alt Hacker News>That doesn't mean AI is going to go away, or that it won't change the world - railroads are still here and they did change the world - but from a venture investment perspective, get ready for a massive downturn.
I don't know why people always imply that "the bubble will burst" means that "literally all Ai will die out and nothing will remain that is of use". The Dotcom bubble didn't kill the internet. But it was a bubble and it burst nonetheless, with ramifications that spanned decades.
All it really means when you believe a bubble will pop is "this asset is over-valued and it will soon, rapidly deflate in value to something more sustainable" . And that's a good thing long term, despite the rampant destruction such a crash will cause for the next few years.
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I don't think anyone seriously believes AI will disappear without a trace. At the very least, LLMs will remain as the state of the art in high-level language processing (editing, translation, chat interfaces, etc.)
The real problem is the massive over-promises of transforming every industry, replacing most human labor, and eventually reaching super-intelligence based on current models.
I hope we can agree that these are all wholly unattainable, even from a purely technological perspective. However, we are investing as if there were no tomorrow without these outcomes, building massive data-centers filled with "GPUs" that, contrary to investor copium, will quickly become obsolete and are increasingly useless for general-purpose datacenter applications (Blackwell Ultra has NO FP64 hardware, for crying out loud...).
We can agree that the bubble deflating, one way or another, is the best outcome long term. That said, the longer we fuel these delusions, the worse the fallout will be when it does. And what I fear is that one day, a bubble (perhaps this one, perhaps another) will grow so large that it wipes out globalized free-market trade as we know it.
But some people do believe that AI is all hype and it will all go away. It’s hard to find two people who actually mean the same thing when they talk about a “bubble” right now.