by OptionOfT
22 subcomments
- Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either.
And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat...
> McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet."
The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles.
Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?
by willis936
16 subcomments
- Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.
- Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon will get through easily. They don't have excessive debt. They can afford to lose their investments into AI. Their valuations will take a hit. Nvidia will lose revenue and profits, stock will go down by 60% or more, but it will also survive.
Oracle will likely fail. It funded its AI pivot with debt. The Debt-to-Revenue ratio is 1.77, the Debt-to-Equity ratio D/E is 520, and it has a free cash flow problem.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and others will be bought for cents on the dollar.
by 1970-01-01
0 subcomment
- Nothing would make me happier than seeing all this AI investing go bust, followed by no bailout whatsoever. I don't want to watch the world burn, but I do wish for a cleansing fire to reshape the landscape.
by captainkrtek
1 subcomments
- It feels as if every CEO used ChatGPT once and said “wow this is incredible, pivot hard to make our product use AI”, and that’s about all the thought has matured to.
by ghostpepper
5 subcomments
- Does anyone really think it’s “if” and not “when” ?
- > He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors.
I guess but is it better for an investor to own 2 shares of Google or 1 share of OpenAI and 1 share of TSMC?
Like I have no doubt that being vertically integrated as a single company has lot of benefits but one can also create a trust that invests vertically as well.
- Most bubbles occur due to excessive levels of credit offered too cheaply, resulting in a whole bunch of defaults happening at the same time. All the major AI players have borrowed money to buy GPUs and build data centers and have used Special Purpose Vehicles to do it so the debt doesn't fall on their own balance sheet, probably using a certain amount of stock as collateral. If the SPV defaults, could that trigger a big sell-off?
- No shit. But it works, if you're stupid.
If you're not then you will end up frustrated because it will be as if you have an over-eager trainee that is only slightly less dumb than a box of rocks when it comes to actual thinking but that has near perfect recall about a massive amount of information. A sort of idiot-savant.
I gave it a try for a practical problem to see how long it would take to converge on a solution. It did not, because its reasoning powers simply are not that strong. But it gave me an endless runaround about solutions that this time really would work and never mind all the previous times we did the same thing and it did not work. Between the over enthusiastic tone, the ridiculous confidence level and the jumping-to-conclusions mode that you just simply can't switch off I found the whole exercise more than a little bit frustrating. It never, for even a second expressed any doubt. It never warned when what it responded with was at best extremely low confidence and possibly very wrong (or even dangerous). And this was for a problem where I already knew the solution, it was in some ways entertaining to see the AI blunder about while in full possession of all of the information to see the solution.
'Great, that narrows it down'
'Now I see the problem'
'Got it'
'Ah - perfect'
etc, etc...
If your job involves actual thinking I don't believe you are in danger just yet.
by aurareturn
6 subcomments
- Is it really a bubble about to burst when literally everyone is talking about AI being in a bubble and maybe bursting soon?
To me, we're clearly not peak AI exuberance. AI agents are just getting started and getting so freaking good. Just the other day, I used Vercel's v0 to build a small business website for a relative in 10 minutes. It looked fantastic and very mobile friendly. I fed the website to ChatGPT5.1 and asked it to improve the marketing text. I fed those improvements back to v0. Finished in 15 minutes. Would have taken me at least one week in the past to do a design, code it, test it for desktop/mobile, write the copy.
The way AI has disrupted software building in 3 short years is astonishing. Yes, code is uniquely great for LLM training due to open source code and documentation but as other industries catch up on LLM training, they will change profoundly too.
by giancarlostoro
2 subcomments
- I think it will pop but not in the way everyone thinks it will pop. There's plenty that's not going to go away / anywhere, but I'm sure lots of startups will fail and close their doors.
by donperignon
1 subcomments
- Google cannot ignore LLMs, I don’t remember last time I used Google to search instead of using ChatGPT.maybe a combination of factors, one being Google destroying their own search engine in order to milk advertisers money, the other the LLMs being so good at synthesizing information. Anyways either they improve or surf the AI wave, otherwise they are doomed
by helterskelter
6 subcomments
- I'm curious what HN is doing with their portfolios right about now. I'd be dumping NVDA and reallocating to more bonds for the time being.
by captainkrtek
1 subcomments
- It feels like AI investment and product focus is now a religion or cult. You have to be so fully invested, blind from any data, and throwing billions of dollars at it, otherwise you’re not “in”.
Meanwhile, no one in my sphere of tech and non tech people is wanting “more AI” and sees the pros/cons of chatgpt, using it as kinda fancy google search..
Where’s the “killer app” that’ll generate literally trillions in revenue to offset the costs? How do the economics work, especially when GPUs are depreciating?
by rockemsockem
3 subcomments
- There's a weird gleefulness about AI being a bubble that'll pop any day now both in this thread and in the world at large. It's kinda weird and I find most of the predictions about the result of such a bubble popping to sound highly exaggerated.
- Most of all of Big Tech, especially Google are doing just fine, making $100B a quarter.
Startups and other unprofitable companies however...
- Every cent poured into this boom is building Google’s future competitors.
Of course he’s nervous - what else would you expect him to say?
- Investor in leading frontier LLM that automates software production says stuff to try to reduce funding for LLM startups...
- Man who helped inspire irrational people says people are irrational
- Assuming this is irrational and must come back to reality at some point, I'm not convinced this is connected to the common man economy as other bubbles in the past were. This round of investment is mostly being funded by exuberant cash flow accumulated over the years that was otherwise used as stock buybacks by a small number of stocks and some private credit deals that are not that accessible to the general public. This is looking more like a crypto crash kind of effect rather than a 2008 one.
by throwawayffffas
1 subcomments
- Obviously, at least in the US the AI bubble is the only thing keeping the economy afloat. If it wasn't for the bubble the US would be in a recession.
Not sure how the situation is in Europe and Asia, but I would guess about the same.
- Tons of companies survived the dot com bubble pop. Corrections are when the market does some sorting.
by TrackerFF
1 subcomments
- Sounds like "We're too big to fail. If we go down, everyone goes down. It is your choice."
But unlike 08 crisis, we're getting a heads up to bring out the lube.
by beanjuiceII
1 subcomments
- will gamers be eatin' good?
- That language feels like it came from a fever dream of Alan Greenspan.
by outside1234
0 subcomment
- About twice a day I think about how I am basically reinforcement learning my replacement. Thank goodness I am 53.
- Just like the digits of PI...
- Very cool and healthy for the CEO of a company investing massive amounts into a given technology to casually refer to it as a "bubble" at the same time. I guess he softens the statement a bit by calling it "an AI bubble" instead of the "the AI bubble", but it's still interesting to see everyone involved in this economic mess start to acknowledge it.
by lateforwork
0 subcomment
- Says the CEO of the company that is most threatened by AI chat.
by bryanrasmussen
0 subcomment
- isn't that basically the definition of a bubble, a boom with elements of irrationality?
by clickety_clack
6 subcomments
- Sounds like something an extortionist would say in a movie. “We’re all dirty here!”
- People predicting a crash and pulling back due to a bubble indicates the beginning of the bubble.
If I were the gambling man, I would grab my PETS.AI stock and sit tight.
by WarOnPrivacy
1 subcomments
- I'm okay with being victim to RAM and NVME prices returning to pre-skyrocket levels.
by donkeylazy456
1 subcomments
- Now they are talking like Wall Street greedy bankers back in subprime crisis.
by zerosizedweasle
1 subcomments
- I don't think people in tech and AI have any idea, just how viciously politics is going to turn on them in 2026 going forward. AI is going to be politically orphaned.
- And there we have the reason for all of these interdependent deals between all these firms, they're all hedging with each other they can keep this set of plates spinning.
They can't, not firever. Bubbles pop.
by scottLobster
1 subcomments
- Silicon Valley! Unprofitable debt and marketing all the way up until you get bailed out by the taxpayers, apparently.
- It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.
by badgersnake
0 subcomment
- Every CEO is reading from the same script right now. It might be a bubble but it’s just like the internet, it’s still going to be relevant and it’s just the crap companies and grifters who will die.
I wonder who’s writing the script.
by notepad0x90
0 subcomment
- They're betting on squeezing more dollars out of the ordinary person's wallet when B2B should have been their main focus. They lay off because of interest rates but gamble like there is still ZIRP.
Their anti-social tendency is the core problem, remember when they were laying off everyone in tech just because it was a trend? here too, they want to reduce head count instead of increase the value of their products and services to generate more revenue. AI has lots of value for sure. Monetizing that without increasing head count would have been sensible. Instead of getting rid of people, they could focus on freeing up the time of existing people so they can do more work and generate value/wealth for the company. Of course, companies like Google are doing exactly what I'm suggesting to the most part (that I know of), but the vast majority on the ai bandwagon are just there to see if they can make more revenue by having less people.
I don't doubt some big companies in this space will fail, but will that trigger a panic/sell-off? And can the US, after cutting off its allies and alienating the whole world recover? What are the social and geopolitical implications of not recovering?
by thisislife2
0 subcomment
- In other words - "We will be firing many of you when the bubble bursts."
by HardwareLust
0 subcomment
- ...says the man guilty of said irrationality.
- if only there were some way for THE ENTIRE MARKET to not have quite so much exposure to hype bubbles
by partiallypro
1 subcomments
- I think AI is a bubble, but I don't think we're close to the peak yet.
by sgroppino
1 subcomments
- It’s not a bubble until it bursts
- Oh, an article from the BBC, I won't read it because they are liars.
- [dead]
by hat_monger
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
0 subcomment
- Except, yes, they will.
Not immune, maybe, but pretty well off if they didn't buy in.
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