Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits(cnbc.com)
69 points by belter 9 hours ago | 142 comments
- akagusu 2 hours agoThe big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?[-]
- javierluraschi 19 minutes agoIt will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people.
- brookst 54 minutes agoWhich of those did the Internet benefit?[-]
- Retric 17 minutes agoIs the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem.
The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc.
Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erode the net benefit.
[-]- amscanne 6 minutes agoAre you being objective or just romanticizing the past?
Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever.
I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume.
If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
[-]- glohbalrob 3 minutes agoMedia is rich but not in proportion of the thousands of new creators doing very well. An extreme example is playboy vs only fans creators
- monero-xmr 6 minutes agoUndeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see them nonstop is incredible.
- lomase 49 minutes agoIs AI at the same level of global instant comunication and gigabites of bandwidth?[-]
- strombofulous 31 minutes agoDoes it have to be for the analogy to work?[-]
- anthem2025 20 minutes ago[dead]
- bko 31 minutes agoChatGPT currently has
~ 120 to 190 million daily active users
~ 800 million weekly active users
~ 450 million to over 800 million depending on the data source and methodology.
Get a grip. Hundreds of millions of people are using it, most of them for free. I would say "society" has benefited.
This has to be peak HN.
Create the fastest growing consumer product in history.
HN anon: yes, but who will benefit?
[-]- ceejayoz 29 minutes agoFacebook has more. Was it a benefit? Does the benefit outweigh the harms?[-]
- bko 25 minutes agoYes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React which much of the modern web is built on, and React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few.
The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.
This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great product.
[-]- uncomputation 13 minutes ago> what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know.
This is extremely naive and akin to asking "why do people drink if it’s bad for you then??" Popular != healthy
- kovac 4 minutes ago> My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.
To consider the other side of this, read "The age of surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff (really read it though, not chatgpt the summary :).
All the benefits you mentioned are real. But, at what cost and could we have reaped the same benefits without surrendering all agency to those who can't be held accountable?
- danielheath 16 minutes ago> The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful?
Perhaps _you_ don’t know.
It’s quite notorious for being the place to organise the genocide over in Myanmar.
IMO, that should disqualify every executive or engineer who knew (and did nothing) from ever again being involved with widely-used infrastructure.
- taurath 18 minutes agoThis forum would be a lot more informative if we could read the average net worth of friendships that a poster has
For an out of touch forum, you certainly are a prime example
- blast 5 hours agoHe's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.[-]
- zerosizedweasle 5 hours agoThe biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has very short shelf life. I think AI will be huge, I don't doubt the endgame once it matures. But the bubble now, spending huge amounts on these data centers using debt without a path to profitability (and inordinate spending on these chips) is dangerous. You can think AI will be huge and see how dangerous the current manifestation of the bubble is. A lot of people will get hurt very very badly. This is going to maim the economy in a generational way.[-]
- donmcronald 1 hour agoAnd a lot of the gains from the Dotcom boom are being paid back in negative value for the average person at this point. We have automated systems that waste our time when we need support, product features that should have a one-time-cost being turned into subscriptions, a complete usurping of the ability to distribute software or build compatible replacements, etc..
The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some way, but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy people that have gained control of everything.
[-]- hattmall 22 minutes agoAI itself is a manifestation of that too, a huge time waster for a lot of people. Getting randomly generated wrong but sounding right information is very frustrating. Start asking AI questions you already know the answer too and the issues can become very obvious.
- actionfromafar 56 minutes agoDon’t say that, you’ll hasten the Antichrist![-]
- Terr_ 37 minutes ago(For those who missed it: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/785407/p... )
- simonw 3 hours agoThat's true for the GPUs themselves, but the data centers with their electricity infrastructure and cooling and suchlike won't become obsolete nearly as quickly.[-]
- davnicwil 3 hours agothis is a good point, and it would be interesting to see the relative value of this building and housing 'plumbing' overhead Vs the chips themselves.
I guess another example of the same thing is power generation capacity, although this comes online so much more slowly I'm not sure the dynamics would work in the same way.
- master_crab 2 hours agoThis is true. It’s probably 2-3 times as long as a GPU chip. But it’s still probably half or a quarter of the depreciation timeline of a carrier fiber line.
- ch4s3 2 hours agoThere are probably a lot of cool and useful things you could do with a bunch of data centers full of GPUs.
- better weather forecasts
- modeling intermittent generation on the grid to get more solar online
- drug discovery
- economic modeling
- low cost streaming games
- simulation of all types
- hibikir 5 hours agoIf you look at year over year chip improvements in 2025 vs 1998, it's clear that modern hardware just has a longer shelf life than it used to. The difficulties in getting more performance for the same power expenditure are just very different than back in the day.
There's still depreciation, but it's not the same. Also look at other forms of hardware, like RAM, and the bonus electrical capacity being built.
[-]- lomase 45 minutes agoIn 1998 to transfer a megabyte over telephone lines was expensive and 5 years later is was almost free.
I have not seen the prices of GPUs, CPU or RAM going down, on the contrary, each day it gets more expensive.
- rootusrootus 2 hours ago> This is going to maim the economy in a generational way.
Just as I'm getting to the point where I can see retirement coming from off in the distance. Ugh.
- bilsbie 3 hours agoWe don’t have moores law anymore. Why are the chips obseleting so quickly?[-]
- myhf 2 hours agoFLOP/s/$ is still increasing exponentially, even if the specific components don't match Moore's original phrasing.
Markets for electronics have momentum, and estimating that momentum is how chip producers plan for investment in manufacturing capacity, and how chip consumers plan for deprecation.
- o11c 2 hours agoThey kind of aren't. If you actually look at "how many dollars am I spending per month on electricity", there's a good chance it's not worth upgrading even if your computer is 10 years old.
Of course this does make some moderate assumptions that it was a solid build in the first place, not a flimsy laptop, not artificially made obsolete/slow, etc. Even then, "install an SSD" and "install more RAM" is most of everything.
Of course, if you are a developer you should avoid doing these things so you won't get encouraged to write crappy programs.
- wmf 3 hours agoThey're only replacing GPUs because investors will give "free" money to do so. Once the bubble pops people will realize that GPUs actually last a while.
- downrightmike 2 hours agoIntel chips from 2008, as there is no real improvements.
- hx8 5 hours agoA lot of the infrastructure made during the Dotcom boom was shortly discarded. How many dial-up modems were sold in the 90s?
The current AI bubble is leading to trained models that won't be feasible to retrain for a decade or longer after the bubble bursts.
[-]- zerosizedweasle 5 hours agoThe wealth the Dotcom boom left behind wasn't in dial up modems or internet over the telephone, it was in the huge amounts of high speed fiber optic networks that were laid down. I think a lot of that infrastructure is still in use today, fiber optic cables can last 30 years or more.[-]
- triceratops 2 hours ago> fiber optic cables can last 30 years or more
The trenches for the cables even longer than that.
- ecommerceguy 1 hour agoHow much of it is still dark?
- yeasku 3 hours agoHonestly, not that many people had modems.[-]
- jorts 2 hours agoIn the late 90s to 2001? Many people were still using modems at that time. Cable or DSL wasn't even an option for a considerable percentage of the population.[-]
- yeasku 2 hours agoIn 2000 6% of the population had access to internet.
In 2002 I was woking making webs and setting up linux servers and I did not have internet at home.
[-]- macNchz 2 hours agoThis is pretty location specific—in the US 42% of households had home internet in 2000.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/189349/us-households-hom...
[-]- yeasku 2 hours agoThat web is not a good source.[-]
- NicoJuicy 1 hour agoYes it is.
Low Global Penetration: Only 361 million people had internet access worldwide in 2000, a small fraction of the global population. Specific Country Examples United States: The US had a significant portion of the world's internet users, making up 31.1% of all global users in 2000. Its penetration rate was 43.1%.
- rhetocj23 5 hours agoPersonally I think people should stop trying to reason from the past.
As tempting as it is, it leads to false outcomes because you are not thinking about how this particular situation is going to impact society and the economy.
Its much harder to reason this way, but isnt that the point? personally I dont want to hear or read analogies based on the past - I want to see and read stuff that comes from original thinking.
[-]- munk-a 3 hours agoDoesn't that line of reasoning leave you in danger of being largely ignorant? There's a wonderful quote from Twain "History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes" there are two critical things I'd highlight in that quote - first off the contrast between repetition and rhyming is drawing attention to the fact that things are never exactly the same - there's just a gist of similarities - the second is that it often but doesn't always rhyme - this sure looks like a bubble but it might not be and it might be something entirely new. _That all said_ it's important to learn from history because there are clear echoes of history in events because we, people in general, don't change that fundamentally.
- rootusrootus 2 hours agoIME the number of times where people have said "this time it's different" and been wrong is a lot higher than the number of times they've said "this time is the same as the last" and been wrong. In fact, it is the increasing prevalence of the idea that "this time it's different" that makes me batten down the hatches and invest somewhere with more stability.
- rhetocj23 1 hour agoWith all due respect, Im not here to teach people how to think.
This guy gets it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxLCTA5wQow
Instead of plainly jumping on the bubble bandwagon he actually goes through a thorough analysis.
- Waterluvian 2 hours agoVideo game crash followed by video games taking off and eclipsing most other forms of digital entertainment.
Dot com crash followed by the web getting pretty popular and a bit central to business.
To all those betting big on AI before the crash:
Careful, Icarus.
[-]- NedF 2 hours ago> Careful, Icarus.
What does that even mean?
pets.com was a fat loser only telling telling people that were going to fly.
Amazon was Icarus, they did something.
Vs weak commentators going on about the wax melting from their parents root cellar while Icarus was soaring.
Most of Y Combinator are not using AI they just say that and you're worried about the people who do things?
- rchaud 5 hours agoDotcom mania companies were not Internet providers. They tried making money on the internet, something people already saw as worth paying for.[-]
- munk-a 3 hours agoCisco, Level3 and WorldCom all saw astronomical valuation spikes during the dotcom bubble and all three saw their stock prices and actual business prospects collapse in the aftermath of it.
Perhaps the most famous implosion of all was AOL who merged (sort of) with TimeWarner gaining the lion's share of control through market cap balancing. AOL fell so destructively that it nearly wiped out all the value of the actual hard assets that TW controlled pre-merger.
- formerly_proven 5 hours agoThis is not really true, e.g. Cogent was basically created by buying bankrupt dotcum-bubble network providers for cents on the dollar.[-]
- hx8 5 hours agoAlso AOL was a mix of dialup provider and Dotcom service. There were many other popular examples of such.[-]
- 1234letshaveatw 3 hours agoI don't think it is fair to characterize AOL as a bubble baby- they were a thing before that[-]
- yeasku 2 hours agoNor I dont think Coget, GX or Level-3 were dotcom companies.
- wslh 1 hour agoI would add more metrics to think about. For example, very few people used Internet in the dotcom era while now the AI use is distributed into all the population using the Internet that will probably not growth too much. In this case, if Internet population is the driver, and it will not growth significantly we are redistributing the attention. Assuming "all" society will be more productive we will all be in the same train at the relatively same speed.
- harmmonica 2 hours agoDo I have this right that there have been no or at least very few pure AI IPO's during this cycle (I can't actually think of a single one)? So it's dissimilar to dotcom in that regard because during that time countless dotcoms went public with sky-high valuations and then failed. A bunch of reputable companies also went or were already public during that time and those saw huge valuation drops so that's more analogous to what could happen in the public market (NVDA, for instance, could pull a Cisco and drop "catastrophically," but survive just fine).
That would cause a lot of pain for those shareholders, but would that be somewhat contained given the public "AI" companies for the most part have strong businesses outside of AI? Or are these market caps at this point so large for some of these AI public companies that anything that happens to them will cause some kind of contagion? And then the follow up is if the private AI companies collapse en masse is that market now also so big that it would cause contagion beyond venture capital and their investors (fully aware that pensions and the such are material investors in VC funds, but they're diversified so even though they'd see those losses maybe the broader market would keep them from taking major hits).
Not giving an opinion here, though my knee jerk is to think we're due for a massive drop, but I've literally been saying that for so long that I'm starting to (stupidly) think this time is different (which typically is when all hell breaks loose of course).
[-]- missedthecue 2 hours agoThere aren't very many IPOs in general. There were about 8000 publicly traded companies in the US in Jan 2000. Today there are about 3950. A lot of the AI related IPOs have been the infra like CoreWeave and Nebius.
- pedalpete 2 hours agoThis time is always different, until it isn't.
However, it is different from the internet bubble partially for the reason you describe.
There have been a few IPOs, but they perhaps happened earlier in the cycle, or companies are pivoting into AI. I'm thinking companies like Palantir, which was always AI, or Salesforce which is making a big AI pivot.
Most of the funding is not coming from public sectors. There is so much private capital available that it isn't necessary. I believe the bubble is in VC, which some would think is find because it protects public markets from the crash, but I'm not sure that is correct.
When the VC money stops flowing into AI, I think it will send a shockwave through the public markets. The huge valuations of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc will be repriced, which will probably force a re-pricing of public darlings like Palantir, Microsoft, NVIDIA.
If VC funds aren't buying NVIDIA chips and building data centers, everyone will feel the need to re-price.
It's emotional, not logical.
- mrosett 2 hours agoIPOs aren't what they once were. The burden of being a public company has increased (SOX and related public company costs are $5-10M/year), so companies are far more likely to stay private. That has created a positive feedback cycle as the private funding ecosystem has become increasingly robust, which is why you see so many $100B+ private companies.
Also keep in mind that the biggest companies during that bubble had peak market caps of ~500B and then lost ~90%, so 400-500B in losses each and total internet related losses of a couple trillion. If NVDA lost 90%, it would be down 4 trillion dollars, or twice that total just by itself.
AI company valuations collapsing would have meaningful impacts on the broader market. Big pension/mutual funds are important sources of capital across every sector, and if they're taking big losses on NVDA, GOOG, and a portfolio of privates, it will have a chilling effect on their other activity.
- dmix 3 hours agoI'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.[-]
- RoyTyrell 2 hours agoThose companies are also likely still in the red. They're banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm sure one of them will be.
- themafia 2 hours ago> 3 different AI services
Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you?
> and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff.
And what are they using it for?
> Sounds like a real industry to me.
Sounds like early adopter syndrome to me. We'd have to know more about your business to take this out of the realm of hazy anecdotes.
- mxschumacher 2 hours agoare you paying them enough to have profitable unit economics? How hard would it be for you to switch from one provider to another?
- Ericson2314 2 hours agohttps://www.billjaneway.com/productive-bubbles this is a good essay on this topic
- mattnewton 8 hours agoSeems like a measured approach- my read is him saying it’s probably a bubble in that bad ideas are being funded too, but there are a lot of really good ideas doing well.
Also nit: Typo right in the digest I assume, assuming “suring” is “during”, does cnbc proofread their content?
[-]- hiccuphippo 8 hours agoTypos are proof something wasn't Ai written. Everyone should make at least one tyop in their writing.[-]
- saalweachter 5 hours agoOnly worms until the typos get into the training data. You need to say at least one thing no one has ever said before in every post.[-]
- square_usual 2 hours agoR9k wins again
- threecheese 3 hours agoI see what ya did tbere :)
- danielbln 5 hours ago"Claude, make sure to sprinkle at least one typo in here. And no em dashes you hear?"[-]
- Loughla 3 hours agoFaculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from using them.
One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing."
I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?"
Blank stares.
I hate it.
[-]- baobun 2 hours agoThe writing is a mandatory part of the learning process. Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or upwork before LLMs.
Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.
[-]- robotresearcher 2 hours agoThe sad difference that makes a difference is that banning graphing calculators from proctored exams is enforceable in practice.
Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best. Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat on exams simply does not generalize.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/18/51-west-...
edit: good on West Point for actually following up on the cheating. I've witnessed another institution sweeping it under the rug even when properly documented and passed up two or three levels of reporting. As an academic director and thus manager of professors this was infuriating and demoralizing for all concerned.
- SrslyJosh 32 minutes agoIf you didn't write it, you don't deserve credit for it. You don't learn by outsourcing your work to a piece of software.
- thewebguyd 56 minutes agoIt's sad. I use dashes in my writing all the time. I've had to consciously pause and make an effort not to use them in my emails now.
- janalsncm 6 hours agoThen it’s a market for lemons. Buyers can’t (or choose not to) tell a good AI idea from a bad one.[-]
- hyghjiyhu 5 hours agoA market for lemons means there is an information asymmetry. Sellers know what they have and try to offload their lemons on clueless buyers. I don't think that's the case here.[-]
- SrslyJosh 30 minutes agoIt is indeed hard to tell how many of the people selling this stuff are True Believers. It's also a bit scary, given how incredibly implausible some of these stuff they're saying is.
- mistrial9 8 hours agoirony level IV
- DonsDiscountGas 8 hours agoApparently not. An LLM proofread would've definitely caught that
- EcommerceFlow 5 hours agoHere's a link to the full interview Bezos had yesterday
- DrNosferatu 1 hour agoSociety as a whole, or one percenters like him?[-]
- MountDoom 1 hour agoBezos is a 0.0001-percenter. Most of people on HN are probably in the top 1% to 5%.
You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.
- ripvanwinkle 50 minutes agoThis shouldn't be a surprise - capitalism always overshoots. Anything worth investing in will generally receive too much investment in because very few people can tell where the line is.
And that's what causes bubbles but at this point it should be clear that AI will make a substantial impact - at least as great as the internet, likely larger
[-]- ivape 22 minutes agoAs FB IPO’d at 100bn, and marched to over 1T, when would you have considered it a bubble? You can ask the LLM if you need to … catch my drift?
- chris_wot 1 hour agoJust like how sending Katy Perry to space hugely benefitted society.
Could some let Bezos know that he doesn’t truly represent society in any way?
- more_corn 21 minutes agoThere’s a typo. “Society” should be written as “five billionaires”
- pseudosavant 8 hours agoWhat is going on with AI right now could be a bubble just like there was the dotcom bubble. But it isn't like the internet went away after the dotcom burst. The largest companies in existence today are internet companies or have products that wouldn't make sense without the internet.
Sure, many of these "thin prompt wrapper around the OpenAI API" product "businesses" will all be gone within a few years. But AI? That is going to be here indefinitely.
[-]- gizajob 5 hours agoThe bubble is in the valuations on the stock market, not in the technology.[-]
- hvb2 5 hours agoAnd their promises.
The "it'll make all your devs 6x as productive by the end of the year" types of promises. But those probably explain the valuations
[-]- gizajob 5 hours agoYeah, Sam Altman’s recent one saying that his LLMs would “cure cancer” if they built enough data centres was also a winner.[-]
- yeasku 2 hours agoAnd create a theory of quantum gravity.
- mxschumacher 2 hours agoi have to say I'm a little disgusted by these statements. LLMs are useful for many problems, but is there really a conceivable path of them making progress into fighting the countless cancers tormenting humanity?
- rhetocj23 5 hours agoThats not true actually.
The technology - for what it is being used vs what is invested - does not match up at all. This is what happened to the dot-com bubble. Theres was a whole bunch of innovation that was needed to come to bring a delightful UX to bring swathes of people onto the internet.
So far this is true about LLMs. Could this change? Sure. Will it change meaningful? Personally I dont believe so.
The internet at its core was all about hooking up computers so they they could transform from just computational beasts to communication. There was a tremendous amount of potentitial that was very very real. It just so happens if computers can communicate we can do a whole bunch of stuff - as is going on today.
What are LLMS? Can someone please explain in a succint way...? Im yet to see something super crystal clear.
- janalsncm 6 hours agoThings like recommendations, ads, and search will always be around because they were money printers before VCs found out about AI and they will continue to be long after.
- bossyTeacher 5 hours agoAI has been here well before transformers. Please, let's not pretend that AI started with LLM chatbots.
- surgical_fire 5 hours agoThis is always a bad take.
The dotcom bubble was not about "the internet" itself. The Internet was fine and pretty much already proven as a very useful communication tool. It was about business that made absolutely no sense getting extremely high valuations just because they operated - however vaguely - over the internet.
Generative AI have never reached the level of usability of the Internet itself, and likely never will.
- somewhereoutth 5 hours agoMy understanding is that the cost of training each next model is very very large, and a half trained model is worthless.
Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People will continue using the old models, but they will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not much more than historical artifacts.
My point is that the threshold for continuing this process (new models) is very big (getting bigger each time?), so the 'pop' will be a step function to zero.
[-]- Workaccount2 2 hours agoIf they stop getting returns in intelligence, they will switch to returns in efficiency and focus on integration, with new models being trained for new data cutoffs if nothing else. Even today there is at least a 5-10 year integration/adoption period if everything halts tomorrow.
There is no reality in which LLMs go away (shy of being replaced).
[-]- SrslyJosh 25 minutes ago> If they stop getting returns in intelligence, they will switch to returns in efficiency
I don't think we can assume that people producing what appear to be addictive services are going to do that, especially when they seem to be addicted themselves.
- ares623 28 minutes agoIs adding new data to a model a full retraining from scratch? Or can it be added on top of an existing model?
If it costs $10B to add 1 year of data to an existing model, every year, that doesn’t sound too good.
- renjimen 2 hours agoMany argument the current batch of models provide a large capability overhang. That is, we are still learning how to get the most out of these models in various applications
- wmf 3 hours agoModels don't become out of date now that deep research exists.[-]
- Duralias 2 hours agoSo with every prompt you are expected to wait that long? I highly doubt general people will be willing to wait, it also doesn't seem entirely viable if you want to do it locally, less bandwidth and no caching akin to what a literal search engine of data can do.
- coffeecoders 8 hours agoEvery bubble looks obvious in hindsight. The dot-com crash left behind Amazon and Google. The crypto crash left behind Coinbase and a few real revenue generating companies. If this is the AI bubble, then the survivors are going to look very obvious in a decade, we just don’t know which ones yet.[-]
- SrslyJosh 24 minutes ago> The crypto crash left behind Coinbase and a few real revenue generating companies.
A lot of us clocked the crypto bullshit waaaay before the crash.
- rhetocj23 5 hours agoBut google and amazon were obvious to those in the know, in terms of what they delivered.
S Jobs called it back in 1995-97 - he referred to it as shopping for information and shopping for good and services.
Nobody has this crystal clear, tangible vision re. LLMs. Nobody at all. That is a big problem.
I found the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSfFcaluHc&t=1700s
[-]- yeasku 2 hours agoPersonally I never tougth of Google as a dotcom era company. Most of those were landing pages with news and chat rooms.
It was more of web 2.0 company.
[-]
- sudohalt 2 hours agoIf you're asking yourself why hasn't the bubble burst when everyone is calling it a bubble it's because no one wants to stop dancing until the music stops. If you told an investor the market will collapse tomorrow with 100% certainty they will invest today like there is 0% certainty of it happening tomorrow.
- righthand 8 hours ago> “That is what is going to happen here too. This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.”
As an owner of a web host that probably sees advantage to increased bot traffic, this statement is just more “just wait AI will be gigantic any minute now, keep investing in it for me so my investments stay valuable”.
- Insanity 8 hours agoI think most level-headed people can see this is a giant bubble which will eventually burst like the dot-com crash. And AI is technology that's hard to understand to non-technical (and even some technical) investors.
But of course, every company needs to slap AI on their product now just to be seen as a viable product.
Personally, I look forward to seeing the bubble burst and being left with a more rational view of AI and what it can (and can not) do.
[-]- lumost 8 hours agoOpenAI has a reasonable path to reduce their costs by 10-100x over the next 5 years if they stop improving the models. That would make them an extremely profitable company with their only real risk being “local ai”. However customers have wanted their data in the cloud for years, local inference would likely just mean 0 cost tokens for OpenAI.
The challenge is the rest of the industry funding dead companies with billions of dollars on the off chance they replicate OpenAI’s success.
[-]- ten_hands 6 hours agoI don't see how this works though. OpenAI doesn't exist in a vacuum, it has competitors, and the first company to stop improving their model will get obliterated by the others. It seems like they are doomed to keep retraining right up until the VC funding runs out, at which point they go bankrupt.
Some other company, that doesn't have a giant pile of debt will then pick up the pieces and make some money though. Once we dig out of the resulting market crash.
[-]- lumost 5 hours agoThe winner takes all thesis would be that like TSMC, the capex of competing in this field keeps growing until only one vendor can both raise sufficient capital to compete and effectively execute with that capital. OpenAI doesn't need to be the first to stop raising money and go profitable, they need to be the last vendor to go profits first.
- wmf 3 hours agoIt's not impossible that the crash will hit all companies at the same time and they might all stop training.
- outside1234 1 hour agoThe problem is that their competitor is Google and they are much better at most of the things that OpenAI needs to be good at.
- rchaud 5 hours agoOpenAI is trying to launch a hardware product with Jony Ive, an ads company, a AI slop-native version of TikTok and several other "businesses". They look well on their way to turning into a Yahoo! than a Cisco or VMWare.[-]
- rhetocj23 4 hours agoYeah they are all over the place and this should be a huge red flag.
Some marginal investors know this but they are okay because the music is still playing - but when they think its time to leave the bubble will pop.
People seem to forget that its not about whether or not its actually a bubble, its really about when will certain people who set these stock prices for valuations, decide its time to exit and take their profit.
- rhetocj23 4 hours agoThe problem is OAI has very firece competition - folks who are willing to absorb losses to put them out of business.
Uber and Amazon are really bad examples. Who was Amazons competition? Nobody. By the time anyone woke up and took them seriously it was too late.
Uber only had to contend with Lyft and a few other less funded firms. Less funded being a really important thing to consider. Not to mention the easy access to immense amounts of funding Uber had.
- gtowey 8 hours agoI too am waiting for the bubble to burst. Particularly because I think it's doing real harm to the industry.
Every company seems to be putting all their eggs in the AI basket. And that is causing basic usability and feature work to be neglected. Nobody cares because they are betting that AI agents will replace all that. But it won't and meanwhile everything else about these products will stagnate.
It's a disasterous strategy and when it comes crashing down and the layoffs start, every CEO will get a pass on leading this failure because they were just doing what everyone else is doing.
- arisAlexis 8 hours agoHow is AI hard to understand when you enter a cafe and everyone is chatting with their LLM?[-]
- bombcar 8 hours agodotcom bubble had tons of activity, too.
it was making money off those idea at the valuations expected that was problem.
the Internet really did revolutionize things, in substantial ways, but not to the tune of millions of dollars for pets.com
[-]- ramesh31 8 hours ago>dotcom bubble had tons of activity, too.
The difference now is that this is all (or mostly) idle cash being invested. The massive warchests built up by FAANG over the last decade are finally being deployed meaningfully rather than sitting in bonds or buying back stock. Much different scenario than companies with non-viable business models going IPO on a wish and a dream.
[-]- bombcar 8 hours agoIt's a question of how far the contagion goes - the Dotcom bubble trashed the NASDAQ and rumbled the world a bit, but the "big stocks" weren't directly involved or affected much; the subprime mortgage bubble shook the very foundations of the banking world.
Will the contagion be limited to a few companies, or will the S&P crumble under the bubble's collapse?
- gizajob 5 hours agoThe part that’s hard to understand is how the sunk costs of hundreds of billions in capex gets repaid by all those people in cafes paying hundreds of dollars per month to use those LLMs.
- redwood 8 hours agoWhere do you see that?
- yeasku 2 hours agoChat rooms webs were sold by millions in the dotcom era.
And everybody used them.
Nowdays everybody see them as useless.
- ivape 31 minutes agoPeople have no idea how much concern there was around whether FB would ever be able to monetize social media. That company went public at $15, and nearly closed below that on IPO day.
AI is more useful than social media. This is not financial advice, but I lean more toward not a bubble.
- Insanity 8 hours agoNot hard to use. I meant hard to understand what the limitations are for non tech users. E.g people who think AGI is just around the corner because we now have stochastic parrots.
- csours 8 hours ago"Commodity Tokens"
- throwaway314155 2 hours agoHe may be right, everything points to that conclusion. My main issue is - why the fuck do we care what Bezos thinks on this matter? His ML efforts all lag behind the competition and he’s certainly not an expert in the field of deep learning. Why?
- jmclnx 5 hours agoMy translation of what Jeff says:
"AI is in a bubble but billionaires will get 'gigantic' benefits"
I see no benefit to anyone unless you can live off your stock portfolio and can easily ride through periods where your portfolio can suffer a 50% loss.
[-]- ozmodiar 2 hours agoHonestly, during the dotcom bubble at least workers were getting paid and jobs were abundant. Things didn't start getting bad for workers until it popped. We're supposed to be in the 'positive' part of the AI bubble and people already seem desperate and out of hope.
Everyone not directly involved seems to want AI to pop. I'm not sure if that says anything about its longevity. Not very fun to have a bubble that feels bad on both sides.
- anthem2025 21 minutes ago[dead]
- dang 5 hours ago[stub for offtopicness]
(title fixed now)
[-]- arisAlexis 8 hours agoTotally wrong title
- coffeecoders 8 hours ago@dang
Title needs to be changed to something like
"Bezos says AI is in industrial bubble yet promises huge benefits"
[-]- Sohcahtoa82 5 hours agoTagging doesn't work on HN.
- artninja1988 8 hours agoVery misleading clipping of the headline imo