it pop, no?
intrepid789 on
It’s like they’ve crossed a Rubicon in a way. If they shut down chatGPT they’ll be a replacement albeit possibly a more inferior version. Toothpaste is out of the tube. But I think LLMs are bad on communication and deeper thinking. Imagine getting by on chatGPT in college only to find it has been recently nerfed and downgraded. All that money on an education and you let an LLM do all your thinking. No greater waste of time or money.
HairballTheory on
Cus they bought the emperor’s clothes and are looking to off load
LegoRedBrick on
How can anything collapse when nothing is real? Most of all speculative greed. The gov will just bail out more companies.
NastyToeFungus on
I have been using AI at work for software development. It is an entirely different thing than AI slop, fake videos, bad journalism, etc. The productivity gains are real and undeniable. You do need to understand how to use it, like any other tool. It fundamentally changes software engineering. However, there are all kinds of secondary effects that are have no good answers. If you don’t hire junior engineers anymore, who’s going to be the senior engineers in 10 years? What fundamentals are still important? How do you deal with the job loss and the effect on the environment?
I don’t think it’s going away, but there are a lot of unresolved questions
Rad_Atmosphere974 on
What problem was AI supposed to solve? Was that ever determined?
9 Comments
Gone are the days of debating whether AI is an economic bubble. Having already fallen $800 billion short of turning a profit on the AI boom, some of the tech industry’s biggest players have accepted that the financial arithmetic on AI just doesn’t add up.
But here’s the catch: though the AI bubble objectively makes life harder for the rest of us, to the Silicon Valley elite, the economic consequences of its downfall could actually be a good thing.
The pro-Bubble stance has its roots in a 2024 book called “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation,” by tech investors Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart. These fellas argued that there are essentially two kinds of economic bubble: the good ones, like the Dot Com bubble, and the bad ones, like the 2008 subprime lending crisis.
As the venture capitalist James Thomason wrote last year: “Stop trying to make bubbles go away. Yes, bubbles create volatility. Yes, investors lose money. Yes, employees lose jobs when companies fail. But the alternative is underinvestment in transformative opportunities.”
Then why don’t the publicly so? Not like anyone is going to hold their feet to the fire over it if they want to change an opinion over something important
Who knows what they do quietly, but externally they certainly aren’t rooting for the poor.
Often the point of blowing a bubble is to watch it pop, no?
It’s like they’ve crossed a Rubicon in a way. If they shut down chatGPT they’ll be a replacement albeit possibly a more inferior version. Toothpaste is out of the tube. But I think LLMs are bad on communication and deeper thinking. Imagine getting by on chatGPT in college only to find it has been recently nerfed and downgraded. All that money on an education and you let an LLM do all your thinking. No greater waste of time or money.
Cus they bought the emperor’s clothes and are looking to off load
How can anything collapse when nothing is real? Most of all speculative greed. The gov will just bail out more companies.
I have been using AI at work for software development. It is an entirely different thing than AI slop, fake videos, bad journalism, etc. The productivity gains are real and undeniable. You do need to understand how to use it, like any other tool. It fundamentally changes software engineering. However, there are all kinds of secondary effects that are have no good answers. If you don’t hire junior engineers anymore, who’s going to be the senior engineers in 10 years? What fundamentals are still important? How do you deal with the job loss and the effect on the environment?
I don’t think it’s going away, but there are a lot of unresolved questions
What problem was AI supposed to solve? Was that ever determined?