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Comment by danielrm26 | Hacker News Reader

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danielrm26

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.

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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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