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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

We are way past peak LLM and it shows. They are basically advertise spacing heating as if it's some sort of advancement, while the tech seems to have stagnated, and they re just making the horses faster. The market should have punished this

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It's 100% plausible and believable that there's going to be a spectacular bubble popping, but saying we are way past peak LLM would be like saying we were way past peak internet in 1999-2001 -- in reality, we weren't even remotely close to peak internet (and possibly still aren't). In fact, we were so far from the peak in 2001 that entire technological revolutions occurred many years later (e.g., smartphones) that just accelerated the pace even further in ways that would've been hard to imagine at the time. It's also important to note that AI is more than text-based LLMs -- self-driving cars and other forms of physical "embodied" AI are progressing at exponential pace, while entirely new compute form factors are only just now starting to emerge yet are almost certainly guaranteed to become pervasive as soon as possible (e.g., real AR glasses). Meanwhile, even plain-old text-based LLMs have not actually stagnated.

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  “You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” he told the room, according to a Verge reporter.

  “We have better models, and we just can’t offer them, because we don’t have the capacity,” he said. GPUs remain in short supply, limiting the company’s ability to scale.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-admits-openai-tota...

So why would Altman say AI is in a bubble but OpenAI wants to invest trillions? Here's my speculation:

1. OpenAI is a private company. They don't care about their own stock price.

2. OpenAI just raised $8.3b 3 weeks ago on $300b valuation ($500b valuation today). He doesn't care if the market drops until he needs to raise again.

3. OpenAI wants to buy some AI companies but they're too expensive so he's incentivized to knock the price of those companies down. For example, OpenAI's $3b deal for Windsurf fell apart when Google stepped in and hired away the co-founder.

4. He wants to retain OpenAI's talent because Meta is spending billions hiring away the top AI talent, including talent from OpenAI. By saying it's in a bubble and dropping public sentiment, the war for AI talent could cool down.

5. He wants other companies to get scared and not invest as much while OpenAI continues to invest a lot so it can stay ahead. For example, maybe investors looking to invest in Anthropic, xAI, and other private companies are more shaky after his comments and invest less. This benefits OpenAI since they just raised.

6. You should all know that Sam Altman is manipulative. This is how he operates. Just google "Sam Altman manipulative" and you'll see plenty of examples where former employees said he lies and manipulates.

Altman wants OTHERS to spend trillions are GPU. He needs the scaling hype to continue so he can keep getting investors to put money in hopes of an AGI breakthrough. If there is no funding, OpenAI is immediately bankrupt.

>We are way past peak LLM and it shows

The dot com bubble saw crazy deals and valuations, followed by a crash.

some companies emerged from it and went on to be a giant company like Amazon. Let's hope this AI boom have some similar outcomes.

In hindsight, the dot com bubble was really the dot com dip.

There will be a great market correction soon. Long term though it’ll still have some value, much like after the dot com crash the internet still remained useful. I hope.

> We are way past peak LLM

in the sense that all of the positive narrative is getting priced in.

Though "Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future" doesn't sound that off. LLMs may go but compute will live on. Bit like web portals and optical fiber.

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