I am split on this, this is definitely a bubble but I don’t know if it’s going to crash or wipe out countries. The problem here is the tech is real and has great promise. This is not AGI but llms can make the promise of robots real, by it may take a long time for it to materialize just like with self driving cars. So the hype can subside but it needs an impetus to slide. It may or may not happen and even if it does, not sure when

▲

pinkmuffinere 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> llms can make the promise of robots real

I think this is a very large overstatement. Many large problems still exist in robotics which can not be papered over with LLMs. I’m familiar with problems in manipulation and affordable sensing, which will not be solved via llms, and are fundamentally necessary for reliable and safe interaction with the real world. I’m confident there are many others. LLMs probably will help with high level planning. But that’s a subset of the many problems that keep robots from becoming mass market products.

I think people are excited about robotics because of the many demo videos that have been coming out of various companies. However, almost all of these videos are smoke and mirrors. If you ask somebody who works on those demos, they will unashamedly tell you all the ways they worked around their technical limitations to get just the right footage. The PR departments are less upfront with that info.

▲

diamond559 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The impetus is that 90% of our country is in recession and the rest are soon to follow. Delinquencies are rising fast and not just in subprime. Layoffs are at levels not seen since 2008. Crypto, tech stocks and many housing markets have already peaked or are already in bear markets. The crash is here and it's inevitably going to get worse.

▲

noahtf13 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m not seeing delinquency increases or values close to .com or ‘08 on this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRALACBN) or more specific series

▲

bdangubic 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

all true - but none of this is actually “ai bubble”

	▲	hnfong 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Betting on "growth powered by AI" is the only thing keeping valuations up at this point..

▲

ericb 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the tech is real and has great promise.

This was very true of the dotcom bubble. The entire "web" was new, and the promise was everything you use it for today.

Pets.com was a laughing stock for years as an example of dotcom excess, and now we have chewy.com, successfully running the same model.

Webvan.com, was a similar example of "excess" and now we have Instacart and others.

I looked up webvan just now--the postmortem seems relevant:

"Webvan failed due to a combination of overspending on infrastructure, rapid and unproven expansion, and an unsustainable business model that prioritized growth over profitability."

▲

spectralista 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This to me is the whole bubble.

The problem of dotcom is we needed a cultural shift. I had my first internet date during the dot com bubble and I remember we would lie to people about how we met because the idea sounded so insane at the time to basically everyone. In 1999 it seemed kind of crazy to even use your real name online let alone put your credit card into the web browser.

Put your credit card into the internet browser then a stranger brings you items in their van? Completely insane culturally in 1999. It would have sounded like the start of an Unsolved Mysteries episode to the average person in 1999. There was no market for that in 1999.

The lesson I take from dotcom is we had this massive bubble and burst over technology that already existed, worked flawlessly and largely just needed time for the culture to adapt to it.

The main difference this time is we are pricing in technology that doesn't actually exist.

I can't think of another bubble that was based on something that doesn't exist. The closest analogy I can think of is the railroad bubble but with the trains not actually existing outside of some vague theoretical idea that we don't actually know how to build. A bubble in laying down rail because of how big it will be when we figure out how to build the trains.

The only way you would get a bubble that stupid would be to have 50-100 years of art, stories and movies priming the entire population on the inevitability of the train.

▲

JauntTrooper 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Uber might be the wildest cultural shift of the last 25 years.

Nobody blinks twice nowadays at getting into a car with a total stranger.

	▲	perilunar 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't get it. Nobody blinked twice about getting into a car with a total stranger before Uber either — taxis have been around for well over a hundred years. It's not exactly a huge cultural change, just more efficient and convenient.

▲

saxenaabhi 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't openAI already profitable on inference?

I understand training is still costly, but it's not unimaginable for it to turn profitable as well if you think believe they'll generate trillions in value by eliminating millions of jobs.

	▲	hnfong 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you eliminate ONE job and let's say the job pays $100K, in theory at most $100K goes instead to AI revenue. In practice it's a lot less, nobody is going to move everything to AI if it's just a 10% saving. So, to get a trillion in value, you'd have to eliminate many tens or even hundreds of millions of jobs.
	▲	hattmall 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		>Isn't openAI already profitable on inference? I don't believe this has been the case or claim at all. At best they have recognized some limited use cases in certain models where API tokens have generated a gross profit.
	▲	zerosizedweasle 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, inference is actually pointing to them being economically unviable. https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...