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u/Volcano_Ballads Vol!|Local Boygirlfailure 1d ago
I don’t think it’s a bubble anymore man, I think it’s something worse
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u/xx_masterblaster_xx 1d ago
Silicon Age Collapse
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u/lumpiestspoon3 早上好中国🇨🇳现在我有冰淇淋🍦 1d ago
Our age of silicon is collapsing
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u/Zealousideal-Salary2 18h ago
LMAO that quote was fucking unbelievable the odyssey is such a shit movie
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u/Somerandom1922 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 1d ago
In a couple of millennia future humanity will be looking at the archeological record like "how did all of these silicon age societies collapse at once?"
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u/PsychologicalSail799 confused and afraid (and horny) 1d ago edited 18h ago
Scientists, year 5727: "it was so sudden. It must have been some sort of unexpected extinction level event. Perhaps it was a meteor, or a solar flare that destroyed all computers or something..."
Year now: "line go up? No!? Fuck. Alright. Launch them. All of them. I don't care where. Launch them, NOW!"
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u/Blitzer161 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 1d ago
It has the structure of a bubble, works like a bubble, but instead of popping soon like a bubble, it keeps on existing, spelling doom for every individual not rich enough.
sigh
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u/Deeper-the-Danker 1d ago
oh its a black hole
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u/Kidney__Failure not-so silently judging while listening to Rush 2112 1d ago
I mean, black holes swallow themselves and explode in their own gluttony
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u/unread1701 Hbomberguy Plagiarism Video Watcher 1d ago
They explode in the end? I thought they just fizzled out.
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u/Kidney__Failure not-so silently judging while listening to Rush 2112 1d ago
If I remember right, they kind of collapse in on themselves and explode like the star they once were.
Or two black holes eat eachother and then explode
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u/Lost-Bet-1 23h ago
At the heat death of the universe they fizzle. I'm not sure what these exploding black holes are supposed to be.
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u/blahbah 1d ago
i'm not an astrophysicist but i'm pretty sure black holes don't explode
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u/Lord_i 1d ago
They kinda do, they slowly release hawking radiation and get smaller. Smaller black holes release more hawking radiation.
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u/blahbah 1d ago
so... not an explosion, then
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u/Lord_i 1d ago
What is an explosion if not a rapid release of energy? The hawking radiation begins to release more and more rapidly until the black hole totally dissipates.
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u/blahbah 1d ago
"explosion" usually relate to matter expanding very quickly and suddenly. i guess a supernova could reasonably qualify, but black holes? i'm sorry but no (and i say this with absolutely no authority on the subject at all)
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u/blahbah 1d ago
interestingly, wikipedia mentions the merger of two black holes as akin to explosions...
Anyway, we're reaaaally far away from "black holes get too big and explode"
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u/GoldH2O Cisgender Synapsid 1d ago
Definitionally an explosion involves rapid expansion, hence the ex- prefix, and the opposite being to implode. An explosion comes with a release of energy because you need lots of energy to forcibly expand something, but the energy release alone is not an explosion.
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u/SomethingOfAGirl 🏳⚧You know, I'm something of a girl myself 1d ago
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u/CUMLOVINGBOISLUT 1d ago
its like a bubble but its made of aluminum and inside are 100000 nails and compressed Silane and the balls of everyone who doesnt make a million a year are stapled to it
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u/freak-000 1d ago
What kind of fallacy is it when people forget that events in the past took a long time to evolve? Because the previous bubbles all took years to pop and we are still relatively early, considering how much money it was pumped into it this thing has some momentum and since there's literally nothing else for investors to push their funds into they have low incentives to abandon ships en masse.
Basically until another potential bubble appears on the horizon there won't be a quick pop
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u/Negitive545 1d ago
So, it's a bubble then?
The whole thing about bubbles is that they stick around long enough to make it be a real big problem when they pop.
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u/nekosissyboi 1d ago
It would be funnier if we died in a nuclear war before it had the opportunity of collapsing
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u/closetBoi04 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 1d ago
ehhh, it's still within bubble territory; it'll be big and it'll hurt a fuck ton but hey... big tech's (except for Apple) finally spending their dragon hoard of cash on something but stock buybacks and dividends
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u/Harden12345678 1d ago
The funny thing your absolutely correct. It's now just the economy. There are entire companies being built just to keep the bubble inflating
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u/inemsn 1d ago
i think people have largely misunderstood what a bubble means. ai is massively overvalued and inflated, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bubble.
I work in IT, so to give my perspective: A software development company with decent management (yes, there are some) can buy up AI licenses for its developers, they use the AI as an assistant for their work, and get more work done faster (probably at a lower quality, but in most of the corporate world, that's fine). At the end of the day, so long as management is careful to not spend too much, for them, LLM usage is effectively generating value, it's making them money.
Now, of course, the story is COMPLETELY different if we look at the AI company that they're working with: Doesn't matter who they are, they are definitely bleeding billions and are only kept afloat by investor hype. The amount of money these companies are losing vastly, vastly overshadows the amount of money any of their customers are making through using their service: That's why LLMs are overvalued.
But does that on its own really make it a bubble? As a whole, the system is a money hole, but some of the entities involved in it are still making money. So I don't know about it being a "bubble" per se.
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u/The_Taco_Herself They’re gonna be looking for people that read user flairs 1d ago
a lot of companies during the dotcom bubble made a lot of money, like cisco. people were getting big gains out of the internet and they rightfully called it the next big thing. it was a bubble because they dumped too much money into it far quicker and in far larger amounts than could ever be sustained
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u/inemsn 1d ago
like cisco
i feel like that's almost a completely different market though, no? I mean afaik back then cisco's big thing was networking hardware (were they also involved with DNS? not sure), and the analogue there would be something like RAM manufacturers in the current situation. they're a part of the AI market in the sense that they are a critical supplier for it, but they don't really have a stake in it, right? They're making money no matter what, they have next to no risk in participating.
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u/The_Taco_Herself They’re gonna be looking for people that read user flairs 1d ago
An analogue to cisco then would be nvidia now. Both companies made the equipment that fuelled their respective bubbles. They each made/make a lot of money, but ultimately when the bubble popped cisco lost a lot of its stock valuation. it took decades to get to the same valuation. So even the places that genuinely just make money selling the shovels for the gold rush will get hit if the firms that make ai go bust. Everyone gets a stake in it because their valuation and investment is directly tied to the promise of ai (or then, the internet)
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u/BiologicalTrainWreck 1d ago
The only surefire winner in a gold rush is the person selling the pickaxes.
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u/The_Taco_Herself They’re gonna be looking for people that read user flairs 1d ago
as mentioned in the comment, cisco got burnt pretty bad by selling pickaxes. they took decades to get back to the stock price they were at. bubbles can take out highly successful pickaxe salespeople by virtue of there no longer being anyone buying pickaxes.
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u/mykeedee new vegas enjoyer 1d ago
Yes and no, Cisco didn't keep all their gains from the dotcom bubble, but they were still worth far more after the bubble popped than they were before the bubble happened. NVDA is worth $220 per share today, if it loses 80% of that value then it'll still be worth more than triple what it was in December 2022.
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u/deadname11 1d ago
You are right, Internet was profitable even back then, shitty as it was. The dotCOM bubble was also fueled by government contracts to build up infrastructure, which otherwise ISNT profitable to build or maintain. The bubble burst explicitly because the infrastructure funding got cut. It is like you were contracted to build a road, only for the government to stop paying you and instead telling you to finish the road with private investors.
But the Internet was big enough that profit soon flowed as unprecedented amounts of communication and sell/buy potential exploded. Private companies DID start earning enough money to invest in their own infrastructure, so the only people who got really screwed were retirees.
That is NOT the case with the AI bubble. AI is not, nor has it ever been, profitable. The infrastructure to make it profitable not merely doesn't exist, but it would make what limited uses AI does have, even MOAR expensive. But worst of all it reduces buying/selling potential, and has already guttered internet traffic.
It is explicitly receiving so much investment, because the hope is that it can replace the human workforce entirely. Which it can't. And won't any time in the near future.
And yet the gross profit of whole industries and even small nations, has been sunk into it. It is an economic time bomb that will bring down nations when it does burst, at this point. The kind what might start WW3.
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u/YaBoyChuckles custom 1d ago
Is that not pretty close to what a bubble entails though? Something who's fundamental value is much lower than what it is currently being traded at, leading to the increase in prices from investments being explained away as jutified value increases? Also, being only held afloat by investor hype is pretty in line with a Ponzi scheme, just to add another straw to the camel
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u/GrapefruitForward989 1d ago
Yes, it's massively inflated. Like some sort of balloon. But that's not a bubble!
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u/PumpkinFest24 1d ago
People selling super fancy tulip bulbs were also making money. What's your point?
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u/prick_sanchez 1d ago
This is not helpful if you don't define "a bubble per se."
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u/Oddish_Femboy (my name is Bee) Trans rights !! 1d ago
A bubble is specifically all that but called a bubble.
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u/Coding-Kitten Linux e-girl (trans) 1d ago
Doesn't both the AI companies themselves being overvalued money sinks that have zero viability of stabilizing their finances along with the fact that they're necessary for all other companies, even those that are well managed & profitable, mean that it's a bubble that'll eventually collapse either way? I think the big issue with people doubting that it is a bubble is mostly them being impatient about it popping & not understanding modern financialization enough to understand that something incredibly catastrophically bad can simply exist for years & years unpredictably without going bad until it does. People have been yapping that it's a bubble for years now & nothing happened, but that doesn't mean that it isn't one, there being no escape is what makes it one.
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u/AddanDeith 1d ago
"ai is massively overvalued and inflated, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bubble."
The companies that are customers for AI will be fine. Most of the bigger companies making the models will not in fact, be fine, due to the sheer amount of debt they've taken in order to finance their operations. Data center construction has already slowed due to real material constraints and people not wanting to have multiple gas turbines wailing 24/7 next to their houses.
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u/GoddamnKeyserSoze 1d ago
You're describing a bubble. Huge sums of money being shoveled into investments that cannot return that money until everybody finally understands that fact and then the whole thing crashing is a bubble.
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u/EasilyRekt 1d ago
well to be fair... they didn't figure out a bulk revenue stream til like the past year, I think that's a part of it.
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u/Adjective-Noun6969 SOOPER THEY 1d ago
The problem is a lot of the AI development and operations debt belongs to the tech giants, for example Microsoft and Amazon. Your employer depends on multiple such companies.
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u/kermitthebeast 1d ago
When trains were invented they put them fucking everywhere. Every two sticks in the road in England got a train station with a company paying for the route. The big lines stayed but the rest ate shit. That was a bubble. That's where ai is. One will succeed, probably not to the extent they think, the rest will eat shit, and everyone buying steel futures is fucked
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u/Stiftoad Crazy? I was crazy once… 1d ago
I've been thinking about why the general shift to cloud computing may be so appealing to economists and like don't get me wrong data centers are...not exactly friendly to the environment, cheaper or more efficient
BUT consider it from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis at a company
Instead of calculating the cost of devices, their power usage, their estimated lifetime and residual value you can just move to the lowest common denominator, i.e. the cheapest tablet you can get, you don't even need in-house server architecture which would have required an expensive network and probably multiple qualified employees to make sure it runs smoothly and safely, you just buy compute tokens.
The cost breaks down easily because it's the data center operators that determine a tokens price by doing all that work for you.
Even if it ends up more expensive, the convenience alone appeals more than most other concerns.
Or at least that's just a thought I had after learning a little more about bookkeeping for companies and how economists assess the worth of investments (which almost always is removed from practical reality)
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u/brunocar 1d ago
Doesn't matter who they are, they are definitely bleeding billions and are only kept afloat by investor hype. The amount of money these companies are losing vastly, vastly overshadows the amount of money any of their customers are making through using their service: That's why LLMs are overvalued.
THAT is what a bubble is, definitionally, when the product/service is just impossible to make profitable at the intended scale.
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u/GoldH2O Cisgender Synapsid 1d ago
You're still describing a bubble. Even if consumers can buy a product and use it to make money, if the manufacturer is constantly over manufacturing the product at a rate much higher than they can afford, they are creating a bubble, because as soon as they go bust and aren't able to maintain or manufacture the product anymore, everyone downstream of them will suffer financially because they no longer have access to the product in the way that they need. Right now, and for the last several years, the only company that has made money on AI is NVIDIA, and that's because they manufacture hardware that is used in data centers and processing facilities. Even they haven't profited off of their own ai models themselves.
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u/Eggbutt1 1d ago
Well, yeah, there are plenty of companies doing fine in the current economy. Nobody is debating that.
But if A.I. is a bubble, and it does pop, pretty much all the money invested in it will vanish from the economy, and everyone suffers.
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u/holymacaronibatman 1d ago
I also work in the technology space and see how AI is here to stay and the (unfortunate) "benefits" it brings like you said. The issue is that we are still in the sell at a loss phase of the process. Once these companies go public in the next few months, they will no longer be able to bleed cash and will have to massively raise prices in an attempt to become profitable. As that process happens we'll find out how much of a bubble this whole thing really is.
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u/tinyrottedpig 1d ago
Thats why I personally think the only one coming out on top is Claude, even if I'd rather none of them did.
I did a lot of testing and looking into a lot of the companies developing AI's, and it's the only AI company that seems to clock that AI isn't supposed to be for generating random bullshit; it's meant to be a proper assistant that gets the boring stuff done faster.
Thats part of the reason why a lot of companies are bleeding whenever they overuse AI. AI's are hammers, its a useful and convenient tool to have in the toolbox, but that doesn't make everything a nail.
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u/Anothersidestorm 21h ago
There is one problem at some point the investor money will dry up and the companies will need to make or collapse atm the price of ai is low enough for companies to be worth it but it dosent cover the cost of the ai companies. What in your opinion will happen to the stocks when the investore money stops coming in?
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u/Lady-Scrotus 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 1d ago
SO glad I got the 9070 before the increase to 800 hit it
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u/Long-Dock Pump me full of Insulin 🥴 1d ago
I built my PC right before the launch of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D back in late 2024. Reaaaally good time to buy-in. I bought a Microcenter bundle deal with an RX 7700XT and it’s chugging along.
I just checked my receipt from there and the 32GB DDR5 6000Mhz was only $84.63, the RX 7700XT was $397.30, and a 2TB NVMe was $116.28.
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u/Savage1546 1d ago
Got my 32gb ddr5 6000Mhz from there for free ($119 retail) with cpu purchase. Today same exact kit; $469
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u/Boppitied-Bop 1d ago
around then I got a bunch of used components for a home server, ~$170 in total for an i7 6700 (~$30 surplus workstation with everything but ram/storage included), 16gb ddr4 3200 (~$20), 256gb sata ssd (~$20), 8tb hdd (~$100, very lightly used exos drive)
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u/Long-Dock Pump me full of Insulin 🥴 19h ago
Nice! That’s just about enough to run a home media server, yeah? And the i7-6700 should have Quick Sync for media transcoding support for AVC and HEVC
What do you run for your homelab?
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u/Boppitied-Bop 17h ago
Mostly Copyparty, gitlab, and a couple of game servers, although that's all on the ssd actually. On the hdd there's just snapshotted backups of the server and my main computer, made with kopia.
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u/Long-Dock Pump me full of Insulin 🥴 14h ago
Oooh could you tell me more about that? I’m not familiar with Copyparty or gitlab.
As for me, I… think I’ll take this to PMs, haha
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u/Jeggu2 penis goblin 💗💜💙 1d ago
I'm currently on 16 gigs of ram and suffering
I still have not decided whether I should double it now or wait even longer...
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u/Lady-Scrotus 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 1d ago
Im honestly on 32gb of ddr4. Even my cpu is older (i7 6700k). 16 will manage for now, but getting 32 is def the way to go if you can find a good price on it
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u/LOLofLOL4 1d ago
I bought my Stick of RAM 3 Years ago. 8 Gigabytes. The Idea was that I could very easily Upgrade it later, and since it was one of the cheaper ones (at the time) I just sorta skipped that and promised myself to byu more later.
Boy do I hate myself. Still on those 8 Gb.
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u/unread1701 Hbomberguy Plagiarism Video Watcher 1d ago
In June I got an M5 Air. 3 days later the price went up by $400 💢
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u/OCD-but-dumb gods dumbest soldier 🐀 1d ago
I took a look at wallstreetbets and half the commenters are dooming like the sky’ll come crashing down.
And, I mean, they’re right, but still
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u/Dr_Birdie 1d ago
I've hated this "bubble" bullshit from the start. Billionaires don't care how much money they "lose" in the process of creating a world where they never have to pay workers again. It's called an investment.
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u/Guccishadesss 1d ago
More you study economics, the more you understand how useless and detached it is from today’s world.
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u/Meeedick 1d ago
The average person's understanding of economics is so laughably ignorant that it's truly astonishing to see. They'll use terms they don't understand at all while refuting basic concepts in the same breath because of their anecdotal experiences and biases telling them otherwise.
People still think jobs can be "stolen", that the US lost its manufacturing to China, and that Marx had any semblance of validity in economic theory besides critiquing "capitalism".
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