Man I cannot fucking wait until this stupid goddamn bubble pops
And what happens when a bubble bursts? Did the internet die when the dotcom bubble burst, or is that just when it really started to get going?
I share most of your sentiments against AI, but a bubble popping won’t make it go away, and it won’t even rectify it to be more to people’s likings (i doubt it). It takes more than just waiting around to accomplish that.
Im so tired of this stupud fucking refrain. Cause we all know how housing got so mich better after 08 and how we dont have any more dot coms and how the internet got so much better since that bubble. You people have no idea what your even asking for.
the bubble pops and then everything comes back, in an “improved” version. Imagine: ChatGPT with ads and sponsored answers.
Just like that one black mirror episode.
The problem is that when a bubble pops and exposes the problem, the government leaders should take the opportunity to fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again.
Instead they bail them all out, so there are not only no consequences to their actions, they are literally rewarded with unimaginable wealth. What about this strategy would induce them to change their ways, over doing it all over again, and getting rewarded again?
good, everyone flood the AI with useless tasks so they go bankrupt
In other words, they want to hook up users and companies, make them dependent, and then rise up the prices severely while finding ways to process and incorporate all of the data they’ve gathered in ways that will probably involve automating the jobs of the users themselves.
aka enshittification
when this bubble pops it’s gonna be horrific.
google, meta, ms, so many more leveraged out huge investments in datacenters. nvidia is propping up whole segments of the fucking economy.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/
it’d be fun to watch if I could isolate myself from the chaos that will ensue, but we’re all gonna get fucked by the aibros, it’s only a question of which segment of the economy blows up first.
Came here to see if someone had mentioned Ed Zitron’s blog. His last two pieces on the AI bubble are fantastic reads.
There is another factor in this which often gets overlooked. A LOT of the money invested right now is for the Nvidia chips and products based around them. As many gamers are painfully aware, these chips devalue very quickly. With the progress of technology moving so fast, what was once a top of the line unit gets outclassed by mid tier hardware within a couple of years. After 5 years it’s usefulness is severely diminished and after 10 years it is hardly worth the energy to run them.
This means the window for return on investment is a lot shorter than usual in tech. For example when creating a software service, there would be an upfront investment for buying the startup that created the software. Then some scaling investment in infrastructure and such. But after that it turns into a steady state where the input of money is a lot lower than revenue from the customer base that was grown. This allows to get returns on investment for many years after that initial investment and growth phase.
With this Ai shit it works a bit different. If you want to train and run the latest models in order to remain competitive in the market, you would need to continually buy the latest hardware from Nvidia. As soon as you start running on older hardware, your product would be left behind and with all the competition out there users would be lost very quickly. It’s very hard to see how the trillions of dollars invested now are ever going to be recovered within the span of five years. Especially in a time where so much companies are dumping their products for very low prices and sometimes even for free.
This bubble has to burst and it is going to be bad. For the people who were around when the dotcom bubble burst, this is going to be much worse than that ever was.
Isn’t this true of like everything AI right now?
We’re in the “grow a locked-in user base” part of their rollout. We’ll hit the “make money” part in a year or two, and then the enshittification machine will kick into high gear.
That’s the usual business plan. However, people don’t really like ai. The results aren’t great, so, if they jack up the price, people will likely cancel. The lock in is poor as the product and convenience is poor. It doesn’t really save money as promised.
The usual business plan is to reinvest all earnings into growth. So you’re losing money, but gaining market share. Tesla, Amazon, etc all did this. They could stop at any point and turn a profit, but they chose to pursue a growth instead.
AI companies are currently not making enough revenue to even cover their operating costs. Even so, they are pouring all of their money into more video cards that, once installed and configured, immediately start losing money.
I don’t think they’re gaining any market share, especially after the Chinese produced nearly identical services.
If anything, a smaller market share is better for business. The more users they have the faster they lose money.
Nobody asked
Basically, the only reason some of these vaguely functional AI tools actually work okay is because they haven’t been ruined with inevitable monetisation yet.
You mean Clippy++ 2.0 auto-complete with jpgs isn’t a business model?
the day that these guys need to turn a profit will be the day that a lot of people lose access to this sort of thing
They are in the train the trainer phase where developers are training their models and getting some benefit from the results it spits out.
The enshitification will begin soon. They have already talked about inserting ads in responses.
I fear people will grow attached to AI chats, which will emotionally manipulate them into buying stuff or supporting specific causes. The ads on a platform like this are going to make google AdWords and pay per click feel like advertising in the newspaper.
