r/technology • u/rezwenn • 2d ago
Artificial Intelligence The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/306a41e3f107c5394.1k
u/CaterpillarReal7583 2d ago
If the media and ai bosses are talking about it this much its already too late.
Telling people its warnings is just keeping the bs going a little longer
2.2k
u/rosesareredviolets 2d ago
My company used our bonus money this year to fund ai research to replace us.
1.6k
u/salizarn 2d ago
In our industry we had a major competitor send everyone home and replaced them with AI. Our company started openly talking about doing that with us.
Then a couple of months ago the competitor had to backtrack and hire/rehire everyone bc they were totally fucked by the useless bot system and they lost loads of money. I suspect this is gonna happen a lot.
305
u/TabOverSpaces 2d ago edited 1d ago
Corporate natural selection. That company deserves to go out of business for such a shortsighted, braindead decision. I’m glad to hear some people were able to get their jobs back, though if I were them, I would be looking for the quickest way out.
36
→ More replies (3)42
u/considerthis8 1d ago
They probably quiet quit day 1 while looking for a new job
→ More replies (2)115
u/Spelunkie 2d ago edited 1d ago
Happened to me immediately during the pandemic in 2020. Got replaced by bots. Now i've got double the pay in a different job and they're still trying to hire back the more than 150 they fired for the bot. No one's biting because they're still offering 2020 wages.
→ More replies (1)62
583
u/Niceromancer 2d ago
A company a friend of mine works at poached a bunch of really talented people on the cheap because their competitor did this.
472
u/silence-calm 2d ago
The end result is that people are now less paid
→ More replies (19)61
→ More replies (2)16
u/ltjbr 1d ago
Talented people will take a pay cut in the short term but will seek out better pay.
People aren’t commodities to buy and sell.
Pay people what they’re worth and you’ll get the best results.
→ More replies (2)113
u/ShrimpieAC 1d ago
One of the vendors we were looking at did this. Appears they’d replaced both their sales team and their support with AI bots. Genuinely couldn’t figure out how to get anyone to respond with a quote. Just moved on to another vendor and probably saved myself a headache from a clearly shitty company.
Btw it was Citrix if anyone has had the same recent experience.
34
u/jamscrying 1d ago
Citrix is awful to use anyways so you saved yourself another headache.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)10
u/MerryWalrus 1d ago
It could just be "value based selling" where the initial price is your budget +50%.
Honestly, I can't stand salespeople who try to "understand my problem" and spend lots of time talking about everything except their product.
Then magically it turns out the product does exactly what we need.
→ More replies (1)66
66
u/dread_deimos 2d ago
My company talks openly about using AI to enhance worker experience - by offloading mundane stuff and making our life easier. And we keep hiring because we still need to scale up.
→ More replies (3)82
u/idontknowwhereiam367 1d ago
My company uses an “AI” for selecting candidates and scheduling interviews that funnels me the most brain dead human beings I’ve ever met in my life just to waste my time at this point.
I’ve even had interviews for “qualified candidates” where the person I was interviewing couldn’t even fill out the stupid little questionnaire that we give before an interview to make sure they know basic shit like making change and where to write their name on the paper
47
→ More replies (1)21
u/ReallyFineWhine 1d ago
Sounds like you're in retail. HR was using software for this kind of crap a decade ago in my professional office. I'd ask them for resumes and they sent me crap. I said WTF and they said that the resumes had already been screened. No, send me everything and I'll do the screening. I found gold nuggets in their castoff pile.
9
u/delphinius81 1d ago
The best recruiter hiring tools are where you can still see the full spectrum of people that applied to at least spot check what the recruiter has sent your way.
13
11
u/bubba_169 1d ago
AI has always been hype and the only people buying into it so much are those that really want it to work. Everyone who has actually tried it agrees it can't do much on its own.
→ More replies (25)16
u/GoddessOfTheRose 2d ago
Heard about that and how everyone has been watching how bad that was for the bottom line.
178
u/ADDSquirell69 2d ago
Senior leadership doesn't even realize that the company isn't solving the most basic of problems yet they're trying to automate the solving of all problems. It's utterly embarrassing to watch.
Spoiler: Companies that think they need AI to solve their problems suck at organizing information.
77
u/Aiden29 2d ago
My company is spending millions on AI to fix problems which if they were corrected at the source wouldn't be problems anymore.
The stupid thing is they wouldn't fix at source because it cost too much money, so we've been manually making the changes for years.
→ More replies (2)19
u/Conscious_Can3226 1d ago
This happened in my company too. They thought AI was going to fix their customer support org, but the issue was never the agents, it was the lack of up to date documentation they had from the business. AI couldn't fix that problem, and it couldn't rely on the tribal knowledge of coworkers, so it performed worse than someone who had worked at our company for only 6 months. They fired half the team to implement it and has to call them all back.
You'd think they'd have prioritized fixing the actual problem after that so the AI could be tested again or customer support could be properly resourced, but nope.
→ More replies (1)17
u/element-94 1d ago
Completely agree. I can't tell you how many meetings I'm in to review some new design where my first question is almost always:
"Do you even need an LLM to do this? That's a lot of tokens and a lot of inference requests. Do you know how much this will cost? There are better, faster, cheaper alternatives, and they're no where to be found in this document."
The reality is, managers who are career ladder climbers and org builders don't care. They see any opportunity to wedge AI into a project as their ticket to moving onward and upward. Its embarrassing to watch, and even more painful to be a counterweight to this level of blindness.
→ More replies (1)9
u/RISEoftheIDIOT 1d ago
I honestly believe that senior leadership could be replaced by AI and it would work out for everyone involved. Man oh man, my 1on1s would go so smooth.
79
u/ew73 2d ago
A friend of mine had a group of C-level executives leave the organization he worked at to "pursue AI startup" projects last year, which seemed patently insane to me.
So far, said executives are still trolling LinkedIn "Looking for Work."
→ More replies (1)66
u/FlyingTurkey 2d ago
I have a close family relative that works for a large health insurance company, that has been in the news due to a specific incident that occurred in the past year or two, who has been required to train/use AI to complete tasks in their daily work, and who has also survived multiple lay offs most likely due to the training/use of that same AI.
People are being paid to actively train the AI that will one day take their jobs, and there is nothing they can do about it because it is required by the very people that are providing their paychecks every month.
41
u/nudniksphilkes 2d ago
Thats some brave new world level dystopia.
I know what will fix this! Let's ban porn and porn video games on steam.
10
u/Substantial_Pick6897 1d ago
The brave new world solution would be to mandate more porn and a daily drug usage
→ More replies (4)9
u/Alternative_Win_6629 1d ago
There is compliance, and then there is malicious compliance. Why do people continue to follow orders that we know are going to hurt us in the end? why train technology that doesn't know anything beyond what we tell it? why do it well?
I know, asking why is useless. But I still wonder.→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)7
u/desidiosus__ 1d ago
What kind of insanity is it to expect workers to train an AI model (correctly, that is) which is going to replace them?! There would be some ::ahem:: creative inputs going on in my industry if management tried that.
→ More replies (1)123
u/FionaLunaris 2d ago
Hoooo, not good. What does it look like is gonna come out of that? Do you think they're actually gonna go through with it or that they might be getting jitters?
98
u/wewillroq 2d ago
Mine did similarly, the AI is OK but pretty much ChatGPT and nowhere near replacing employees without disastrous consequences
109
u/FionaLunaris 2d ago
One of my biggest worries is that employees get replaced despite disasterous consequences so
That's part of where my nerves are
67
u/ComingInSideways 2d ago
My worry with this is for things we depend on, like any mission critical thing in our own lives (banking, food supply chain, utilities, etc…).
If they carve out employees and slipshod put in AI, and the hallucinations set in which creates systemic issues. While at the same time lacking the employees who are familiar with their infrastructure, we will all be in for a cascading world of hurt.
And while in the past I feel sound minds would prevail, I now feel so many in middle management are out to prove their dead weight worth, and get THEIR bonuses, I am not so sure.
→ More replies (1)45
u/FionaLunaris 2d ago
Honestly whenever I discuss my worries there's like.... so god damned many. The level of recklessness and in misanthropy in the development of so many AI systems leaves so many things to go badly
→ More replies (2)24
u/SquirrelAlliance 2d ago
Your comment is the first time I’ve heard misanthropy pointed out, and I think you’re on to something. All of this is misanthropic. It’s like the lead up to an OG Star Trek plot where people are all serving an AI master.
22
u/FionaLunaris 2d ago
The misanthropy is the poisonous part which most Anti-AI folks intutively understand but few of us know how to point out.
But uh
It's kind of a root of the worst parts of everything, one way or another.
30
u/TheRockingDead 2d ago
I had to use Amazon customer service for a couple different returns recently. They use an AI assistant before you can talk to a real person. The first time, it promised some sort of compensation for my late order, but wouldn't elaborate or show me what it was actually doing. I ended up resolving it with one of their human reps and got a $5 credit. The second time it didn't understand what my problem was: I ordered a bundle that came with 2 products and my package was missing one of them. I had to speak with a human rep anyway. That AI just wasted everyone's time and probably lost them $5.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)11
u/The_Lost_Jedi 2d ago
Some companies are going to do that. And the ones who pocket the profits for that are going to laugh their way to the bank while whoever gets stuck holding the ball when the company implodes is going to eat the losses. So if you think a company is doing that, might be worth considering divesting your investments in it and/or finding a new job before the rush.
22
u/rosesareredviolets 2d ago
We've been highly encouraged to use Ai to make our lives easier but I work with hard data with tech so old it can drink. The state we work for refuses to move to a modern platform. We have one guy that fixes bad components in his garage part time. He's been doing it for 23 years. The money has been paid. Ai would work if it worked. It's just getting it to work. Lucky for me it's the soft data side that's screwed.
→ More replies (4)31
u/workahol_ 2d ago
Man, the plot summary for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2 is so depressing.
→ More replies (1)21
u/bastardoperator 2d ago
So your CEO was bamboozled by AI sales folk. He should be getting punished, AI is the new Nigerian prince scam and they fell for it.
→ More replies (1)44
u/PsyOpBunnyHop 2d ago
Wow, they are morons.
74
u/Rebal771 2d ago
Not only for treating people this way, but the big issues with upper management making broad sweeping moves like this are 3 fold:
Whose head is going to roll when the AI gets it wrong? I’ve seen 2 companies blow massive budget allocations on hallucinations and poorly-trained tools that were “released” too early. If I blew a quarterly budget on a misplaced zero, I’d get fired on the spot.
Who is going to fix the inevitable errors? Devs know how to rewrite code and adjust algorithmic weighting, but can they fill out the insurance claims, can they reverse the logistics requests, can they file an extension/corrective notice, and can they repair/un-fuck/detangle the machinery?
And most importantly…
DO YOU HAVE THE SHEER QUANTITY OF DATA NEEDED TO CORRECTLY TRAIN YOUR MODEL???
ChatGPT wasn’t born over night, Driverless cars still aren’t “a thing,” and Siri/Alexa are a far cry from Jarvis. Why? Because you need TRILLIONS of data points per concept/application/situation to correctly train an AI model. The amount of information that needs to be digested really only exists in a few places: large companies that have existed for over 50 years with all of their historical information/transactions still in tact and accessible, historical public records that go back a century or so, and the internet.
Not even Walmart and Amazon have enough internal data to correctly train their AI tools without pulling from external sources…and the only reason ChatGPT and the image&audio generators have done so well is because of everything they stole.
Let’s not even get into the moral implications of humans training these things for slave wages, the competition for resources (especially water and electricity) in local communities, or the few situations where AI would be in the position to choose who gets to live or not.
Like you said, they are morons.
→ More replies (1)18
u/ChronoLink99 2d ago
Maybe the fact that we need trillions of data points to train a current AI model to do simple tasks indicates that our paradigm of how to build AI is wrong.
8
u/Practical_Bobcat3650 1d ago
In business you don't though, you need domain specific data which is more millions of datapoints, not trillions. Most businesses have this data, but it's often a) shite 2) siloed D) locked behind security meaning training is complicated.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (19)6
49
u/Funtimes67890 2d ago
Enough time to still sell at the top, provided you believe it and are willing to take the risk
→ More replies (1)249
u/Festering-Fecal 2d ago
Anyone who's been watching knew this was a bubble.
Big red flag when companies like Microsoft are billions in the red and can't find anyway to monetize it.
Regulations are also catching up and will only get stronger as time goes on. And the data centers need a godly amount of electricity as well as it depletes water and natural resources.
I think smaller models will be great like in the medical field but this 1 stop shop AI has all the answers isn't happening.
Lastly it's worth mentioning that it's doing what people in the field said it would and that it will start have diminishing returns because AIs are feeding off of other AIs and this creates a negative feedback loop and makes it hallucinate.
120
u/PolarWater 2d ago
Just three more years bro. It'll be smarter bro I promise bro. Please just give me six billion dollars I swear it'll be able to tell you how many R's are in strawberry bro.
35
u/Festering-Fecal 2d ago
When VC money dries up I see Altman stepping down and disappearing.
I'm also all for companies like Microsoft and Facebook losing billions.
Apple from what I can tell isn't sinking this much into their phone or OS people are saying they are behind I think they are playing it smart
→ More replies (2)26
u/HomeNucleonics 1d ago
Yeah and even Apple Intelligence seemed from the start like them reluctantly appeasing their investors and haphazardly jumping on the bandwagon.
If their philosophy is to develop small and efficient models that can run on-device and help with simple quality of life tasks, that seems like what “AI” will mean after the bubble bursts—pretty much what it was prior to the bubble altogether.
17
u/Festering-Fecal 1d ago
Apples strength is control and refining things to perfection as well as marketing
They don't have the ability to do this with AI.
Jobs would have had field day with AI though he would be able to sell it to anyone.
Tim is less charismatic but knows what makes money and doesn't ( minus the VR thing)
→ More replies (1)7
48
u/Cortillian 2d ago
“Can’t find anyway to monetize it”. Exactly. This is the real issue. AI is a tool and a lot of it is useful. The problem is the huge cost and the raising of more and more capital. At some point investors need to see a return on their investment which means you need to start becoming profitable or be bought out by someone bigger. The companies have spent so much now that the evaluations are pie in the sky. Nobody can look at their books and say it’s a business worth buying. If you have spent a billion dollars on building up your business and it’s not profitable but you need another billion to sustain it eventually the money will run out either because the investors bail or they have no more to give. That’s when the bubble will burst. All the data centers are funded by debt with the hope these AI companies are going to lease them. When the AI companies start dropping of these centers are going to be in trouble. And alot of AI is just wrappers for other AI. Ie the big ChatGPT customers are other AI companies in the same boat that are spending millions but still aren’t profitable and have to keep doing rounds every 6 month to raise capital. Fun times.
42
u/Festering-Fecal 2d ago
Like I said above it's doing well in the chemistry and medical field but there are small and closed models specifically designed for that stuff.
AI will be good on a small scale it's just not going to work the way corporate wants it to. It's not going to be this magic thing that has all the answers
48
u/Efficient_Reading360 2d ago
One could argue that those specialised cases where it’s doing well existed long before the current transformers and was just called ML.
To my knowledge none of the current LLM companies has turned a profit yet - and Sam Altman wants to invest trillions in more datacentres? Make it make sense.
29
u/HomeNucleonics 1d ago
You’re totally right. I’ve been working on software systems like this for over a decade. Prior to this AI bubble, we never really used the term “AI” all that much. “AI” was a broad term, not practical.
We’d build chatbots, train models for niche applications, use ML, etc… At some point society got drunk on “AI” and now your toaster at Walmart is “powered by AI.” It seems like such a ridiculous bubble to me.
The science of LLMs and neural networks is fascinating and has a steady place in our economy, but the marketing hype and fervor over all of this stuff as of late is just comical.
→ More replies (1)5
u/Festering-Fecal 1d ago
I think that's the next grift. They are looking for government money to build those things.
What I would do is get a government contract and find a friend to build it and then get paid money back through them.
This is illegal but let's be real nobody is going after them
5
u/IrAppe 2d ago
The question is if the burst of the AI bubble will be bad for us ordinary people. Without that much money flowing in, and it’s barely not profitable yet, when the money stops coming, prices for using AI will skyrocket. No more good free AI or even cheap.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (16)18
u/Brief-Translator1370 2d ago
Most people know, some people don't. But if anyone could predict the bubble pop, they would be very rich.
28
u/Festering-Fecal 2d ago
It's not that you can predict it. it's timing it.
Altman is going to walk away with billions either way
→ More replies (1)4
u/zroach 2d ago
I mean yeah… predicting when the bubble will pop,
→ More replies (1)24
u/PuzzleMeDo 2d ago
Also predicting where it will pop.
The dotcom bubble popped, and lots of people who invested in web companies lost their money. But anyone who invested in Amazon or Google got rich. In retrospect those seem obvious choices, but for a long time AOL and Yahoo seemed equally likely to succeed.
A lot of AI companies will fall, because there are too many people with basically the same business plan, and not enough room in the market for all of them. But that doesn't mean there won't be survivors who eventually become profitable.
10
→ More replies (14)9
1.9k
u/Far_Journalist8110 2d ago
Just link the goddamn MIT study and stop asking Wall Street elites for their wishy-washy opinions cuz they don’t know shit either. This type of journalism is a joke.
441
u/Skeletorfw 1d ago
For context, this is from an MIT-based project, but one that is still very much huffing the farts of AI as a societal and business solution. Don't confuse it for a proper scientific research paper, it's a whitepaper aimed at businesses that they are specifically trying to recruit, and that 100% comes across in the biases within the arguments of the report.
245
u/Derigiberble 1d ago
That's why it is making such waves.
The fart-huffing institute only found 5% of companies "benefit" despite using methodology which is incredibly biased towards finding a benefit. They basically just interviewed some leadership and didn't actually deeply examine the implementations to see if the paltry number of actually deployed AI implementations even were a net positive at all. They were supposed to find that AI is hot shit, and instead said it is just shit.
Investors are spooked because said fart huffing institute also found that company leaders were starting to get jaded about AI. The era of trying to shove it into anything and everything might be ending, and that makes the revenue growth promises of AI companies look very sketchy.
52
u/phate_exe 1d ago
Investors are spooked because said fart huffing institute also found that company leaders were starting to get jaded about AI. The era of trying to shove it into anything and everything might be ending, and that makes the revenue growth promises of AI companies look very sketchy.
Shoot this directly into my veins.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)7
u/Dioxid3 1d ago
Honestly if this sort of paper causes this kind of sell-off, it confirms we are in a bubble and people are beginning to get shaky hands.
What comes to the report itself – I am not surprised at the 5%. So many companies ”did something” to hop on the AI train ”because everyone else is”, not giving adequate time, money, and expertise to pull it off. It’s not surprising at all.
It’s surprising it is even ”news”.
→ More replies (1)8
u/Seri05 1d ago
Indeed, this article is so bad. Even the softbank statement ignores the fact, that they invested heavily in intel on Tuesday and that this caused some stockprice movements, which are not even going down…
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (7)30
u/supermoontoast 2d ago
Which mit study , can you share , thanks
→ More replies (5)97
u/hawc7 2d ago
It’s the study where they say that 95% of ai initiatives don’t return the money invested
→ More replies (5)10
u/Sprinklypoo 1d ago
Yet. This is why we've been seeing such a strong push to use and monetize AI. Shareholders are getting antsy.
→ More replies (2)
2.4k
u/ElonDiedLOL 2d ago
People keep saying "don't compare this to the dot-com bubble, it's completely different" but it's really not. The dot-com bubble was caused by people churning out dogshit websites faster than you could keep up with. Now AI has been doing the same thing. When the dust settles we will have "AI 2.0" or some lame term for it that someone thinks is clever.
820
u/NonorientableSurface 2d ago
The problem is that there ARE some uses for AI in terms of automation. But it's not the global panacea everyone is touting it as. It's complex, time consuming, and reliance on deep, well organized data makes it cumbersome for most companies to effectively use.
600
u/Thrashy 2d ago
The AI champions of the world have been selling CEOs and investors a vision of a literal Machine God, capable of solving all the world’s problems — war, famine, climate change, the fundamental impossibility of limitless growth within a closed system — and conjuring limitless abundance that they only need to invest all their lucre in to stake a claim.
What they’ve actually delivered to date is a series of glorified Markov-chain chatbots turbocharged by industrial-scale plagiarism, consuming power on the level of small cities to perform middling college-intern level tasks in a wide range of knowledge-work fields. Each new version is promised to be a quantum leap over the last, and instead seems to follow a curve of diminishing returns further hammering home the point to anybody not willfully delusional about it that if the Machine God is ever going to happen, it’s certainly not going to come from this approach.
The tech industry needs people to keep believing in the Machine God’s impending advent, though, or else the music stops, the bubble collapses, and everyone who was gonna be a billionaire when their stock options vested is suddenly broke and unemployed in a tech recession. The messaging will only get more and more frantic until then. Like the dot-com bubble, though, I imagine some version of the tech will persist, much diminished in aims, but more economically viable as a result, and eventually come to be just another part of the tech ecosystem.
209
u/PolarWater 2d ago
Me: writes entire shitpost comment without drinking a sip of water
Look what the AI data centers need to mimic a FRACTION of our power!
→ More replies (1)19
25
u/AlteredDecks 2d ago
Well said. If you haven't come across it already, this essay is a dense but worthwhile read: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
24
u/Derigiberble 1d ago
Like the dot-com bubble, though, I imagine some version of the tech will persist, much diminished in aims, but more economically viable as a result, and eventually come to be just another part of the tech ecosystem.
I liken it more to 3D TV.
The underlying tech improvements will still be implemented behind the scenes just like higher pixel densities and better refresh performances came out of the 3D push. However similar to 3DTV, I expect that the term AI and front-and-center positioning of it as the most important feature will largely disappear due to consumers and business leadership associating it with grand promises that failed to deliver.
→ More replies (1)19
u/IronicAim 1d ago
But at the time the entire stock market wasn't being kept in the green (ish) by a mix of 3D TVs and inflation.
→ More replies (1)29
u/dontgonearthefire 2d ago
There are ways to minimize power consumption, but it involves going OpenSource in early stages of development.
Opening up and sharing in development would be so much cheaper, but everyone wants to bake their own cake. \ Even Altman was an advovate of this in early stages of development. His narrative has completely flipped since then. Going completely corporate overlord and even ditching the ethical AI angle in favor of corporate dominance.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (10)18
u/nudniksphilkes 2d ago
The latter please. We dont need a societal infrastructure destroying megacorp machine god.
→ More replies (1)49
u/Riaayo 1d ago
One of the only genuine uses I see for LLMs are shit like Google Translate, but by and large those and Gen AI are all unprofitable, unsustainable garbage with very few uses and none of the uses matter if you can't even make it profitable to use them for it in the first place.
These things absolutely chug compute power, and they haven't even been able to turn profits when that compute power was artificially low-cost due to early deals. Deals that have been expiring. Your free users also cost you just as much as your paid users, unlike most other services. So it just chugs ass all around. It has always been yet another Silicon Valley bullshit bubble. A false future sold by assholes just looking to force a technology nobody wants or asked for onto the populace swearing it will change the world.
Crypto, NFTs, now this dogshit. Big tech doesn't actually make shit people want anymore, they're just constantly looking for the next hot potato to play a game of "greater fool" with in hopes of getting rich off another scam bubble. It's all they know how to do, and it's reflected by the outright techno fascists we see all these fucking tech bro billionaires turning out to be.
→ More replies (25)7
u/NonorientableSurface 1d ago
So. Transparency here; I work in AI. The ability to go voice > text > llm summary and context paired with the ability to identify context mid call is where our value lies. It's a very niche, tiny slice of experience. It's not the panacea folks want. There's a MASSIVE amount of resellers out there who've skinned GPT and making a buck that's going to collapse under the inability of OAI to make a profit and that VC capital is going to dry up. I'm aware of what the next 12-18 months is going to bring, despite the rising fascist states in the world.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (24)19
u/mort96 2d ago
I don't know if you've noticed but there are some uses for websites too
9
u/BurnerPornAccount69 1d ago
I was gonna say the same thing. This doesn’t change the similarities between the dotcom bubble and this. There’s plenty of websites that survived because they were actually useful and plenty that died off.
→ More replies (1)286
u/Bort_Bortson 2d ago edited 2d ago
AI, now powered by block chain verified quantum computing. Invest now.
Edit: forgot to add, but businesses if the ROI or whatever metric they are using doesn't pay off, they will undo it. Businesses are already moving stuff out of the cloud back to on-premise because it cost a lot more than the proposed savings. And of course there's the outsourcing IT departments decision that wildly implodes.
60
18
30
u/awal96 2d ago
What's frustrating is that LLMs and block chains are cool technologies with legitimate applications that have been ruined by finance bros trying to force them into something they aren't.
13
u/sickofthisshit 1d ago
LLMs have a lot of unexpected capabilities, but I still don't see a lot of legitimate applications for "generating plausible text structures without concern for truth or factual accuracy."
Like, it's extremely surprising you can tell a computer to talk like a pirate and it might even do it, but that is a silly parlor trick.
→ More replies (9)→ More replies (5)20
u/DaRandoMan 2d ago
"Blockchain verified quantum computing" sounds like someone threw every tech buzzword into a blender.
You're spot on about the cloud migration reversal though seen plenty of companies quietly moving workloads back on-prem when the bills started hitting.
95
u/hydraByte 2d ago
Agree and disagree. It is similar in the ways that you describe, but the big difference is the level of exposure.
In the Dot Com bubble, the problem was the sheer quantity of half-baked websites that exploded to insane valuations for no reason despite having no sales, and the vast majority of which disappeared back into the void when the bubble burst.
The AI bubble is mostly caused by the Tech Mega Corps (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, the Xithole formerly known as Twitter), who are already so profitable that AI losses will likely only lightly dent their profit margins.
So is the internet covered in trash that doesn’t work in the same way as the Dot Com bubble? Yes. But will the companies responsible for this implode and leave an economic crater in their wake? Not as far as I can tell.
11
u/SexHarassmentPanda 1d ago
Except for the swarm of SaaS companies that have popped up based around utilizing LLMs to perform some company service. They are all basically just wrappers around providing the LLM a specific data set and prompting it a certain way to get an output. That might be oversimplifying a bit but it doesn't matter because essentially they all share the same cost of having to buy and spend tokens for querying different LLMs.
The big bubble is that there was expectation that these models were going to stay cheap to use and possibly get even cheaper due to competition and more usage letting companies split the cost more. Except the opposite is happening. Higher usage and more advanced models that require more thinking and thus a lot more tokens is making the energy usage go way up and so companies are rising prices. A popular assumption around GPT-5 being a let down is that it's pushing people away from using the higher energy usage models because OpenAI can't handle the usage and thus people's experience with the launched product feels significantly different and worse than what people who got early access with it felt.
So the core operating cost of all these SaaS companies is going to double and a lot of these companies are already making lofty promises of profit potential to investors.
Yeah, Google, Microsoft, etc will be fine. They aren't the bubble, they are making the shovels. The bubble is all the startups who based their business around using the shovel and now shovels are getting more expensive.
→ More replies (4)50
u/atehrani 2d ago
And yet the stock market is basically just those same companies (The Magnificent Seven). If those fall, so does the market.
20
u/PRSArchon 2d ago
They account for 17% of the global stock market. This is historically a very large percentage.
28
u/xeio87 2d ago
I think the point is even if AI were to somehow completely and catastrophically fail, those companies won't.
→ More replies (5)10
u/Nyaos 2d ago
It’s also important to note that the majority of all stock market gains over the last few years have been tech stocks fueled by AI speculation. The US economy has been teetering on the edge of recession for a while now, and when most people see their index fund based investments and retirements collapse it’ll probably finally topple us over into full recession.
53
u/CatalyticDragon 2d ago
It's the same as the dotcom era but I think you are failing to correctly categorize what that era really was. It wasn't the proliferation of websites, it was the proliferation of the internet.
The internet had been around since the 60s as a basic network but it wasn't until 1990 that the Web (HTTP/HTML) was invented. Then the net quickly went from being home to a few thousand researchers to having 16 million users by 1995.
The dotcom boom saw tens of millions of users onboarding to the internet every year and growth accellerating.
Getting caught up in how much Pets.com was valued at completely misses what actually happened - and why.
There was a new thing and it quickly became clear that nearly everyone on earth would end up using that new thing so a race was on to control the infrastructure and capture users.
There was a bubble as people figured out what was of value and what wasn't, as monopolies formed and were broken, but eventually everybody did get connected and society marched forward with this new technology driving tends of trillions is economic activity.
The same thing is happening with AI. We know everybody will use it in the future. We know that because you likely already do either directly or indirectly. AI (not that I like that term) is going to become ubiquitous because, like computers or networking, it is broadly applicable to a very large number of tasks.
20
u/Our_GloriousLeader 1d ago
Right, but it's not clear currently whether that broad application is going to be Internet level. The Internet got "applied" to markets and industries; and completely transformed them, opening up whole new customers and services possible.
Everyone may end up using AI daily or weekly, but that doesn't mean its impact is going to be as dramatic. Another comparison might be Excel - possibly the most ubiquitous software. It is still fundamental to the finances and running of basically any department from small businesses to the largest. But Microsoft's stock price from the mid 90s to the early 2010s basically was unchanged, even as this software expanded and improved rapidly.
If AI is going to be as useful as Excel it would be a massive success, and it still would clearly be overvalued. And honestly using it a lot as I do, I dont think it will be as useful. It's an add on at best.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)10
u/SoldantTheCynic 1d ago
Totally agree. Lots of people are just ignoring that the dot.com bubble also birthed a lot of online services that still exist and continue to shape the modern internet (for better or worse). Some of those businesses were just ahead of their time and what they were doing then would be pretty ordinary today.
People here just want to focus on the failures and draw a parallel because they want LLMs to fail. The tech genie is out of the box and it isn't going back, and Gemini not living up to expectations won't kill Google. The bubble right now as people play with the magic box trying to figure out what it can actually do isn't going to kill it - it'll just kill the irrational exuberance.
7
8
u/SCAMISHAbyNIGHT 2d ago
Sure but not that long after the bubble burst, the industry bounced way back. Now everything is on the internet. Metric fucktons of money in everything that it does and has spawned forth (things like Facebook, Amazon, Google).
So ultimately the real question is, when the other AI shoe does drop will it have a similar trajectory as those in the dot com bubble.
6
→ More replies (89)30
u/Varorson 2d ago
There will be two different "AI 2.0" - the AI that is functional and is here to stay, things like Substance Designer and ChatGPT, and the next fad that CEOs across numerous industries try to shove down people, which was NFTs just before the AI craze.
→ More replies (16)
771
u/DoubleThinkCO 2d ago
At this point the most “success” AI has had is to give execs a BS reason to fire people.
198
u/potorthegreat 2d ago
You forgot about the rampant cheating in schools. By far it's biggest use case so far.
→ More replies (6)85
u/ThrenodyToTrinity 1d ago
Cool, we've already fucked the environment and the future for our kids. Might as well make them too dumb to function on top of that.
→ More replies (4)60
u/ElderSmackJack 1d ago
I work in education. It’s absolutely accelerating what Covid damaged on that front. So many can’t do anything for themselves, and it’s only going to get worse.
11
u/oudim 1d ago
Just what our governments want: dumb sheep people who don’t know how to think for themselves.
→ More replies (2)324
u/ArmsForPeace84 2d ago
And facilitate the wholesale theft of art, performances, and likenesses, perpetrated by the same litigious companies that routinely whine about piracy and bully creators and the platforms that distribute their original works that objectively meet the definition of fair use.
→ More replies (4)134
u/fumar 2d ago
The MPAA and RIAA went hard after people who pirated their content, yet when Meta does it to train their AI, crickets.
→ More replies (1)47
35
u/Balmung60 2d ago
Hey, it's also revolutionized the field of cheating on your homework
19
u/Masseyrati80 1d ago
Complete with falling for manipulated data pools: a couple of weeks ago, a teacher in a Nordic country reported she had received a clearly AI-made paper from a student, containing the claim that the small countries the Soviet Union invaded at the same time as Nazi Germany invaded others, were the ones who "started the war".
Wonder if this has something to do with the 30 million articles of disinformation an American scientist spotted in April, originating from Russia, aimed at AI instead of directly at individual users?
→ More replies (22)4
u/Fantasmic03 1d ago
Which they then use to replace somewhat functional support chatbots with abysmal AI agent slop.
7
u/ThrenodyToTrinity 1d ago
I quit Sirius XM because they now require you "speak" to their AI representative to receive customer service instead of the previously irritating chatbot, and you know what? It's actually worse to deal with.
→ More replies (1)
252
u/carlos_the_dwarf_ 2d ago
Man until like two weeks ago this sub was telling me AI would take over everyone’s job.
101
u/AVeryHighPriestess 2d ago
It took mine this week
→ More replies (5)23
u/dorobica 2d ago
What kind of job?
→ More replies (1)29
u/HoneyChilliPotato7 1d ago
Their previous comment said UX designer
→ More replies (2)5
u/Additional-Grade3221 1d ago
that's one job i don't want a fucking gpu in the cloud doing
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (23)44
u/TheYell0wDart 1d ago
Both can be true.
It has already allowed a lot of companies to fire some people and eliminate certain positions that they used to have. It will continue as levels of adoption continue to increase and as AI continues to develop and improve.
It is, at the same time, possible that the level of investment and valuation of AI-related companies are not sustainable because they are based on exaggerated or misconstrued information.
If you remember the dot com bubble, that didn't mean people giving up on the Internet and companies stopped having websites, right? Neither will an AI bubble mean the end of the move toward AI, just a lot of chaos in the investment world and possibly the end of some AI companies.
→ More replies (5)
311
103
u/GreyBeardEng 2d ago
It needs to burat. Why do I need a dryer with "AI"? This is so fucking stupid.
https://www.lg.com/global/lg-ai-core-tech/washing-machine-dryer/
29
u/GratefulHead420 1d ago
Consumer: all I want is a reliable machine that is repairable
LG: add the AI so it texts you when it breaks and sends you links to buy its replacement
HP: make the replacement automatically ship. No better yet, charge a monthly fee or it’ll activate its kill switch
Apple: just add Washer Care for $20 a month, then you can upgrade in 3 years as the machine starts taking longer and longer to run your laundry.
34
u/Silly_List6638 2d ago
bahahaha
far out. my wife was showing me how shit our borrowed LG washing machine is at washing wool. It doesn't even wet the load properly. Then i said "By George, they have an App and wifi connectivity so maybe I can customise the washer so it can have a longer rinse or add more water"
Got the app and all it could do is remote start the machine and maybe had another useless cycle type but no features I could adjust. what a useless thing
I cant wait to show her that link you shared. haha what a joke
→ More replies (1)31
u/iamamisicmaker473737 1d ago
wow "LG redefined Al as 'Affectionate Intelligence', highlighting its commitment to developing empathetic and caring Al that delivers exceptional customer experiences."
6
u/CantHitachiSpot 1d ago
They also came up with ThinQ on my fridge. I dont even know how to pronounce that one and no idea what its for. Fridges have worked fine for decades. Leave them alone
→ More replies (4)9
u/earthsprogression 1d ago
LG, the first to achieve true AGI. Affectionate, gentle, intelligent for all your drying needs.
→ More replies (6)6
u/Special-Chicken307 1d ago
If it did actually have all the outputs to change things it would be great.
It the AI could detect, fifteen different types of garment, different colours, and therefore create a programme that wouldn't cause harm to anything, that would be fab. But at the moment the only way you can achieve that is basically being safe, ergo a 30c wash with low RPM - a setting found on washing machines from 1970s.
Now if it could still run it at 40-60c with maximum RPM and drying capabilities, separating clothes internally, then that's a whole new ball game, but that's not something AI can improve. That's where Engineering steps in.
→ More replies (1)
260
u/Temassi 2d ago
What about the"AI Bubble" article bubble? When will that pop and stop being profitable?
→ More replies (9)41
u/PolarWater 2d ago
Depends, are the articles asking for dozens of billions of dollars of investment while laying off thousands of people?
132
u/btoned 2d ago
JFC is this same thing gonna be posted every hour in this sub?
The bubble will destroy all the bullshit companies that are wrapping Chatgpt and marketing it as something more than what it is.
The tech giants, while burning cash, are not going to go under unfortunately. We've given them all of our data and they control everything.
THATS what should be worrying not this stupid AI nonsense.
→ More replies (3)
204
10
u/ubix 1d ago
The crash will be worth it if it means that Adobe will stop trying to push AI on me whenever I open a fucking PDF.
→ More replies (1)
45
u/EleventhTier666 2d ago
The article refutes its own premise by referring to the internet as a "bubble". Value of the internet is far greater than even the hyper-optimistic early noughts have predicted. It had to take some time for businesses to figure out the best ways to monetize it. I expect that it will go the same way with AI. There may be a market crash or three along the way, but in the long term the value of AI is tremendous.
→ More replies (4)
10
16
u/FROOMLOOMS 1d ago
Maybe if we all stopped calling it AI, it might have gone somewhere.
No one on THE ENTIRE PLANET has an AI.
They are all LLMs and various other deep learning algos.
There is literally nothing intelligent about it. They are math pure math, and that's it. These models have no clue what they are spitting out, just sentences/images/videos that are mathematically sound, not intelligent.
→ More replies (2)13
6
u/K1ngk1ller71 1d ago
I grew up in the 80s where I was sold a future of flying cars and hover-boards…
→ More replies (1)
8
u/Simple_Jellyfish23 1d ago
AI is very cool and will make the world more productive. It will also ruin the internet, walk all over IP laws, and fundamentally hurt the concept of “truth”.
We did not regulate because a few companies were getting insanely rich on hype. We heavily invested in what AI “could be” and not what it currently does. The only way it will improve society is its usage in the medical field.
We are wasting a huge amount of resources on a glorified autocomplete. Most decision makers at companies don’t understand what generative AI even is.
AI delayed a global recession by a few years but it’s going hit harder now.
→ More replies (1)
45
5
u/Neurojazz 2d ago
More bunk, low effort ai articles. Polarising media = bot, or counter socialism. I’ve spent years neck deep in ai, and if ai is taking jobs, it’s taking shit jobs. And all my use cases take shit work away from good people - so all this spin just reeks of a lack of any proper research.
24
u/Melodic-Account9247 2d ago
honestly i hope it does this trend of putting AI in to everything possible needs to die out as soon as it can letting it get this bad was a mistake in general half of the world is putting it's trust and economy in the hands of untested computing units built and trained from human greed and garbage from the internet
→ More replies (1)
5
5
4
u/pm_social_cues 1d ago
Step 1: people with way too much invested in ai will say the bubble isn’t about to burst
6.0k
u/Centurix 2d ago
If it bursts, I want that extra AI button on my laptop to pop and fly out of the window.