Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

See also this Bloomberg article on how circular the deals are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-07/openai-s-...

This is another way that bubbles form, a cabal of cross-dealing giants that don't have solid revenue to ground the valuations is a very scary position.

I believe that a lot of AI is real, but the realness of AI's impact on the economy does not prevent a bubble. The dot com bubble didn't make the internet any less real or impactful on everyone's lives. So it feels like very scary times ahead.

Also, the devaluation of the dollar is an extremely tricky situation for the US. Morgan Stanley puts it at 10% less value in 2025, and another 10% drop by the end of 2026:

https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...

I was never scared with the inflation during Biden because it seemed like we would be on track to put the economy in the right position, because it was global and the US was doing so much better than the rest of the world. But now, it feels like the US is intentionally entering recession and choosing a future of poverty.

Cory also has a giant writeup about the whole situation, including more links.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/

  > the devaluation of the dollar is an extremely tricky situation for the US

For many, the revaluation of the dollar is actually the scary scenario. See for instance this (maybe too) subtle analysis from Yanis Varoufakis:

https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterpl...

Though I agree with dollar revaluation also causing problems, I find approximately zero to agree with in that article. Low dollar value hurts me today, not the elites as this article claims. Low dollar value does little to hurt the elites whose wealth is managed to ride that out without impact. And in particular tariffs hurt working people, not the elites. We have been through this a century go, it's one of the better understood things in economics. The pain doesn't start today with the tariffs, it starts next year.

If AI were real, companies would charge market price for it now and reduce the price as model training costs fell over time. That is how things worked in microcomputer market between the '80s and '90s as hardware prices fell and software became commoditized. Giving it away for peanuts in the hope that prices can be raised 10x later is destined for failure.

Over the last few years I've been drifting away from focusing on pure technology plays. Somehow I feel like maybe that might save my bacon someday ... or maybe AI will completely consume the world and we'll all be left behind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509898

Very cheap cloud hosting coming soon to a data center near you...

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