More Futurism slop, it just don’t stop.
Tech Lemmy loves its Futurism
A lot of people in the comments conflating “AI bubble burst” with “AI has disappeared completely”, and saying it’s not happening because AI still exists there.
When the dot com bust happened, the internet didn’t just disappear overnight, it just shrunk into something more reasonable. I feel like this is the same.
Same vibe as “if global warming is real how come it was cold at my house this morning?”
AI/LLMs will still be around, they just wont be the end all be all some people have been hyping it as
Yeah, to me it kinda seems inevitable that the AI bubble will pop. Because AI companies are having such a hard time making a profit selling their AI. The tech that they developed will still exist, and self-hosted models will definitely still exist. But the glut of AI datacentres and the price gouging on RAM and GPUs that they cause, cannot possibly last indefinitely.
Oh please let me be able to afford to upgrade my PC in the next 2 years
Could be worse, here’s the memtest I just ran after things have been glitching out lately. Be glad you’ve got a couple years.
We have the same CPU 🫠
Why did it fail?? What were you testing?
The internet now is bigger than the internet pre dot com burst, though, right?
Sure, but there was still a bubble and it burst.
Sure, but it has grown more slowly and organically than that bubble expected.
Same thing will happen with the AI bust.
Oh god.
But, in the same vein, things will grow that are actually useful. Nobody needs AI injected into every aspect of daily life like it is now, but there will be things we look bark on in 20 years wondering how we lived without it, I’m sure.
And they’re still be people, just like now, who long for those days when life was simpler and less stressful and we were living closer with nature and ourselves rather than through a machine entity.
China has been taking steps to keep it’s AI industry in check. They’ll be fine. Their bubble pop is essentially a market adjustment. We all just get bent out of shape because of how big these numbers have gotten over the last few decades. The important thing is that the Chinese government took steps to protect it’s other sectors which is why we likely saw their bubble pop before ours.
It’s less that they protect companies, and more that they don’t care when they end.
That protects the industry.
Compared to America where specific companies lobby to limit competition, and end up just charging more for shitty products.
It’s pretty much why we keep losing.
Because if the big companies never end, they buy up everyone else. Too big to fail means it’s too big to even exist.
What? Their real estate is popping too. Could you be more specific as to what “steps to protect its other sectors” means?
I can’t.
I believe what I said, but I’m not following the Chinese market in any serious way. One of my comment edits was to disclose that but I choose the more basic statement. I’m fully willing to be wrong when presented with data. I felt that removing my own hedge allowed comments like yours to more directly challenge the statement.
I’m in the middle of studying for a mid term. I don’t want to use the energy to dig into it. I got my stance mostly from articles I’ve read in passing on how they have regulated their AI market to protect workers and manage circular investing. It could easily have been propaganda.
Refreshingly honest social media comment!
They don’t have a handful of companies financing each other in a giant game of venture-capital-human centipede that will topple the entire market when it goes belly up.
their real estates have been “popping” for several years now. i still remember finance bros making videos titled “is china going to collapse in 30 days??!?!!?” a couple of years ago.
in reality it’s just the government managing risk and taper speculation in the real estate market.
It looks like every news article about China’s real estate says their prices are lowering continuously. That means in America that their loans would be under water. Honest question, isn’t that the case for China too?
And the honest answer is: it’s complicated.
First thing, property prices going down is not necessarily a bad thing, but people don’t usually see it that way.
Simple truth: if you own a house, you would want house prices to go up, forever. This is true anywhere on Earth, and it’s true in China too. But as a society, you can’t allow house prices to go up forever. Because that means getting onto the housing ladder becomes harder and harder, young people would have to rent forever. Their income thus funneled into the property owning class, inequality goes up, stability goes down, and so on. Everyone can see the problem, but not all governments can do something about it. This is where China, an oppressive authoritarian government, has its advantage. They doesn’t have to worry about if the voters are going to elect them again. So they are afford to make some people unhappy.
But it’s not that simple actually, lowering property prices is almost uniquely bad for China. Because property is universally seen as the vehicle to preserve wealth in China. In fact a majority of China’s household wealth is stored in the property market [1]. Another compounding factor: China has a large pre-sale housing system. In other words, people are borrowing money to buy houses that aren’t even built yet, and that accounts for 90% (!!) of house sales [2]. I’m sure you can imagine, when property prices go down in this kind of system, people are gonna get really really mad. In fact people got so mad they got onto the street! If you know anything about China, you know how big of a deal this is. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in China. Last time this happened, people died and that particular event even became a freaking internet meme.
And all that plus the fact property developers in China are often choose to take a lot of risk and are highly leveraged 3. This is almost reminiscent of the subprime mortgage crisis, yet a catastrophe similar to the 2008 crash hasn’t hit. Why? Because China’s government has a much stronger hold of the economy, and they are much more willing to intervene than any western capitalist country. Being authoritarian also helps. They have a lot more policy lever they can pull, so they can allow the property prices to gradually fall, without taking the entire economy with it. Which is kind of unimaginable in the US.
This is not to say their system is perfect - and that’s without talking about their horrible human rights records. Their policy makers are human too, and make mistake. Their stock market will rise and fall, the point is you shouldn’t try to fit what happens in China into the typical western economy boom-and-bust narrative. That’s not how it works in China.
[1]: The portfolio of the average household in China is more highly concentrated in real estate than elsewhere. For instance, 62 percent of its assets are in real estate, compared with 38 percent in Japan and 28 percent in the United States. (2020) Source
[2]: Developers have responded to restrictions on accessing other sources of funds by increasing their use of presale funding (Graph 5). While presales have long accounted for the bulk of new residential property sales in China, their share has increased from around 80 per cent to almost 90 per cent since 2016. (2020) Source
Simple truth: if you own a house, you would want house prices to go up, forever.
Hardly. I need a house. If my house price crashes to $5, I’ll be able to get a much nicer one for $10. Just $5 extra investment.
The problem comes when you’ve borrowed against the house at the higher price. Negative equity is no joke, but I don’t care what my house is worth otherwise. It’s value is completely unavailable to me.
Boy, it seem’s China’s beating the USA at all aspects of AI.
/rimshot
This is how they win: everyone’s gonna pop, but their iron fist over the banks will prevent an absolute bust.
We haven’t learned from fanny-mae and we’re gonna get soundly fucked.
AI isn’t a bubble. It’s here to stay. Get used to it.
The dot com bubble didn’t mean the world wide web wasn’t here to stay. There is an AI bubble.
My message is aimed at the anti AI crowd. Yes, there is a bit of a bubble right now, but AI progress will continue and it will become part of our daily lives just like the internet transformed how we live.
“Bubble” refers specifically to overvalued assets.
Cisco, telcos, etc were over valued once too.
I’m not quite sure what your point is there.
For every pre-dotcom tech company you can name that was “over valued once” there are dozens you can’t name because they collapsed.
To your broader point, I agree that AI is here to stay, but the current hype is BS.
Regardless, your use of the term bubble is incorrect.
People talk about the AI bubble like it’s going to burst and everything will just go back to normal and we’ll all frolick in the fields holding hands. That’s really stupid.
Some people do, and certainly those people are poorly informed.
Most people talking about the AI bubble are focussed on the gargantuan amounts of money being invested to build out datacentres, relying on the future value of inference.
As in, right now n inference tokens is worth $y.
Investment is occurring on the basis that in the future everyone will need nx tokens.
The actual amount of x is the problem. If it’s less than investors are hoping, and it almost certainly is, then the bubble will pop and suddenly all that investment money is lost.
A catastrophic economic outcome.
However, you’re correct that the chatbots of today will survive the coming economic storm.
