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Comment by marcusb | Hacker News Reader

> The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that.

I think the first part of this is probably true, but I don’t think everyone knows it. A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it.

It feels like a bubble to me, but I don’t think anyone can say to a certainty that it is, or that it will pop.

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> A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it.

Or they're acting like they think there's going to be significant stock price growth between now and the bubble popping. Behaviors aren't significantly different between those two scenarios.

It's always been an interesting mental exercise for me to try and measure the unknowable gap between what people say they believe and the motivated reasoning that might drive their stated beliefs.

Putting your statement another way, if you and I can see the bubble, then it's almost a certainty that the average tech CEO also sees a bubble. They're just hoping that when the music stops, they won't be the one left holding the bag.

You can "have your cake and eat it too", as long as you're happy with a smaller portion of the cake.

I own some NVDA. I've sold a good portion of it, so I've "locked in the profit" on it. If it doubles again, I'll sell some more. If it crashes I won't be too disappointed -- I've locked in my profit, and now I own more reasonably priced NVDA shares.

Note that if you have index funds, you probably already own a surprising amount of NVDA.

It’s a non sequitur, like saying “Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.”

I’m guessing the author meant it tongue in cheek but really meant “everyone I know or follow knows it’s a bubble”

No, it can still be a bubble when everybody knows it's a bubble. If the price is still going up, I may know it's a bubble, and still not get out, because I'm still making money. But it's a hair-trigger thing, where everybody gets more and more ready to run for the exits at the first sign of trouble.

No one can see a bubble. That's what makes it a bubble.

That's the conventional wisdom, undercut by the fact that people have guessed (and bet their fortunes) that previous bubbles were bubbles well before they popped.

Its more accurate to say that bubbles rely on most people being blind to the bubble's nature.

And how many people have guessed wrong? There will always be people betting on bubbles, some ought to be right.

A lot? Also irrelevant. All it takes is one for the statement "nobody can see the bubble" to be false. Take the housing bubble for instance. Do you think the people who called that one were successful purely by chance, or does the fact that a few investors observed that mortgage lenders were underwriting loans to people with extremely poor credit and approving loan applications the lenders knew to be materially fraudulent at a massive scale indicate that the call was more of an educated wager? Did they know to a certainty it was a bubble? No, of course not. Was it a very reasonable guess? Absolutely.

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