Sorry to break it to you but you are neither immune nor a bystander to the fortunes of AI going down. You are part of it all whether you like it or not.
so zero exposure to any popular index? Even “ex-US” is tsmc and sk-hynix in a trenchcoat. I think it was BHP exclaiming that theyre an AI play because they cover 85% of the raw materials in DC build outs.
In the current mania “no financial stake in AI-related” is a very bold claim.
Of course, this doesn't insulate you from second- or third-order effects, but it does remove the possibility of your money being immediately wiped out. It's really not as bold or crazy as you say it is.
If you are young, impact is less scary because you still have 20, 30 or 40 years for the market to go back up.
Are you aware of the existence of other countries which do not operate like the US? (no mandatory pension fund, etc.)
The financial crash that will happen as the result of the AI speculation bubble popping will be the exact same. You won't see Altman or Dario on the streets, that's for sure.
I'd love to live in a world where AI firms bidding these things up doesn't affect me but I'm really struggling to understand how they aren't impacting the market.
Just because I'm too poor to own stocks doesn't mean stock prices don't affect me. That's indirect exposure not direct exposure.
You're never too poor to own stock.
there are a lot of older folks leaning on 401ks and IRAs that are heavy in big indexes and I suspect many of them may end up eating cat food to get by if/when the bottom drops out.
the rest of us will, though. I for one am looking forward to cheaper graphics cards, which I'll use to play video games after givin out handies behind the wendys
We have only begun to extract the value of commoditized intelligence. Sure there are arguments on local models and pricing power.. but I think we will be compute constrained for the near future.
Journalists have been eager to call AI "over" since 2022, and yet:
- Models just got good at writing code this year
- Models just got good at editing images last year
- Models just got good at cinematic video this year
This hasn't even played out. It hasn't even started.
Why on earth would this be the end?
The robotics story is just getting started, too.
I literally do not write code anymore.
If any one of these happens, or two, or all three, then the loans for trillions will become worthless while the use of AI can explode. The relationship between cost and ai intelligence output need not be linear over time, which is absolutely what the people financing are assuming.
Personally, I think linear over 5 years is about right, but no longer than that.
Google was not the first search engine. But in a way, it was the last.
Rather than it being presented as productivity tool for enhancing human labor and activity, it's presented as an eventual god that will radically transform the rules of economics and everything else, and thus it needs to be forced into everything. That's absurd hype and with it all the absurd VC funding and valuation. Thus it's seen as a huge financial bubble.
Absolutely lots of hype but there is lots of value behind generated (unlike crypto) and we are still very early. This is what I was pointing at. There are folks on very extreme both sides, you are a good example, and I happen to believe it’s probably somewhere in the middle.
This could happen this year or next, assuming you're willing to pay $30k for the hardware.
- Fable
- Seedance
- Nano Banana / GPT Image
- Kimi
- ChatGPT
These tools are 80-90% of my day now.
Google Search? Meh. Chrome? Eh. Mac or Linux? Honestly just input devices now.
The models are the hottest thing in the world.
I am getting so much done. If I told myself from two years ago the progress these models would have made, I wouldn't have believed it.
So AI can become as big as the internet, but that does not mean that the existing "AI" stocks will become big.
Here is probably one of the more clear examples. A model trained on video and also robotic simulation/recording (probably ensembled with control systems/mobility models) will likely be at the core of how robots make decisions and plan.
https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-...
This is way outside my area of expertise though. I've only dabbled in more classic robotics and control systems, but these multi-modal sequence to sequence models are highly adaptive and can effectively transfer learning across very different domains.
but you are taking advantage of a subsidised service. What happens when developers are forced to pay the full price (i.e. $2000 a month instead of $200 a month)
I think other industries are use to being continually disrupted by advances in technology and so will adapt easier and faster. Which again, is kind of ironic..
(i am a dev myself but it still makes me laugh)
That's not correct, is it? Opus 4.5 came out in Nov 2025. Some might say models were good at coding even before that.
It took 10-15 years before the stock market got back to the level it did pre dot-com crash [0].
Similarly, majority of people still don't 3D-print stuff they can get cheaply at Walmart or from Amazon. Or use VR/AR as their primary form of interaction.
I too would use "plenty" rather than look at the horribly depressing stats.
Basically, 80% of sales are still brick-and-mortar. That doesn't seem very depressing?
One thing's for certain: There's no way anyone who's come close to Sauron's Ring (made actual use of AI) wants to part with it :')
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. New ways of productizing the technology are still be defined as people are using it. The pricing models are evolving in real-time as the providers figure out what the market will bear.
Ever since the 2008 housing crisis, people have been predicting the next bubble-burst/black-swan event.
The one that really crushed the markets was the one almost body saw coming: Covid-19.
Tulips, 1929, Dotcom, Great Recession, 2010's Flash Crash - none of these were in the public discussion before they happened.
The "public discussion" is a whole different thing. They weren't in the public discussion because macroeconomic theory isn't something mom and pop like to chat about on the weekend. They only become dinner-table discussion topics when the impacts hit main street, after they happen. But bubbles in recent history have been pretty reliably identified beforehand:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180330001927/https://www.barro...
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/06/16/in-come-...
It isn't hard for economists to find bubbles, where the market is taking on high levels of risk. What is downright near impossible to do is predict what specific event will cause the dominos to begin dropping, or when it will happen.
Anecdotally, I have family who don't follow the stock market at all and are talking about the "AI Bubble" that's about to pop.
That's why timing the crash is hard. The market has to agree with you but also at the right time
The only people who didn’t see it coming were the capitalists who were invested in the inflated market, and had bought into pseudo-scientific economic theories that served the single purpose of affirming what the capitalists already believed.
There's a very good reason a book (and movie) like The Big Short was such a big hit. It's because it was about the handful of people who actually saw the crash coming and were confident enough to put their money and reputation on the line.
Feel free to cite at least one reputable source.
what will come out of the crash will likely be terrible for the average person, regardless.
Although at its peak, CSCO was up ~2500% in a 5-year period, whereas NVDA is “only” up ~1000% in a similar timeframe.