First, this might well be the event that fully pops the AI bubble. There were signs it was already happening, but this may be the “final nail in the coffin”. The bubble popping now rather than later would mean 1) it’d fuck everyone less than it would if it were allowed to grow more before popping, 2) it’d be sooner before it’ll stop ruining every single good and beautiful thing in this world (for instance, it’ll kill a lot – maybe all – gigawatt data center projects), and 3) some time in the next few years I’ll get to wake up one morning and think “you know, I haven’t even thought about LLMs in a long time”. (The blockchain bubble was fucking insufferable and we’ve largely gotten to the “almost never have reason tho think about it” phase with blockchain. The AI bubble is unspeakably worse and the sooner we can get there with that bubble, the better.) When the bubble pops, the effects will ripple through all the companies in on the generative AI grift, all of which are evil as absolute fuck. For every one of them that dies or becomes less relevant in the future, the world will be a slightly less terrible place.

Second, schadenfreuda. Nvidia and Huang have been personally fucking us all in every possible way and today we get to see them taste the tiniest modicum of the suffering they’ve inflicted and will continue to inflict in the future.

Just for a few examples.

I don’t really care about Huang personally. What matters is the effect this is going to have on Nvidia and by extension OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Coreweave, SpaceX, Xitter, etc etc etc and by further extension on the whole tech industry and on a whole lot of other industries. Dumbass CEOs are making their employees use Claude or whatever. Google has an “AI overview” on its search pages. Students who use LLMs lag others by a grade level. People are losing their professional skills because they’re outsourcing their brains. Generative AI was always a fucked up scam. The sooner we can put it behind us, the sooner we can start moving in a less horrible direction.

Yes, our pensions and 401Ks and shit are going to suffer. Yes the economy is going to be fucked for a long time. Yes the gorillionaires are going to get away with gorillions while the rest of us take the brunt. That was always inevitable from the moment that a significant portion of every economy invested in this snake oil. But the sooner it collapses, the less terribly it will affect us. If it went another, say, year, even more of the economy could be tied up in the bubble by then and we’d have been fucked-er.

Maybe I’m full of shit and the bubble is going to continue strong as ever for another year. But the possibility of a decisive and roughly permanent crash in the very near future seems more likely now than it was yesterday (and more likely yesterday than the day before, and more likely the day before than the day before that…) And fuck yes that puts a smile on my face.