The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst | Shock sell-off after study warns most investments in AI get zero returns

•

u/FuturologyBot 4d ago

The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79:

From the article: “When will the internet bubble burst?” the cover story of Barron’s asked on March 20 2000. “That unpleasant popping sound is likely to be heard before the end of this year.”

In fact, that same day, one of the most high-profile tech businesses of the moment suffered a share price plunge of 60pc. A flood of other collapses followed, evaporating trillions of dollars.

Now, some on Wall Street fear that “unpleasant popping sound” may be imminent for the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

On Tuesday, tech stocks suffered a shock sell-off after a report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers warned that the vast majority of AI investments were yielding “zero return” for businesses.

“Despite $30-40bn (£22-30bn) in enterprise investment into Gen[erative]AI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95pc of organisations are getting zero return,” MIT academics wrote.

Shares in Nvidia – the $4tn company that has powered the AI boom – dropped by 3.5pc, while data giant Palantir fell by 9pc.

MIT’s findings threaten to be the pin that pops the tech stock market bubble, which has added trillions of dollars to the value of US stocks.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Silicon Valley has been evangelical that AI chatbots will transform the economy. Executives have spent billions on tools for their staff as a result and predicted massive cost-savings.

But the promised AI revolution has stalled, MIT’s report suggested.

After surveying 150 business leaders and 350 employees, MIT found that “just 5pc of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value, while the vast majority remain stuck with no measurable P&L [profit and loss] impact”.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1mxx7z4/the_warning_signs_the_ai_bubble_is_about_to_burst/na80c4g/

2.5k

u/MarketCrache 4d ago

Most of the rise in the stock market seems to be coming from news of a dozen companies all selling tech to each other. If you point out that very few people are going to pay anything for AI, the retort is that corporations will. Well, I hope the $Trillions in outlays is going to be available and worth it coz that's the bare minimum needed to make it a payer. Meanwhile, retailers and fast food companies are struggling to get customers to part with $20.

And this fker has the most punchable face of 2025 so far...

1.1k

u/DreadPiratePete 4d ago

People keep confusing the tech for the tech companies. The tech might have a big future, that does not mean the tech companies valuations are realistic. Its the dot com bubble all over again.

The only way these companies valuations survive is if they manage to replace most workers with robots and AI in the next few years. At which point no one has a wage, so there are no consumers, and the entire capitalist economic system goes tits up. At which point I dont know why they'd think there will even be a stock market any more.

447

u/Throwaway-tan 4d ago

This. "AI" or at least, ML and LLMs are going to stick around. There's little doubt about that.

Basically all the models run on the same underlying algorithms, training data, etc. There is little practical difference between Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude and the half dozen others. That means anyone can come to market with an effective competitor if they're willing to spend.

Enthusiasm over new tech, speculative investment in start-ups, dubious and unproven business models.

Precisely like the dot com bubble.

150

u/JacobK101 4d ago

I think these large data training models will stick around in more specialized roles for "solving" technology, where's it's already been proven to be effective

"solve" for possible medicines in a massive database of chemicals. "solve" for possible patterns in a huge set of astronomical data. "Solve" for the second-by-second power and field adjustments needed to maintain fusion in a tokamak reactor

But in the majority of practical applications, whether it's talking to people, an industrial task, etc.
Simpler neural network models, just robotics & basic programming, or even underpaid human staff tend to be waaay more cost effective

And llm's have failed to lay out a meaningful path to change that, even after trying to brute force it for 5 years.
All we get are marginal improvements on these chatbot applications that require order of magnitude increases in operating costs

105

u/Teruyo9 3d ago

Meteorology is my field, and I have high hopes about machine learning identifying weather patterns to help forecasts be more and more accurate from further and further away. I don't need Google to give me a wrong answer, or ChatGPT giving me Bromide poisoning, or an image generator boiling the oceans to create useless trite.

31

u/DevilsTrigonometry 3d ago

Yeah, I'm watching this from the outside (my dad does numerical climate modeling) and there have been some really, really promising developments in AI/ML for weather and climate models, but they're basically unrelated to the LLM craze.

The only interesting and novel application I've seen for LLMs has been in robotics, where apparently they can be combined with existing ML techniques to "figure out" complex tasks without explicit programming. I' m actually excited about that. It seems like the implicit knowledge about the world embedded in LLMs can actually be applied to problem-solving.

Other than that, they're just fancy search engines and autocompletes, as expected from their technical heritage. They're not even working all that well as virtual assistants - check out the Pixel subreddit's feelings on Gemini.

→ More replies (1)

49

u/TheConnASSeur 3d ago

I was just thinking this. General AI this early in the game is absolutely fucking stupid and it's absolutely not reliably usable for a layman, but if you train a specific AI model for a specific tasks it can actually do some incredible things. Understanding and predicting weather patterns are one of those things that rely heavily on pattern recognition and that's what our current AI models excel at. It's too much for a human, but if we let an AI gorge itself on weather data, it's going to find some novel solutions.

10

u/AnOnlineHandle 3d ago

The field has been doing that for decades. And the innovations behind these recent models and countless research papers springing from it help with those tasks too.

→ More replies (3)

9

u/This_Charmless_Man 3d ago

I work in composites and there's been a push for more automation in the industry. The problem for stuff like automated layups is that it's fiddly and the cheaper solution is to throw more laminators at the problem. Machines can do filament winding, but traditional work is staying manual for the foreseeable

20

u/N33chy 3d ago edited 3d ago

I'm a very hands-on mechanical engineer. I don't see even a humanoid bot running a LLM being able to do all the fiddly things I do. It's not able to (to take a random example from this week) navigate our cluttered, ever-changing production floors while dodging people, forklifts, and pallets to get to a bespoke testing machine running an off-network clunky touchscreen UI, then fitting through cramped quarters and troubleshooting its physical malfunction somewhere within a maze of hydropneumatic components with hardly any clearance to turn a wrench... hell, it would need its own dedicated base to find the wrench in the first place... and then it's not going to know what to do when it has to figure out how to test an individual valve that it might figure could be the issue, especially not when the one thing in the facility that can do that is an old pile of tangled hoses that itself moves around a lot, and oops it turns out that its motor was recently hit by a forklift and needs rewiring... and then where's an extension cord? is it long enough? how does it grab all the crap that someone's put in front of the only power outlet nearby? now it needs to check the pressure ratings on the assorted components so it doesn't dismember a flesh bag nearby, but the ratings aren't listed so it has to wipe away years of welding detritus and suss out what markings are relevant (and they don't say "PSI", "KPa", or "Bar")... etc etc

Anyway, feels like job security to me... if only for a decade

20

u/TheConnASSeur 3d ago

I think the fantasy of automation is built around this idea that we'll just magically build completely new, purpose-built factories designed to maximize new automated systems. So every corridor and Jeffries Tubes are specifically built to be accessed by roving automated engineers. And every piece of the factory machinery is built in easily removable modules that can just be hotswapped and worked on later in a separate, human facility. It's nothing more than a fantasy, but the suits somehow think this will absolutely happen somehow in the next few years without them needing to make a massive investment to both design and manufacture all of this insane shit. They think it's just going to magically pop into existence ready for them to exploit when the reality is that they'd need new factories to build those new factories.

14

u/DevilsTrigonometry 3d ago

Yeah. It's especially hilarious because the standardization and modularity and design-for-manufacture that would make fully-automated production facilities possible would also be enormously beneficial to productivity in human-operated facilities, but executives outside of China refuse to invest in them.

→ More replies (1)

10

u/N33chy 3d ago

Agreed. It's possible to do, I think, but if we weren't able to get the US to switch to metric in the 70s because (IIRC) people had invested so much in imperial tooling and the documentation and knowledge associated with it, then this much greater effort isn't going to happen soon.

A bot-friendly facility could be built from the ground up by one of the massive multinationals I used to work for, but nearly all the tiny shops that feed them look a lot like where I currently work and and can't afford such an effort.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (2)

→ More replies (8)

173

u/Moregaze 4d ago

Still don't know how a business model predicated on theft was even allowed to come to market. LLMs are just stealing others work and summerizeing it.

100

u/notmyrealnameatleast 4d ago

Yeah, it's been a while since I've clicked on anything other than Reddit links in Google and I often find myself just reading the "AI" rewording of another article instead of actually pressing any link at all.

Google must be losing so much click ad revenue, that I think they just stole their own job with ai.

93

u/tlst9999 4d ago

Even then, it's just stupid rewording.

I googled a hospital name and the AI article says the hospital is opening in 3 months. I knew the hospital was new, but it already existed for years, and the info was probably scraped from some old news site from years ago.

67

u/ji1651 4d ago

I recently looked up how to do something on my new phone, the ai response specifically stated my phone in the instructions and yet somehow the instructions were for some ancient Android version. Same thing with instructions for a new win 11 laptop, don't know for which windows the instructions were but it was definitely not 11. It's not only trained on old data, it's often just straight up hallucinating. Ai in it's current form is utterly garbage and further training it on social media just makes all those bots feed each other a bunch of lies which is rapidly degrading it even further.

There was a time when I used ai because it was straight up faster than trying to find something with Google but that time is already gone again. They made something promising but fucked it up so fast chasing the holy dollar.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (5)

40

u/GhostC10_Deleted 4d ago

Probably shouldn't be, I've seen that AI rewording be very incorrect, or miss real important nuances, in my field. I don't trust it for anything as a result.

11

u/mynameisnotrose 3d ago

I notice that AI generated content in my field of knowledge is laughably bad, which has left me to doubt anything it produces in areas I am not an expert on.

4

u/firehawk_hx 3d ago

Slight tangent but you’ll notice the same effect from people on reddit talking with authority about any subject.

It all sounds fine until the moment it’s about your field of expertise, and suddenly you realise most people don’t have a clue what they’re talking about but still feel compelled to contribute to a discussion on the matter.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (2)

3

u/spaceman_spyff 3d ago

I program CNC machines and design fixturing for assemblies and last week out of curiosity I asked Gemini the smallest hole diameter I should interpolate with a 0.25” endmill (general rule of thumb is 110-115% of the cutter diameter but that is kind of generational/institutional knowledge). It returned 0.0043”. Impossibly incorrect.

The source link was some tangentially related Reddit thread but it didn’t quote it correctly, missed a bunch of context, and fucked up some unit conversions. It was not even fucking close.

26

u/YadaYadaYeahMan 3d ago

make sure to click through to the sources the summary provides

the number of times the summary has only been right is very low for me

so often i read the highlight, it seems to answer my question but i check the scource anyway, just to find out it is quoting an article that in context is saying the opposite of the conclusion the AI summary is positing

truly, it is rarely just "right"

20

u/BraveOthello 3d ago

So ... If you have to check it's sources anyway, what value is it adding?

13

u/nftesenutz 3d ago

It's basically a crystallization of the use-case of Google that students have been taught to not do for over a decade. Just looking stuff up, reading a few headlines and the first lines of a few articles and taking that as fact.

27

u/grammar_nazi_zombie 3d ago

Yeah I’ve personally seen Gemini hallucinating to the point that one result completely contradicted itself. Other times it has straight up made up answers that are verifiably false. We’re treating autocomplete as if it were AGI.

7

u/WheresMyHead532 3d ago

im paraphrasing here; my cousin works for Google. he says theyre heavily pushing the AI, because they noticed more people were using ChatGPT/DeepSeek instead of googling. Its a “competition” for them to basically get everyone back into using Googles AI for their needs.

The reasoning isn’t very smart, but that’s just about what was explained to me in August of last year

Edit: I forgot, he also mentioned something about AI news articles obscuring actual results, and the Google AI is in part implemented to make googling “easier”

20

u/mygutsaysmaybe 3d ago

I’ve stopped using google directly because partially because of the AI. I’d rather see a couple labeled sponsored links and know they are suspect than see a factually inaccurate summary to have to wade through on every single search. And now I’m no longer using the term “google” as a verb, it’s just plain searching.

Also, since they’ve started on relying on AI more, more of their services are turning to shit.

Especially, and surprisingly, their maps. They used to be so good for estimating times of arrival, seeing where accidents were, determining detour routes, construction zones, and traffic flow. Since they’ve embraced AI, it’s like they now trust the AI instead of user data and can now no longer give accurate real-time routes or reroutes.

→ More replies (2)

10

u/OafleyJones 3d ago

This is the thing. All it takes is one successful lawsuit establishing said theft and the whole thing falls apart. All the synthetic data in the world won’t help.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (10)

22

u/SignorJC 3d ago

LLMs will stick around, but they will never grow into anything actually resembling a true artificial intelligence as defined by 99% of people before the marketing teams at Google and OpenAI convinced everyone that a shitty dumbass chatbot is “AI.”

The next level of advancement will cost as much if not more as reaching g this first plateau.

3

u/YourOldBuddy 3d ago

They will get better, but yes. Better is still not good enough. We are going to get better at utilizing it when it works.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (2)

→ More replies (10)

134

u/Faiakishi 4d ago

The rich: "let's get rid of all human employees so we don't have to pay anyone!"

Their business: 'dries up because no one has money to buy things'

The rich: 'surprised pikachu face'

24

u/generally-speaking 3d ago

The richest people know this and don't care, because at the point when this happens they already own all the land, industries and they just have to focus on producing better products for an ever smaller customer group.

→ More replies (4)

15

u/No_Stand8601 3d ago

Good way to instigate a revolution

11

u/ej_21 3d ago

there’s a reason zuck is building a bunker.

a zunker, if you will.

7

u/LilPotatoAri 3d ago

Nah I don't believe it. At this point i feel like Americans will put up with anything as long as it happens slowly enough. By the time anybody wants to rebel they'll all be too emaciated from hunger and injured from fighting over scraps to unite as a front.

3

u/KamikazeArchon 3d ago

Americans are still, as a whole, doing incredibly well. Specific subsets are doing extremely badly, but most people have decent food, housing, health, etc. And the "and I did not speak up because I was not X" effect prevents many from reacting to the ones doing extremely badly.

3

u/Schlongstorm 3d ago

Exactly this. The term 'treatlerism' gets thrown around a lot in online spaces I'm in. Americans just want their treats, their little comforts, and we'll tolerate a lot. But if those little treats go away, take away our comforts... well, things will get ugly. Hard to say if it'll lead to positive changes in the way the country is run, but violence is all but inevitable if the majority of Americans lose their treats.

→ More replies (1)

8

u/rzm25 3d ago

Karl Marx, Das Kapital Vol. 1

19

u/BurntNeurons 3d ago

The 'greatest generation' and their 'beautiful perfect fair competition based capitalist system' has to make one(several) more rape-y grabs at the earth's resources, the poor and the ignorant constituency to grease their lips and pockets just a bit more before they dry up and blow away in the wind.

4

u/Tolopono 3d ago

Rich people can buy from each other. Its what keeps Lamborghini afloat

→ More replies (3)

38

u/RealMcGonzo 4d ago

Back during the Dot Com bubble inflation, the internet startups handed out T shirts like crazy. I still have a box of them up in the attic. None of the names sound familiar these days. AI tech is here to stay and will be a very big deal. But a lot of these high flying companies will crash and burn when the Great Consolidation happens, much like before.

7

u/-Bento-Oreo- 3d ago

Only the big names will survive. They're the only ones that can afford to buy the ridiculous electricity and cooling costs. Google is gonna win the AI wars

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (2)

16

u/LaserKittenz 3d ago

This is going to be the story of the 2020's .. Big tech breakthrough that people overhype and then later claim is dead.. Meanwhile tech people will continue to work away on it until its useful . blockchain and AI are very cool but I suspect we wont see apps use their potential for awhile

20

u/Aceofspades25 Skeptic 3d ago

Blockchain? lol.. that was like 3 hype cycles ago. It's an interesting idea for some limited applications but it's not going to revolutionise anything.

8

u/EFreethought 3d ago

Pour one out for the metaverse.

→ More replies (4)

9

u/Jazzlike_Mountain_51 3d ago

Most of them are not offering anything new or unique. Most people know that an AI start-up is code for a front for reheated chat gpt

5

u/TehMephs 3d ago

The stock market has survived much worse. I’m more concerned about the inevitable beggary of said companies and we end up giving them yet another bailout

→ More replies (2)

5

u/snowdrone 3d ago

Open AI is the new Netscape

14

u/FirstEvolutionist 4d ago

I notice that people often think I'm talking about AI stock market performance whenever I talk about AI progress. I don't care much about valuations and the market, I care mostly about the technology.

"It's a bubble!" I hear... the market has bubbles. Hype is for the market. The tech either works or it doesn't.

18

u/wwarnout 3d ago

The tech either works or it doesn't.

Or, it works sometimes - which is a big problem.

My neighbor has tried asking question on many subjects (e.g., engineering calculation, legal opinions, geography, astronomy, medical diagnosis), and in most cases, AI is only about 50% - 75% accurate. So, how does one know if AI is accurate (other than having an actual expert in the field in question confirm or deny)?

→ More replies (2)

5

u/PipsqueakPilot 4d ago

Don't worry, Curtis Yarvin (and his acolytes like Thiel and future president JD Vance) have a solution for all those unemployed people.

→ More replies (31)

57

u/Really_McNamington 4d ago

Just when Microsoft had idiotically managed to ram it into Excel too.

35

u/stellvia2016 3d ago

The irony here is: Why didn't they simply have copilot populate the formula instead of trying to give a direct answer.

I also don't understand why they don't have specialized functions for the LLM to hand off to when specific types of questions are asked. And yes, I understand the LLM doesn't "understand" anything when generating the response, but Copilot as a product could evaluate the question and/or LLM response for keywords to fire off other functions.

29

u/No_Internal9345 3d ago

Because that would require actual programming instead of AI slop.

6

u/Heimerdahl 3d ago

Funnily enough, you could do it all within the ai sloppery.

One can easily create a mock-up prompt like this:

Before replying, consider if the user request can be handled by one of these existing tools: {tools}. Present the potential tool and give a recommendation... // and so on. How to adapt it, etc.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (2)

→ More replies (9)

28

u/skralogy 4d ago

people keep forgetting the saying if the product is free you are the product.

You have millions of people having conversations with ai, and that ai is able to remember your preferences. I find it hard to believe advertisers aren't paying for that data.

36

u/Marsman121 3d ago

This isn't the case though. The reason it is "free" is because AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic is burning billions in investor cash.

I'm sure there is some level of data collection, but selling it isn't enough to offset infrastructure, generation, training, and salary costs. There is a reason why OpenAI keeps begging investors for billions of dollars... and getting it (for now).

4

u/skralogy 3d ago

Alot of these companies are using ai to develop ai. It's going to be very difficult to determine its value as it is still constantly being researched

→ More replies (6)

→ More replies (2)

35

u/MajesticBread9147 4d ago edited 4d ago

Meanwhile, retailers and fast food companies are struggling to get customers to part with $20.

50% of consumer spending in America is driven by the top 10% of spending.

Those 10% of people do not go to McDonald's often.

Even if there is a large amount of unemployment from AI, it's not unforeseeable that the wealth of the top X% grows more to compensate for that.

Kinda like how if you didn't choose to live in the rust belt/Midwest, the fact that there were no longer manufacturing jobs where GED hopefuls could get paid well for turning screwdrivers or welding joints all day it had little effect on you. You never see somebody in DC/New York/Los Angeles complaining about manufacturing.

4

u/Inside-Sell4052 4d ago

If there is a large amount of unemployment caused by AI and wealth of the top grows more to compensate for that as you said how does the state maintain control?

12

u/MajesticBread9147 4d ago

In all likelihood, increased surveillance and authoritarianism

6

u/Inside-Sell4052 4d ago edited 3d ago

But how will the state pay for this is what I mean.

If say unemployed reached 30% who will they tax?

Edit. It's frustrating the replies don't understand the point I'm making

8

u/cardfire 4d ago edited 3d ago

Through salle of goods? We are experiencing tariffs now and will see increases in municipal occupancy taxes and other forms of aggressive rent seeking in regressive taxation, I'm sure.

A friendly reminder that money isn't real, and that we all just collectively agree to kill anyone through negligence if they fail to acquire enough of it. 🙃

So we are clear, I believe taxes are important and useful. I just think the US tax code is designed to maximize extraction from us plebs and not the rich, and that regular human beings have the shittiest lobby.

6

u/Assassinite9 3d ago

The same way they've always maintained control...by threat of force.

→ More replies (3)

3

u/Far_Inspection4706 3d ago

I dunno man I'd be inclined to believe that rich people eat at McDonalds or any fast food place often tbh. It's not like everyone out there is going to have gold leaf and caviar tastes, some people are going to have days they just wanna munch a cheeseburger no matter if they have a billion dollars or not.

→ More replies (2)

6

u/mattihase 4d ago

$20 for fast food is pretty difficult to justify budgeting for these days as a consumer. A trillion is just silly.

4

u/rogergreatdell 3d ago

And this fker has the most punchable face of 2025 so far...

Oh shit did Steven Miller say all this?

8

u/MandelbrotFace 3d ago

Altman is a PoS

3

u/No_Stand8601 3d ago

Sam Altman should just upload his brain for profit and complete the scifi trope

→ More replies (50)

404

u/fat_boyz 3d ago

The ones making money in a gold rush are the people selling the shovels.

146

u/silverum 3d ago

That’s why there’s so much money going into data centers. They’re literally selling the shovels to the AI companies who still behave as though “more compute=eventually striking gold”

54

u/headphase 3d ago

Aren't data centers a service business though? If demand for compute drops off, data centers are screwed.

The firms selling the hardware to the DCs, on the other hand....

28

u/Chrysaries 3d ago

It's kind of like putting all of your shovel profits into building shovel factories. Still gonna hurt when shovel demand drops

3

u/Gareth79 3d ago

I think all existing DC capacity will still end up being used, just demand for new ones will fall off, and existing capacity will be (re)used with more efficient hardware.

→ More replies (2)

5

u/todp 3d ago

And even they're seeing the writing on the wall, with data centre projects being cancelled

3

u/Jazz_is_Adornos_Bane 3d ago

Because infinite growth and productivity increase in unsustainable. Since the 70's companies have grown increasingly desperate to continue to make line go up. Brutal benefit cuts, corporate welfare lobbying, downsizing, market expansion abroad, shipping production to third world sweatshops, just in time logistics, shittier but more addictive products, merging consumer and labor, stock buy backs, gig economy work, automization, and supportung both the personalization, identity refocusing(away from class) and aestheticization of social justice, and authoritarian movements/regimes domestically and abroad . Even the dot.com boom had crazy growth but limited effect on actual productivity.

So what we are seeing is capitalism reduced to endless hyper cycles, almost a millenarian cult about some productivity silver bullet to stem the tide. The decline in productivity growth is not news to the actual companies. As the prospects become bleaker, rigid cultural normativity, linguistic disciplining via jargon, and professions of absolute faith in the mission of free market capitalism become more ardent. Crypto, NFT, the Singularity, self driving cars, and AI. All are endless hype cycles and hoped for solution. These are the last, desperate afterburners. Chimeral rituals to mimic the buygone days of semi functional growth. They have ruined the planet, destroyed the health of workers, poisoned our brains, culture and discourse, hoarded immense reserves of wealth, hired private militaries, built doomsday bunkers, and turned to authoritarianism to ensure they will maintain control when the destabilization they caused comes to fruition.

And what is worse is the US has no left option. Democrats are wholly complicit because they themselves are hopelessly enmeshed in a system of corporate lobbying and stock portfolios. Reddit shits its breeches(I bet those redditerinos even almost spit oit their heckin drink!) because a fucking sleazey governer hires someone to mock Trump. How many of these lib "ownages" have to "happen" to Trump before they realize their smug satisfaction does not equate to a change in system logic? Equally captured by the spectacle of market aesthetics, equally unmoored from material concerns. All uncritically accepting the logic of flat essences, brand, identity, culture, race, nation, freedom, democracy, the selfsame commodity ingredients thrown in a stew they call "the conversation", to be regurgitated endlessly and forgotten next week.

The "far Left" is equally corrupted. Enraptured by poststructuralism and postmodernism. The intellectual affect of late capitalism. Only concerned about the same flat essences and their relation to one another. Endless description of simulacra, biopower, fluxes, flows, vectors, but having abandoned dialectic. With no formal ability to make judgements beyond descriptors of power relations between essences that they create by claiming they don't exist, they have no way out of their own gilded cage. There is no ethics. No outrage. No hope. Foucalt is happily adopted by the right because they recognize a kindred spirit. A world of merciless power relations, hypostasized ghosts haunting every step. The inability to recognize non-identity, what escapes the logic of categorization, to engage with it in a way that does not hypostasize, reify, fetishize, means moral judgements lack any force. It is why the New Left vanguards all backed the elimination of age of consent laws. All they saw was liberation of the subject from the state. The pure identity acknowledged by power that was being limited. Pure liberation for them involves what has been inscripted into the subject already as concept. What they missed was the negative that escaped such legibility. It is an ideology of affirnation. With no ability to distinguish, plurality, play, flux collapses into a self justification of power as such. Endless poetics about the surface forms the surface into metaphysics. All the concepts, lacking any dialectical mediation, become calcified into new, plastic Platonic forms.

The Left has become that which it was fleeing. It is now parodically idealism. Identities that lack formal analysis and historical contextualization. Suffering posited onto identity groups and used in the flux of free market power relations as capital. Systemic racism is the simulacra of analysis. It is metaphysical closure posturing as social justice. Because it creates immutable identity and immanatizes the world with it. This isn't critique, it is the possibility for performance, for talking head gigs, cushy policy thinktanks, DEI firms, and branding opportunities. Race is made up. Racism measurably ebbs and flows with historical conditions, was created historically(tied inextricably to caoitalism's birth), and can die historically. It is not some unholy spirit carried in man's heart, justified with dubious positivism. This is the clarion call of a left that has abandoned all hope, thay refuses to seriously engage with critique. The Jargon of Authenticity. And as such, is a left that has abandoned its role as the protectors of negativity. Of that which is particular, illegible to conceptual schema, that which is able to hope, to dream of social transformation. And we need that left because a real leftism is the only hope for the world.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (4)

114

u/MacDugin 3d ago

All this really tells me is ads are coming to your local chat bot.

5

u/zombie_singh06 3d ago

Yeah but it doesn’t really work in this sense. On Google, if you search for something, the top most links are paid/advertised but you can scroll down for actual results without typing the query again.

But in a ChatGPT scenario, it doesn’t work because you will have to keep asking the same thing repeatedly if the first or second or third response is from paid advertisers. Unless they do a paid popup on the left side of the chat (similar to Google doing a right side of results page showing ads back in the day). But that impacts the UI of “AI” and will see drop in users because it doesn’t “feel personal” anymore

8

u/colin3131 3d ago

It's definitely possible to inject advertisement into a chat result without relying on banner ads. As simple as OpenAI keeping an ad plugin on hand and instructing the model to find the most relevant product and recommend it in the answer.

Companies already pay a huge amount for targeted ads, contextual ads in generated answers are going to be even more lucrative for these LLM search companies over the next decade.

→ More replies (1)

→ More replies (2)

675

u/FomalhautCalliclea 4d ago

Remember that Tesla stock soared the same day that the company was announcing its biggest decline in sales in years.

As the saying goes, every company is a bank, and every bank is a casino.

Valuations on the market are made up, and the points don't count. This is just a big cargo cult thing we call "capitalism".

I can't wait for some AI companies which were seen as the portal to a Star Trek future to have their name become synonymous with Enron or Theranos.

166

u/Rob-A-Tron 3d ago

"Give a man a gun and he'll rob a bank, give a man a bank and he'll rob the world."

→ More replies (2)

14

u/brendan87na 3d ago

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

44

u/theswellmaker 3d ago

Valuations on the market are made up, and the points don't count.

So the US capitalism experiment was just one big game of Who’s Line Is it Anyway

7

u/SneakWhisper 3d ago

Except no decent humorous improv routines and giant questionably sfw foam props.

28

u/Heiro78 3d ago

My company CEO was talking about a huge win for us with supplying the infrastructure for a norwegian or swedish data center that's being built deep underground that is supposed to be able to do stock trades and all that jazz. I put on a giant smirk cuz it was just further revealing how it's just a shell game

6

u/FomalhautCalliclea 3d ago

As long as it's not a nuclear shell...
[Seinfeld running gag music plays in the distance]

[looking anxiously at those "deep underground" places that are totally not bunkers]

→ More replies (4)

→ More replies (38)

369

u/Ok_Possible_2260 4d ago

The AI boom isn’t a dot-com rerun. Back then, it was profitless startups running on fumes; now it’s the Magnificent Seven, all of which are cash-loaded giants that have been single-handedly propping up the market for years. Take them out and the economy caves, because everything from pensions to 401(k)s is lashed to their weight. The rest of the market? Already rotting. Their size makes them both the crutch and the cliff edge.

143

u/kirsion 4d ago

But at the same time, it's practically impossible for these huge tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and nvidia to collapse or become bankrupt. Tesla on the other hand...

107

u/Ok_Possible_2260 4d ago

Tesla may have shown profits in recent years, but it’s one subsidy away from bleeding. Its success has been propped up for years by government tax incentives, not pure market strength.

52

u/JohnAtticus 3d ago

Last time I checked isn't 1/3 of their revenue from other polluting companies buying green credits from them to offset carbon emissions?

As more companies reduce their carbon footprint (ie Amazon swtiching to electric delivery vehicles) the market for green credits shrinks.

Now their car sales are declining...

And subsidies are being removed (US).

All of their revenue sources are in decline, only car sales might stabilize at some point, but it won't be enough.

→ More replies (5)

→ More replies (4)

18

u/Intelligent-Parsley7 3d ago

Nvidia is a GPU company. They have millions upon millions of GPUs in data centers that could go bankrupt. What happens when millions of used GPUs hit the market?
Any company can go bankrupt. Nvidia is a great example of that right now.

10

u/Labidido 3d ago edited 3d ago

What happens when millions of used GPUs hit the market?

Nvidia would take a hit, but it's very unlikely they would face bankruptcy.

If the bubble burst in 2025, the GPUs flooding the market would mainly be H100. H100 will be old technology for hyperscalers in 2026, B100 and eventually R100 will take its spot.

The hit will be much worse if the bubble burst later and B100 floods the market, but I highly doubt Nvidia would go under.

The world will still demand compute even if the AI bubble pops.

→ More replies (1)

5

u/aaron_dresden 3d ago

The datacenter GPU’s are highly specialised rack scale solutions. Not consumer form-factor cards. We’re talking custom networking, custom cooling, the physical scale and power requirements are huge compared to consumer space. Even if they hit the used market this isn’t like when people were mining crypto with consumer cards at scale. Consumers wouldn’t really be able to use them, and other businesses in the data center business are unlikely to take used hardware. China and maybe some other sanctioned nations might take them on the black market but it’s unclear.

I don’t see Nvidia going bankrupt, even if demand drops off a cliff. They outsource manufacturing, so they can scale down as demand scales down. It will massively shrink future revenue but they can continue on like they did before the boom.

18

u/stemfish 3d ago

5 years back the thought of Intel falling off was a joke.

Today it seems inevitable that they're going to implode and only a shell of the current company will continue.

9

u/wildwalrusaur 3d ago

Intel's not going anywhere

They're too strategically important to US interests. The federal government won't allow it to fail. See: the billions we've already shoveled Intel's way over the past decade despite their repeated failures and mismanagements.

3

u/genshiryoku |Agricultural automation | MSc Automation | 3d ago

Just so you know Nvidia has contracts in place that prohibit the 2nd hand sale of their GPUs, companies are required to give them back to Nvidia for a rebate.

So sadly (as someone in the market for a lot of cheap compute to train AI models on) there won't be millions of GPUs flooding the market, even if all AI companies go bankrupt today.

→ More replies (4)

47

u/PruneJaw 3d ago

Why would a company like Google, Apple or Microsoft collapse or bust if AI disappeared tomorrow. It's not like these companies are only AI companies. They'd just write it off as a failed project (it won't be, it's just a stepping stone) and move on. They've started and failed at more thing that we can remember. Now companies that sprung up with AI being their entire identity would be in big trouble.

16

u/Travolta1984 3d ago

And this is one of the reasons that all companies today are jumping onto the AI bandwagon: if it fails, yes we lost money but so did all our competitors; if it succeeds then they were onboard from day one and ready to capitalize.

Nobody wants to be Microsoft when Apple released the first iPhone.

→ More replies (1)

9

u/gruey 3d ago

It correlates somewhat to dot-com and even more to the "Big Data" boom. While it's true that a bunch of startups failed and stock prices dropped, it didn't invalidate the technology or opportunity. Bigger players were also part of the boom, and they integrated the technology to become even bigger. They basically even fed off the corpses of the failures to get stronger.

Then there's the other class that do boom then bust, but still survive. For example, Akamai was one of the poster children for the bust. They went from a $30B market cap to less than $83m, but survived to be over 25 years old now and are around $11B in market cap.

Big Data wasn't as extreme, but it wasn't as flashy as well. Lots of startups slapped the label on themselves and failed, but lots of companies integrated it into a serious business model. The same will happen with AI. Lots of companies will fail, but the big players will integrate it and some new guys will survive. In fact, you could argue that AI is just Big Data's natural evolution, and just like you could argue that "Big Data" is a silly moniker when you compare the data used for today's AI, it's pretty inevitable that 10-15 years from now calling what we have today "AI" will feel like a joke.

21

u/jkp2072 3d ago

People are forgetting one important thing...

Cloud and data centers, can be very well used for many things apart from AI.

Even if AI doesn't evolve in next 10 years at all. Current Llm usage itself will use that cloud demand.

This is not like dot com bubble at all. Their they layed out "dark fiber" ,(worth 2 trillion) ... Aka supply was way ahead then demand... But here it's reverse.

→ More replies (2)

12

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

42

u/Ok_Possible_2260 4d ago

You’re overstating the fragility here. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon aren’t “propped up” by startups, they’re entrenched monopolies with diversified revenue streams that dwarf whatever AI burn rate is happening.

3

u/GeneralMuffins 3d ago

Back then it was pets.com and some other companies no one has ever heard of now though its all the largest companies in human history.

→ More replies (1)

18

u/cointalkz 3d ago

People conflate stock bubbles with an actual Innovation bubble. Much like the early days of the internet, there was a lot of speculation and in turn, a lot of Vapor stocks. However, much like the internet, AI isn’t going anywhere.

→ More replies (2)

265

u/Traumatic_Tomato 4d ago

I often see companies who laid off their staff and replaced them with AI realized the errors even at small % rates were making it not worth cutting the costs of real humans who would rarely make such errors. They tried to rehire back the people who lost their livelihood over corporate greed.

78

u/ashvy 4d ago

Yeup, there's a recent story from an Australian bank of such a debacle

11

u/Nimbus420i 3d ago

CommBank? Can you please link the story?

8

u/tittygunner_tom 3d ago

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-21/cba-backtracks-on-ai-job-cuts-as-chatbot-lifts-call-volumes/105679492?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

28

u/LEDKleenex 3d ago

As others have said I'd love to see actual examples because this sounds logical in theory but it seems like you made it up or are embellishing.

Anecdotally, if I scrutinize the info I get from AI, there are nearly always errors and hallucinations, which makes sense because LLMs aren't actually AI as we think of it. There is nothing really intelligent about these models, but it's still interesting and sometimes useful to see the words strung together mathematically.

One time I posted a YouTube comment about a somewhat niche topic, and since it was somewhat difficult to find more info with Google, I tried using ChatGPT to find more information. And just minutes later with my prompt asking about the subject, ITS FIRST CITATION WAS MY YOUTUBE COMMENT, but the hilarious part isn't just that it cited my comment, it's that it used my comment as an authority that my suggestion was a fact, AND that it was the general consensus of most people.

I'm honestly shocked that people put so much faith into this modern "AI". I feel like all of these companies that are using/planning to use it are either in on the scam, or they're getting scammed.

60

u/the_pwnererXx 3d ago

you often see it? can you give some examples?

19

u/Etroarl55 3d ago

This i want to see it too.

14

u/Cptawesome23 3d ago

lol at “often see”

→ More replies (3)

14

u/Marsman121 3d ago

It is so weird to see tech articles talk about how AI is causing job losses, yet reading the article, they don't actually give anything concrete. Links to 'sources' are often other articles talking about how AI's are causing job losses, again with no concrete numbers, often linking to... you guessed it, more articles saying the same thing with no real numbers. Follow the thread long enough, you inevitably arrive at a CEO of (checks notes) an AI company talking about how AI is causing massive labor disruptions.

And journalists take that as fact, not even questioning the massive conflict of interest there.

In reality, I see it as more "recession does recession things." Prices have been going up. Economic vibes have been warning of a coming recession for years now. Tariffs and massive government shakeups... consumer spending pulling back... tech overhiring...

But no. AI is the cause of job losses, not the usual things that come from the beginning of a recession! Sure, no one can tell you how or where AI is doing this, but it's happening!

8

u/hikingmike 3d ago

A lot of times lately when I see job reduction announcements, the companies are citing AI among the reasons. I think it’s overblown a bit, and it becomes partly just a convenient excuse to do what they already want to reduce costs. But it’s in the news.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has issued a stark message to employees: Artificial intelligence will reduce the company's corporate workforce in the …

CrowdStrike CEO announces 5% of workforce to be slashed globally, citing artificial intelligence efficiencies created in the business.

Duolingo: In January, Duolingo reduced its contractor workforce by 10%, partly attributing the cuts to the adoption of AI for content

Here's an estimate from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: He says up to 50% of the work at his enterprise software company is now being done by AI. (Yeah definitely not sure about taking that one at face value)

7

u/DCChilling610 3d ago

Yep. AI is just a smoke screen to cut back while still looking innovative. You can’t say in one breath that AI isn’t having the ROI and then in the next say companies are cutting jobs due to how efficient AI is making them. That’s conflicting stories.

→ More replies (1)

4

u/bornagy 3d ago

I think companies use AI as a publicity excuse for AI related layoffs.

→ More replies (8)

15

u/Lokarin 3d ago

I think the actual AI bubble is in the energy sector; I don't think there's any real profit in AI in the first place except as an energy drain... so if power companies start pulling out that's when I'd panic

98

u/chrisdh79 4d ago