Stock up on dry beans and rice. See if your parents have a spare room. Don’t buy anything expensive. This bubble is gonna hurt.
What is going to happen to the stock of all these big tech companies (see Google, Amazon, etc)? What is going to happen to the tech world that lies in the periphery but depends on services provided by these companies?
What is going to happen all the devs that are currently working in the AI industry once it recedes to like 25% of its current size?
Can the non-AI tech job market absorb all the soon to be laid off employees?
These are the questions in my mind when it comes to transformer tech.
Not just the tech world. Think of all the businesses below "huge enterprise" that rely on SaaS for most of their tech stack, many don't even have internal dev teams. Maybe a lot of them bought contracts with any number of "AI SaaS" tools to run their businesses.
When all those go under, all these companies have major disruptions and have to scramble to find replacements, get their data out if they even can, etc. It's going to be very messy.
Not to mention the trillions of dollars of unregulated, non-bank lending that's funding all of this build out. It's a black box, there's no visibility into true valuation and because the credit isn't public, the rot can be hidden for years until its too big to fix and finally snaps, taking the rest of the economy out with it.
Good advice regardless of what happens. Freeze dried food also great if one can afford it. Bubbles bursting aside, emergencies happen. Water treated for long term storage is also important to prepare the beans and rice. Also portable portable bunsen burner with many gas cartridges.
Though I'm more concerned about the effects of the current political climate, than the "AI" bubble popping. In the scenario of that going south, nothing will be normal for a long time.
There’s minimal risk to the decision makers. Meanwhile, every one of us peons is significantly more at risk of losing our jobs whether we could be effectively replaced with these AI tools or not because our own C-level execs decided to drink the snake oil that is the current bubble.
See Microsoft's recent "We don't understand how you all are not impressed by AI."
In the case of MS, you're right, Satya isn't going to fall on his own sword. They will just continue to bundle and raise prices, make it impossible to buy anything else (because you still need the other tools) and then pitch that to shareholders as success "Look how many people buy Copilot (even though it's forcefully bundled into every offering we sell("
This time around the ramifications might be larger, but it will still mostly be felt by those inside the bubble.
Personally, I would rather experience a slight discomfort from the crash followed by a normalization of hardware prices and the job market, than continue bearing the current insanity.
That's because the companies were largely public. In the dotcom era, the exit for startups was to IPO, as early as possible. When someone like pets.com was burning through cash with zero path to profitability, it was public knowledge, everyone could see it.
The AI built out is largely funded with private credit. It's a black box, we have no idea of true valuations. The mean time for a company to go public went from 4 years during dotcom to 14 years now. The rot can be hidden for a long time until the big funds go bust, with all the collateral damage that brings.