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It’s objectively a bad thing when a country’s entire economy is being propped up by seven companies and the vast majority of consumer spending is concentrated in the top 1%.
Specially when those companies are valued in TRILLIONS. Nothing is worth trillions, somehow these surreal numbers have been accepted as hard fact.
Nothing is worth trillions,
There is things worth trillions. Like full countries, and the largest pension funds and social security funds. Having a single company be comparable to those massive collections of people is insane, and it’s because they think it can replace workers–when it can’t, not yet, and not for a long time
Yep it’s such a fragile situation
This doesn’t really tell me anything, I’d have to compare it with other charts. E.g. what does the chart for agriculture look like? Airplane manufacturing? Internet in early 2000s?
NVIDIA really out here selling shovels in the gold Rush
Nvidia are very smart in that regard, ethics aside. Very early on they decided that selling cards to gamers will not give them the infinite growth everyone so desperately desire, so they started looking for what does, and they were consistent at it ever since. Every tech bubble of the recent history is powered by Nvidia cards. How much they contributed to the hype (and damage) is not entirely clear, but that’s not zero for sure
If Lemmy is supposed to be the place where the most tech savvy people in the interest congregate, and everyone in the comments is unsatisfied with AI then we really do have a problem. These companies have all reached a point where they no longer listen to their most informed customer base but instead take 100% of direction from investors who don’t even know what they want except a line going up.
Eh. Lemmy has a lot of ignorance surrounding technology and science compared to other sites. Hacker News is what you’re looking for if you want somewhere that is full of the most tech savvy people on the Internet, and most of them are extremely pro AI (with some weird AI cultishness alongside). Myself I think AI is a bubble but there is a lot of promise in the underlying technology once you take away the hype, just like the .com bubble at the turn of the century.
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I am not sure if you have discussed AI in a room full of hackers recently, lol. I have. Maybe 1/100 is pro-Generative AI in my estimation:
Investments and income have been divorced from reality for a while now, bud.
If Lemmy is supposed to be the place where the most tech savvy people in the interest congregate
Says who? Mostly feels more like sales than R&D here. Which kinda fits with these pitches.
I feel like someone working at the pointy end of R&D in AI isn’t necessarily well placed to predict the future of AI.
Bubble is an econ term. Whether there is an AI bubble has a rather tenuous connection to the future of AI. Not much of a connection between the housing bubble and the future of housing either.
So how dangerous is that really? I assume one day we’ll finally see investors saying, “Nah, that’s a bubble. I’m not gonna see any returns from those companies - I’m selling.” Then stock prices will fall, and some investors will lose money by selling for less than they bought. After that, AI unicorns will start to lose funding and close their businesses, laying off people.
But will I - a person who does not work in the AI industry and has not invested in AI companies - be affected by this?
Were you affected by the dotcom bubble?
Maybe the remaining tech companies, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, might raise prices of their products to cover the losses.
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I dont think we are in a bubble and I think all the media posts about it are just trying to make people sell their shares.
Sure there is no obvious profit yet but there will be. Once people start using AI in their phones and ask it questions, everything from baking to coding becomes way easier since its an interactive conversation, not a search result.
People will pay for that convenience since its a huge downside to not have access to it. Search results now seem very limited to me since I cant find out more about what its saying.
I think you are overestimating the amount people will pay for convenience or cling to their old ways.
Did e-readers kill the bookstore? Some people will always prefer to cook out of a book or dive into docs to write code.
Or look at the modern streaming landscape. In the beginning there was basically Netflix and everyone was fine paying that monthly fee for the convenience of streaming basically everything. Now we have 20+ vendors all charging for some subset of content. And we have seen a corresponding loss in subscribers as people hit the limit of what they are willing to pay for convenience.
Literally the entire point of searching something is to open up the links and find out more about what it’s saying… Do you need your AI to come up with the search queries too???
Its not interactive. Did you read my comment?
If you dont understand why people are going to pay for that, I dont know what to tell you.
Thats literally the entire thing about Ai, you can have a conversation, not static text and links.
Looks more like the dot com bubble to me.
Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?
Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?
Yes and no.
Yes in the sense that we have a lot more “fad” economies. There is something new so that needs to be EVERYTHING and the market course corrects, often at the cost of hardship for many.
But “no” in the sense of what “bubbles” tend to refer to. Things like the Japanese Bubble Economy where it causes (I forget if it is officially one but) recessions and even depressions.
The AI Bubble is not going to do that (on its own…). Yeah, a LOT of companies are going to be left holding the bag when they realize LLMs can’t solve all problems for them AND manifest a Cyber Stana Katic to give them a blowie while it does that. But what will they be left with?
- A LOT of “prompt engineers”: This is bad because that is going to be a LOT of people who, increasingly, went to school to get a degree in something with very little utility. That said… Art History majors have been showing us how to do that for decades and at least they did something they loved on their way to service industry jobs.
- For the companies that gutted their workforce over the past few years: A need to rapidly hire talented workers who don’t require ChatGPT to do their job: This is REALLY good for the people who have been hurting and should actually lead to a lot of job mobility… for the old hats who predated this fad
- For the companies that purchased hardware: A lot of edge computing devices are going to be of questionable value. But for the folk who “just” bought a shit ton of GPUs from Daddy Jensen? They have a shit ton of GPUs they can either sell for cheap (not horrible) or repurpose (good)
Don’t get me wrong. There is going to be upheaval and it is going to be bad. But it is also important to remember that drawings like the above are actively misleading and bordering on manipulative. Because basically all the biggies, except OpenAI, have non-AI uses. Oracle ballooned massively because of the OpenAI injection but… they are still god damned Oracle. Same with nVidia who, when they aren’t powering every LLM on the planet, are also one of the companies that makes all the cards that power stuff like computer vision and the like in cars and what not.
Because… remember the dot com bubble? Remember how basically the entire world still runs on The Internet? It was just a case of rebalancing and pivoting for the most part.
All that said… the US is in a really bad way because the fascists have been increasingly gutting the economy and stopping basically any industry that involves manufacturing or communicating with external countries. We are gonna have a massive stock market crash when OpenAI et al pops…
Unpopular opinion but this will not as bad as housing bubble and we’re way past bubbles actually popping in contemporary economy. Even China corrected for its massive ghost city housing bubble just recently and that was actually worse than ai tech overvaluation.
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