Its a bubble
Lol
Is that why MSFT dumped like 3.5% today?
Good.
Fuck AI, send it directly to hell.
AI is here to stay. AI is also in an unsustainable bubble. Both things are true
Dotcom mkII
Words do not compute. Issuing a $1T IPO to Sam Altman.
And that is probably only the beginning.
AI crash will be 11X bigger than subprime mortgage crash, also driven by mass stupidity.
The next movie will be titled: * The Big Shart*
This guys is jacked…jacked to the tits.
You too will soon be able to buy an abandoned datacenter for just $1,000.
What’s the deal with the “HPE” in some Register articles? It’s apparently the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise logo, but articles about HPE don’t appear to have that logo.
Is The Register affiliated with HPE now?
The whole “AI” thing is one big grift.
I agree, and essentially they used slightly reworked old neural network technologies, increasing their power with the help of data centers.
Wow. Glad they just converted to a for profit entity! Can’t wait for them to unleash all this success on to the the general financial market.
Maybe, just maybe, the bubble started bursting now.
I wish. Even knowing it’s all a gigantic scam, they’ll first protect themselves before letting it burst and screw everybody else. The rich get a buffer period.
Is it really a scam when it creates content?
It may be slop to you, it may not be useful for everything they market it as.
But plenty of people find it useful, even if they use it for the wrong things.
It is not like cryptocurrency, which is only used by people who want to get rich from it.
Is it really a scam when it creates content?
No one is claiming that it doesn’t output stuff. The scam lies in the air castles that these companies are selling to us. Ideas like how it’ll revolutionise the workplace, how it will cure cancer, and bring about some kind of utopia. Like Tesla’s full-self-driving, these ideas will never manifest.
We’re still at a stage where companies are throwing the slop at the wall to see what sticks, but for every mediocre success there’s a bunch of stories that indicate that it’s just costing money and bringing nothing to the table. At some point, the fascination for this novel-seeming technology will wear out, and that’s when the castle comes crashing down on us. At that point, the fat cats on top will have cashed out with what they can and us normal people will be forced to carry the consequences.
Exactly. Just like the dotcom bubble websites and web services aren’t the scam, the promise of it being some magical solution to everything is the scam.
It’s not that it’s not useful for the end customer. It’s more that investors are overpromised on the value and return from AI. There has been no returns yet, and consumers are finding less useful than these companies intended. The scam is for the investors, not the end user
creates content? Out of what? I dont deny that there are some use cases for ai that are good, but ultimately its all built on backs of people who have actually contributed to this world. If it was completely non-profit it would be more okay, but as it currently is ai is tool of exploitation and proof that law protects only the rich and binds only us.
ultimately its all built on backs of people who have actually contributed to this world
Being highly unethical doesn’t make it a scam.
scam is kind of oversaturated word nowdays
Is it really a scam when it creates content?
I create content in a ceramic bowl twice a day. Give me a billion.
The scam is that the business plan is not feasible. Hundreds of techs have died because some cool idea could never make real money.
And this is the finance model:
It’s a scam because the prices they’re charging right now don’t reflect the actual costs. AI companies are trying to get people and companies hooked on it so that once they crank the prices up by 10x to start turning a profit, they’ll be able to maintain some semblance of a customer base. If they were charging the real prices a year ago, the AI bubble would have never reached the levels it has, and these companies wouldn’t be worth what they are now. It’s all propped up on a lie.
Ah so the Uber business model then
I agree with you. Not as useful as tech-bros claim, but not as little as other people claim neither. Definitely not a trillion value thing, tho.
Would be nice, I want to buy some ETFs at a discount
This reminds me of something that came up recently. Copilot started hallicinating quite a bit more than usual in Copilot reviews. That made me think about the cost of operarion. As they burn money like this, I won’t be surprised if they start decreasing inference quality to decrease cost per user. Which also means people relying on certain model behaviour for tasks could get nasty surprises. Especially within automation workflows where model outputs aren’t being reviewed.
Copilot and Gemini are trash. They are driving away future business.
Microsoft also lowered stake in OpenAI from 32.5% to 27%
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/the smaller the share, the smaller the quarterly losses. Other sources have included that MSFT now gets a 20% royalty on openAI revenue, but its not in that PR. It’s not clear why else MSFT share would have fallen.
AI is funded solely by sunk cost fallacy at this point. I wonder how long it will be before investments start getting pulled back because of a lack of ROI. I can already feel the sentiment towards AI and it getting pushed in everything turning negative amongst consumers recently.
I wouldn’t have a problem if they were actually investing the money in something useful like R&D
Nearly all the investment is in data centers. Their approach for the past 2 years seems to be just throwing more hardware at existing approaches, which is a really great way to burn an absurd amount of money for little to nothing in return
AI is funded solely by sunk cost fallacy at this point.
and the us economy an gdp relies solely on ai make of that what you will.
Yeah, Trump will prop it up with tax dollars to prolong the inevitable. That’s the American way.
Why do you think AI is pushed so hard?
Everyone is aware this has to be useful. Too much money.
Still the powers that be will do everything to avoid a hard crash, which would be so much earned.
One of our biggest bookstores contracted with a local artist for some merch. That artist used AI with predictable results. Now everyone involved is getting raked over the coals for it.
No surprise, they just announced a 4th round of layoffs too. 😟
https://www.koin.com/news/portland/powells-layoffs-employees-10292025/
Investment is done really to train models for ever more miniscule gains. I feel like the current choices are enough to satisfy who is interested in such services, and what really is lacking is now more hardware dedicated to single user sessions to improve quality of output with the current models.
But I really want to see more development on offline services, as right now it is really done only by hobbyists and only occasionally large companies with a little dripfeed (Facebook Llama, original Deepseek model [latter being pretty much useless as no one has the hardware to run it]).
I remember seeing the Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 (“the first AI phone”, unironic cit.) presentation and listening to them talking about all the AI features instead of the real phone capabilities. “All of this is offline, right? A powerful smartphone… makes sense to have local models for tasks.” but it later became abundantly clear it was just repackaged always-online Gemini for the entire presentation on $2000 of hardware.
what really is lacking is now more hardware dedicated to single user sessions to improve quality of output with the current models
That is the exact opposite of my opinion. They’re throwing tons of computing at the current models. It has produced little improvement. The vast majority of investment is in compute hardware, rather than R&D. They need more R&D to improve the underlying models. More hardware isn’t going to get the significant gains we need
They’re investing this much because they honestly seem to think they’re on the cusp of super intelligent AGI. They’re not, but they really seem to think they are, and that seems to justify these insane investments.
But all they’re really doing is the same thing as before but even bigger. It’s not going to work. It’s only going to make things even more expensive.
I use Copilot and Claude at work, and while it’s really impressive at what it can do, it’s also really stupid and requires a lot of hand holding. It’s not on the brink of AGI super intelligence. Not even close. Maybe we’ll get there some day, but not before all these companies are bankrupt.
The dot com bubble 2.0 is on the horizon
I knew it was a bubble since Computex January 2024 when Derb8uer showed an “AI PC case”. He asked “What’s AI about this PC case?” and they replied that you could put an AI PC inside it.
You are talking more about the term here being used everywhere out of context.
I am talking about companies slapping “AI” on their products and systems and raising their value, in the same way that companies in the 90s slapped “dotcom” on their branding and raised their value.
The problem is there is little continuous cash flow for on prem personal services. Look at Samsung’s home automation, its nearly all online features and when the internet is out you are SOL.
To have your own Github Copilot in a device the size and power usage of a Raspberry Pi would be amazing. But then they won’t get subscriptions.
more development on offline services
There is absolutely massive development on open weight models that can be used offline/privately. Minimax M2, most recent one, has comparable benchmark scores to the private US megatech models at 1/12th the cost, and at higher token throughput. Qwen, GLM, deepseek have comparable models to M2, and have smaller models more easily used on very modest hardware.
Closed megatech datacenter AI strategy is partnership with US government/military for oppressive control of humanity. Spending 12x more per token while empowering big tech/US empire to steal from and oppress you is not worth a small fraction in benchmark/quality improvement.
I wonder how long it will be before investments start getting pulled back because of a lack of ROI.
Just wait for the next hot thing to come out
I’d love to see a revisit to METAverse. Lmao.
How many years did Uber go markiing a loss ? Amazon similarly.
this is not a bad analogy, but you are off by orders of magnitude
more importantly, both Uber and Amazon always had a path to profitability (Amazon specifically was already making tons of money on AWS long before the store front made money). AI has already been shown to not have a path to profitability; whatever little value companies around the world have been able to extract, cannot pay the cost of producing it.
think of it this way:
You produce a little car that can drive 2 people and some bags around, it costs you $1000 to make and you sell it for $3000 which a ton of people can afford… you have a path to profitability
I enter the market with a car that can carry 20 people, plus full on luggage for all and it moves twice as fast… but, in practice, I can only really move 3 people and often take them the wrong way, also the luggage was a complete lie and I can only allow passengers with their purses… also my car cost $50,000 to make so I would have to sell it for $70,000 and nobody would pay that when they could get 20 of your cars for less… also also, I promised the people making some parts of my car that would invest 7 kajillion on their companies somehow.
Which company would succeed? yours or mine?
Amazon didn’t make a profit, they didn’t lose 11Billion a quarter
apparently the bubble might not be as extreme as some people think because the major AI players are all being propped up by companies that actually produce revenues and profits
Like Nividia which… Oh all based on AI revenue.
And even though NVIDIA is better place as they do produce something, but the something in play has little value out of the AI bubble.
NVIDIA could be left holding the bag on a super increased capacity to produce something that nobody wants anymore (or at least nowhere near at the levels we have now) so they are still very much exposed.
I want cheap GPUs at home please!
I’d love this, but not Nvidia.
me too, but the GPU used for AI are not the same as what we would use at home.
maybe the factories can produce both kinds and they would be cheaper, but it is speculation at this point
but the something in play has little value out of the AI bubble.
You’re delusional if you think GPUs are of little value. LLMs and fancy image generation are a bubble.
The gargantuan computational cost of running the machine learning processing that is now required for protein folding and molecular docking are not.
Sure, but the scientists doing those kinds of workflows don’t have anywhere near the money to burn on GPUs. Even before they had all of their funding cut off for being to gay or brown or whatever crap the Nazis have come up with.
This is just a small part of the perpetual cycle of growth and contraction. Growth comes from breakthroughs and innovations. Contraction comes from mis-allocation of resources and the need to extract efficiency from the breakthrough and innovation.
So now everything is booming and growing. This will slow down and if it becomes efficient enough it will remain useful and accessible. If not, it will be discarded and another breakthrough will take its place.
The gargantuan computational cost of running the machine learning processing that is now required for protein folding and molecular docking is not.
Sure but do you need the absolute gargantuan capacity that is being built right now for that? if so, for how long and at what cost?
The point is not that GPU per se are of little value… the point is that what would you do with 10,000 rocket ships if you only have 1000 projects that may be able to use them? and what can those projects actually pay? can they cover the cost of the 10,000 rockets you built?
They’re the ones selling shovels in this gold rush, though.
You know if you invest all your winnings into all the companies that buy your stuff so that they can buy more of your stuff, you are actually not generating any winnings.
The problem is that the companies that actually produce revenues and profits are also in turn being propped up by AI.
Hard to say, really. Yes, MS can absorb loss if the value of their stake in OpenAI goes to $0 overnight, but how much of their stock value is based on expectations that they can sell cloud compute for billions of dollars? And how many private and institutional investors have a stake in that?
such as?
deleted by creator
What? there was no such thing a “bubble” around the Metaverse… (at least not the economic slang term “bubble”)
From the first video of the Zuck presenting the idea, everyone just laugh it off… Meta did waste tons of money on it but they had the money to burn so there was no bubble at all in play here
If I am rich and stupid, I may think a pool in the roof of my house is a great idea. I can spend the value of the house having it built and then have the house collapse on me. Since I am rich, I can just buy another house or pay to rebuild it and that’s the end… no bubble.
However, if I am pitching plans for pools on roofs… and millions of people buy into it, many of whom can barely afford my terrible plans, when the houses start collapsing, too many people will be left with no house or means to procure another one… that’s a bubble
Meta verse was a scam to extract money from nft bros and web 3.0 “game” devs
lol, what? “Bubble” doesn’t just mean something is expensive
is this $11,500,000,000 in real money or speculative money?
There is no difference anymore
Yes, lol.
You think it’s 11.5B worth of gold bars?
Catch yourself up on the discourse; you look like a fool.
Their comment is a bit snarky but pretty funny. This seems like an OTT reaction
You look like a blocked user.
When I lose $11 Billion dollars, I have to go to bed without supper.
If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.
The difference between 100 million and 11.5 billion is about 11 billion. If you own a bank 11 billion that’s not only that bank’s problem, it’s the economy’s problem.
It’s about 11.5 billion, really.
It’s exactly 11.4 billion, really.
Well, if you want to get exact, sure. But if we’re talking about half units, like 11 and a half billion, then 11.4 is so close to 11.5 there’s no difference and calling it just about 11 sorta implies that it’s a more significant difference IMO
You need to be as precise as your resolution, otherwise the precision is meaningless. I guess you could argue that your resolution is units of half-billion (since some things are measured like that), but the initial value of 0.1B, and your use of 0.5 rather than ‘half’ suggests a resolution of 0.1B.
This is different to the aphorism ‘The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion’, both because of the difference in scale, and the quoted resolution.
11.4 bln is 100 mln away from 11.5 bln. I’m not sure “so close” is correct here.
If a man worth 11.5 billion loses 100 million, it affects him less than you or I losing a thousand. In fact it doesn’t affect him.
59 seconds is 1000000000000 pico seconds away from a minute, so I’m not sure you could say 59 seconds is “so close” to a minute.
So I wondered a bit how much it actually affects the economy.
“S&P 500” companies’ market cap is about 57 trillion dollars with a P/E ratio of about 30. So openai by itself is dragging down the total s&p 500 earnings by only about 0.5%. The bigger problem is that there are multiple companies like openAI, and a large chunk of the entire economy’s valuation is tied to the promise that all the AI companies will somehow become profitable sometime soon.
When you put it that way, I’m actually kind of mad. Most of my retirement is in index funds, so essentially OpenAI just pissed away half a percent of my life savings in the last quarter!
According to this article written in July, it’s a bit more dire than that if you take a step or two back. Basically, openai and their copycats/derivatives are being held up by investments from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who in turn are being held up by investments from Nvidia. If/when the whole chain collapses it’ll be more than 0.5% of earnings that disappear.
If OpenAI goes down then it will start a domino effect as people lose confidence in AI and AI companies. That’s how the bubble pops.
So it ALL depends on the definition of “soon”?
Probably
I was referring to the general concept behind the quote.
I originally want to post the OG (apocryphal?) variant:
Owe Your Banker £1,000 and You Are at His Mercy; Owe Him £1 Million and the Position Is Reversed
But it sounds rather quaint these days.
Partially, if OpenAI lose 11.5 billion, someone get 11.5 billion, the money is used to pay something it did not vanish in a cloud
