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Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

You can be as snarky as you want but the reality is we're years deep into a market cycle that has seen a tremendous amount of capex with very little visible return.

How much more productive do you think claude makes you as compared to Google or Stack Overflow? 15%? 50%? 200? Do you think that's enough to satisfy the market or are we all trading on unrealistic expectations? Do you think shareholders are going to like it that they're losing billions a quarter so Anthropic can run a service that helps you write web dev projects marginally faster? Do you even understand the amount of value that's tied up in these questions having a good answer right now?

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You don't stop the car but speed up faster toward the wall. That has been the strategy in the last decade or so. In other words, you invent a new AI-BLOCK-WEB-4.X thing and move the bubble one stage further.

Just like we study the “Crash of 1929”, our kids will study the “bubbles economy”:

- Internet bubble 2001, - Blockchain bubble 2021, - AI bubble 2025,

(Omitting 2008 and Covid because they’re not startup-related).

Am I wrong or are they bubbling faster?

I think bubbles form and pop all the time. I would add (in the US) home price bubble, biotech bubble (of mid 2010s), cybersecurity bubble and more.

Pops are less noticeable when a lot of money is sloshing around so deflating one bubble immediately start inflating something else. Worker bees can switch to the next thing in the same "building next great thing, work is plentiful, money no object" environment.

So the bubbliness, IMO, is a function of the macroeconomic state, specifically the amount of money in the economy. Things get sober (and very ugly) when the money printing cycle ends, as it eventually must to avoid sliding into hyperinflation. My 2c.

I think 2008 set the stage that the government will bail out reckless economic activity for the top at the expense of the tax payer. Actions no longer have consequences and you better be big enough to hold the economy hostage to your scheme.

I'm entirely in agreement with you, I just have a dark sense of humor.

I do actually use claude quite a bit recently and I suspect (completely anecdotal, so take it with a boatload of salt) it speeds up my development time by about 25% on average. But its a very lumpy sort of speed up that is sometimes a slow down depending upon how wacky the LLM's answers are. And I find claude 3.7 to be worse than claude 3.5 in many ways which makes me confused about how hyped up it is and further disillusioned about the "common sense" idea people around these parts have that the technology is just going to keep improving significantly year over year.

I use it entirely through the web interface and using the lowest price basic monthly subscription fee. I am probably a cost center for Anthropic rather than a profit center, but I don't really see that as my problem to worry about. I'll enjoy the thing while it lasts and then not cry too hard when the house of cards collapses.

comments like this are giving me life lol

I feel like I'm living in an insane asylum but your experience largely matches mine, except I've been reluctant to open my wallet

Goodness this is such a perfect response.

Seeing more and more of this now, where even in "these parts" anything short of "AGI IS HERE" even a few months ago would have you labelled as "Luddite" "skeptic" and "left behind".

When is the general public going to start asking questions? It's really not a game--people's 401ks have been propped up by the "Magnificent Seven" (disproportionately by one company) for some time now.

What happens "if" these proclamations fail to manifest? How is this all supposed to work out?

I don't think companies like Meta, Alphabet or even Amazon are extremely overvalued. Their growth in revenues and earnings is still very solid, so even if A.I is a no show their earnings should continue to do fine (I'd even add Microsoft to the list). Sure stock price might slow down significanty but it can easily add 10% yearly for the forseeable future. Its much less than what we're used to, but its solid growth that has not much to do with A.I.

And I totally agree people should forget about the s&p 500 returns we've seen in the last 15 years going forward, it would probably be less (though I have no crystal ball, but regression to the mean seems likely).

Actually, all stocks are dead and tech heavy Nasdaq has entered the correction zone this year. It will be a real while before the stocks return to their pre-correction value. The AI hype drivers have lost massive value, hence the desperation will get immense, expect the “AI ready to replace expensive SWE/Lawyer/Entertainers/Creatives” narrative to start any moment now! Of course everything is smoke&mirrors so those will be charged at such premium that the naysayers will not be able to afford it and irrational leaders will buy it and cite immense success to maximise their C level bonuses and will early retire before the tower comes falling down.

Correction is one thing but saying "stocks are dead" is hyperbole. Just my poor ass startup is paying Google Cloud around 1 million USD a year to have our operations going. We're quite a cheap company but we're totally dependent on them. And Cloud is a minor part of Google's earnings they have Youtube, Search, Android etc etc. This isn't a bubble, these are real earnings that are probably not going away any time soon. Does it mean Google is bullet proof? No. They may experience a big correction at some point but that has always been the case for all companies.

I can make the same case for Meta, Microsoft, to lesser extent Amazon. I'll leave Tesla aside it's indeed too richly valued.

I meant red(dead). Also losing a lot of valuation after jacking up to that point is not fun.

Also a business paying $1M/year in cloud bill is neither poor nor tiny. We have very different definition of tiny and poor.

Meta is very well suited in this AI race and will prevail well. Others will cut some loss and throw some ashes sometime soon.

It will be incredible when the bubble pops. Especially if it coincides with the upcoming downturn in the economy.

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