AI is not just one bubble, strategist says – but a 'rolling sequence of bubbles' | Hacker News Reader

AI is not just one bubble, strategist says – but a 'rolling sequence of bubbles'

fortune.com

14 pointspessimizer11 comments

Show us the numbers that substantiate this framing.

Also, if it is “rolling sequence of bubbles”, isn’t it more just like foam that self-corrects rapidly without major crashes? Put differently, isn’t this the opposite of a “bubble”?

A sequence of bubbles implies one bubble after another, therefore there is no two bubbles at the same time, therefore it’s no foam.

It’s one-dimensional foam.

no, the concepts hype ,froth, and slop are inexorably comming together.

https://archive.is/3RGTz

Its fun to fit theories to past events, but this strategist knows next to nothing. Call me back when he's working on a frontier model or implementing tools at scale... his opinion is worth less than the cost to serve the "article" he was quoted in.

what does any of that have to do with the reality of financing things currently providing unproven ROI in real world values?

ok, lets take a todo app. Everyones naive first project in modern JS framework world. Before AI, it took a week worth of work to git some simple todos, maybe a calender function, probably a reminder. Some very set of basic functionality.

No one was going to buy it in that state, great.

Nowe we have AI; in an afternoon, it'll pound out a todo app and all your choice of fixings. Great!

No one is still going to buy it; 2x, because the "total addressable market" is not the globe, because, you know, joe over there learning basic programming can do it just the same as you now. There's no secret sauce.

Whose making money? the guy selling you AI. Great, but you know, your apps not going to sell when anyone can implement any moderately time consuming app.

So not only do you have the poor business model of your todo app, you also have the poor marketability of a todo app, since any AI can do it just as well as you.

So yeah, sure, AI is building apps, but aside from selling you this wonderful capability, it's a snake eating it's own tail.

Its good to separate usecases and market fit from what the tools unlock. You can't use AI to front-run the discovery and research processes, which like you said many people find out too late. Their next iteration includes this context usually.

> Its good to separate usecases and market fit from what the tools unlock.

Good for what? It doesn't affect the economic equation in any way.

> You can't use AI to front-run the discovery and research processes, > Their next iteration includes this context

Still no change to the fact that "aside from selling you this wonderful capability, it's a snake eating it's own tail".

AGI simply doesn't fit in the current economic model and it's tempting to assume that the econ model will change to accommodate AI for the good of the people -surely the big AI bosses keep promising it and will continue to do so.

However, all evidence on the ground paints a different picture of the future - continued inflation, compute and general asset trickle-up and concentration, with a government too entangled in the scheme to be able to change it.

This is just a bubble by another name. To use tech as an example, remember that the dot-com bubble was really three crashes: the crash of the dot-com companies in 2000, the telecom crash in 2001, and the media crash in 2002. Of course these were all linked. The dot-com companies were massive revenue and expected revenue sources for telecoms and media companies. But noticeably they didn't all crash at the same time. This is typical.

If you think AI is also a bubble, it will probably be the same. If Anthropic and OpenAI go through hard times or disappear, it will take a while before the market understands the scope of how it will affect cloud companies and how much cloud companies have built out and how much revenue can be replaced by non-AI companies. Same thing for semiconductor manufacturers (although as a classically cyclical businesses the pain will be obvious more immediately). One difference though is that because the revenues of these cooperating industries are more round-trips, perhaps that will cause them all to fall together as revenues can disappear essentially overnight.

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