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Comment by scarlehoff | Hacker News Reader

Internet didn't disappear after the dotcom crash, but a lot of money did. This is what could happen here I think.

The internet remains the biggest singular development of my entire life. The most valuable companies in the world are internet companies.

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.

People enjoy the narrative that AI is doomed. I am in the same mindset as you. I cannot see compute demand changing anytime soon.

This is a straw man position. Who is saying AI is doomed? There were previous winters but the technology kept improving. What people are doubting is all the current hype around it. Stuff like AGI and the singularity being right around the corner with fully automated societies and robots dong all your chores for you.

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.

> robots dong all your chores for you

This could happen this year or next, assuming you're willing to pay $30k for the hardware.

> the current hype around it.

- 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.

You’re arguing against claims I never made. You can reject AGI hype and still believe AI demand, infrastructure buildout, and commercial adoption will continue growing.

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.

More precisely the mismatch in investment and debt and timelines. The people laid the fiber (if that is even an apt description) were not the ones who made money from that investment. If there is even some sort of mismatch in the investment timeline then that could mean all the current investors are wiped out and someone else will eventually profit from their work.

But the incentive to produce that intelligence is so high, that many opportunities become practical to explore. And many of them show doing AI inference workloads at 1000x cheaper and with 1000x less power, and sometimes 1000x faster.

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.

This is an interesting angle, and one I hadn't considered before. Would it be overly cynically to draw a line between it and the recent willingness [1] of many on the frontier to support some sort of coordinated pause or slowdown? I think that proposal has genuine value on its own merits, but it might also give a lot of overly-optimistic financing a chance to pay off before cheaper inference crashes the market.

[1] https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

Yes, but to walk in to the market late, and not have all that debt, it will be too much of an opportunity for an aspiring company.

Google was not the first search engine. But in a way, it was the last.

it is a little ironic how software devs loved creative destruction and "paradigm shifts" until it happened to them. I think what happened to Journalism is unfolding again but this time to the software development industry. Some will survive and adjust but many won't, the change is just too fast and sudden for an industry use to being immune.

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)

> Models just got good at writing code this year

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.

That's "this year" [the past 12 months].

That's not what "this year" means lol

The robotics story is a good example of where overexuberance may be entering the market. What is the connection between LLMs or image generation and robotics, beyond the vague intuition that they're both futuristic AI tech? (Perhaps AI maximalism is true and the entire economy will be eaten soon, but then none of this sector-specific analysis matters.)

There is a huge overhang. Same techniques and sometimes even the same models can drive a lot of robotics coordination and decision making.

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.

You've talked past the point. Both can be true.

It took 10-15 years before the stock market got back to the level it did pre dot-com crash [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

But were the internet companies of 2000 the ones who became the most valuable? GOOG, yes. Netscape and Yahoo, not so much. Amazon yes, pets.com, not so much. Sun is no more, Cisco to two decades to return to its dotcom bubble levels. Netflix was shipping physical DVDs. Microsoft could qualify as an internet company now with Azure, but not in 2000.

So AI can become as big as the internet, but that does not mean that the existing "AI" stocks will become big.

> I literally do not write code anymore.

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'd assume open weight models hosted on openrouter aren't being run at a loss. As such, I've been experimenting with them lately and results are pretty promising. Requires slightly more patience and handholding than just cranking Opus 5 in Claude Code, but for the cost saving it's definitely worth it.

unfortunately, the dotcom ate just money; the housing crash ate money and people. This will be some combination of the two; I wouldn't doubt a few pension funds in the deep red states get crushed if it takes money and property with it.

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