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Comment by mergy | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the author trying to address this. The only issue is the author didn't define what 'pops' in the bubble.

The 'what' that pops, probably, IMHO, is the investment and resources ecosystem dumped, poured, thrown, redirected, etc. to AI.

Just like the .com boom, the costs and money thrown at AI are outsized and will 'pop" as it matures. A 'pop" and leveling down to something perhaps not so outrageous is coming.

As the author states, .com popped but left the Internet still around and expanding. AI is exactly that kind of bubble.

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Im not convinced at the comparison to the .com boom of the internet, its intellectually lazy.

The internet was always going to disrupt the way we think about the discovery and purchase of goods and services at the bare minimum. Some saw that the role of the personal computer was evolving from just computation to communication and so on.. this stuff was obvious early on. Irrespective of the equity bubble at that time, the potential was real. It was just too early.

There is nothing of this sort happening with LLMs. Where do they fit? Nobody has a clear answer and I don't see a clear one emerging any time soon. If someone has a very clear and direct answer, please feel free to reply :=)

AI is not the same as LLMs. AI is pretty inevitable. LLMs will likely be superseded by some other algo.

I never mentioned AI once in my post.

Comments such as "Ai is inevitable" okay... post something tangible dude. All this stuff is just total noise.

The comment you replied to was about AI. Something like:

Comment: AI isn't so bad

You: But LLMs are no good

I see that again and again with AI arguments. It's not a good argument really. Like saying aviation will fail because biplanes weren't very good.

I still have no idea what you are replying to, in response to my comment

Hi, I tried to address that in the video version.

I think what pops is the false belief.

.com -> going online will save you AI -> adding a chatbot will save you

To me, those are what qualify as bubbles. And the other stuff is just overheating, disruption, and other effects.

I think what pops is the Ponzi-like financial structure underlying the huge investments. The projected profits simply don't come fast enough to justify incremental investment, and the pyramid runs out of incoming money. Yes, AI is huge. But the Internet was also huge. And it still couldn't sustain the levels of investment that were being made in 1999 and 2000, even in the big players.

Totally, I think this is more of what the general population are speaking around in discussions of "bubbles"

> I think what pops is the false belief.

Then you're inventing your own term. Bubble is shorthand for the Economics term "speculative bubble" or "economic bubble" and has described the behavior of many markets over the centuries. What collapses is asset prices, not ideas. It's definitional...just ask your friendly neighborhood economist.

Edit: Here, I went and found the origin for you (via wikipedia). The South Seas bubble spawned the term:

"The metaphor indicated that the prices of the stock were inflated and fragile – expanded based on nothing but air, and vulnerable to a sudden burst, as in fact occurred."

A financial bubble has a clear definition. You're just changing the meaning to be a different strawman so you can refute that. Are there lots of companies that are overvalued because of their AI offerings, and will those companies fail when they don't provide acceptable returns? If yes, bubble.

Okay - that is too extreme of a "bubble" definition for me. False dilemma.

So, then, I guess, nothing is a bubble for you. For me, a more reasonable definition is a large build-up of capital that, at some point, snaps or pops, then sits at a level much lower than the original.

If you take something like that approach of the "bubble" then you can have a more charitable discussion. The AI bubble discussion then is about if the current levels of investment and capital being dumped into AI will stay at the same levels or have a more dramatic dip to be more of the future run-rate, then you can see how people see the parallels of other "bubbles" and actually have more of a discussion I think.

My sense is most view this concept of the "bubble" as the assumption.

That's great that you have your own definitions of a bubble. However, we are generally talking of a financial/economic bubble, which is pretty clearly defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble for quite some time.

One just need to ask one question: "is there a big amount of companies in a specific sector that are valued far above their returns". If that answer is yes, that means we are in a speculative bubble. The current insane valuations of unprofitable companies point to the largest speculative bubble ever to exist. I can't wait for it to pop faster already so there are less articles like this.

There you go -

"is there a big amount of companies in a specific sector that are valued far above their returns". If that answer is yes, that means we are in a speculative bubble."

Pretty much.

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