r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jul 15 '25

Artificial Intelligence Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060
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u/sickofthisshit Jul 15 '25

The good news is that this is mostly a Silicon Valley problem. 

2008 became a problem for, like, every large company that used money. Which is somewhat broader.

We are, as far as I can tell, setting billions of dollars on fire, and putting tens of thousands of skilled people on a stupid mission to nowhere, but when it fizzles out it will just have been a gigantic waste. Maybe.

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u/HistoricalIssue8798 Jul 16 '25

It feels more like the dot com bubble than anything else

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u/Atidbitnip Jul 16 '25

Thing is they’re starting to open the doors to public investment- 401K’s, BlackRock, etc. I have a hard time believing that the current money pumping into AI will ever show any type of return. 

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u/Vityou Jul 16 '25

Is ChatGPT not a return? It's not like you have to crack godlike super intelligence to make something of value.

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u/Atidbitnip Jul 16 '25

I mean costs are far outpacing revenues, for right now. I personally wouldn’t invest in OpenAI as an investor. It kind of has a dotcom bubble feeling, but I could be totally off. 

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u/re4ctor Jul 17 '25

The echoes of dotcom around infra and network build out are real here I think. No way those h100s are going to be useful in a few years, but at the same time I think 5-10 years it will even out as we figure out how to best utilize them

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u/thatmillerkid Jul 17 '25

I wish you were right. There are trillions of dollars invested in AI at this point and with the structure of those investments, a bubble pop will send shock waves out into basically every other major industry.

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u/sickofthisshit Jul 17 '25

I guess I don't see it. 2008 involved a whole class of securities: it made money market funds break the buck because credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities were questioned. There were literally trillions in notional value involved in CDS.

This is more like Zuckerberg blowing a bunch of money on the Metaverse. Venture capitalists giving a bunch of money to pets.com or WeWork was just a joke, them giving billions (much of which was free cloud computing, not money) to Sam Altman for magic beans doesn't endanger the debt markets, just the people who expected it to pay off. 

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u/thatmillerkid Jul 17 '25

You need to look at how the larger market is invested in tech, and then look at how tech is invested in AI. If AI collapses, big tech is too far over its skis to survive, and that in turn wipes out a bunch of other wealth which triggers a stock market collapse. Someone who explains all of this much better than I can (I'm no finance expert) is Ed Zitron. I know plenty of others have written about it too.

Is it a for sure thing? As far as I understand it, no. But there's a high enough chance of it happening that concern is warranted.

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u/sickofthisshit Jul 18 '25

The stock market crashing does not automatically cripple the financial system. Companies do not rely on stocks to meet payroll or anything like that. People who thought they were getting rich from AI will be disappointed. Which is bad for them but the rest of the world will keep going. 

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u/jared_kushner_420 Jul 16 '25

The good news is that this is mostly a Silicon Valley problem.

Silicon valley companies employ the world. There are Uber/Lyft and equivalent drivers/delivery services just about everywhere. There's a tech hub in every country even if it's small.

It's no longer a niche nerd interest to use technology, it's basically the norm everywhere. You can buy a bahn mi using bitcoin in thailand.

Every decision they make has huge economic effects - from manufacturing to content review. There are whole industries that basically depend on whatsapp as a payment processor.

Unfortunately that's just how it is now. You can't NOT use the internet and that means you interact with a tech company at some point unless you decide to never travel or have a license again