Tiled Hacker news on React Router

adityaathalye
today at 12:26 PM
> The reason why AI companies are spending so much money is to rollout data centres to run the AI in the first place. These expenses are one-off purchases, not regular operating expenses. Once all the data centres are built, AI spending is going to plummet.
Fatal misunderstanding.
Datacenters are not warehouses. Amazon.com being borderline-profitable owing to massive ongoing capex on warehouse expansion is not at all like AWS becoming borderline-profitable owing to massive ongoing capex on LLM datacenter build-out and SOTA model training (it's CAPEX, but carries OPEX affect because of GPU depreciation schedules and competitive hardware upgrade cycles), and opex of delivering LLM inference services, and being able to price it all competitively.
(edit: expand explanation of why it's a misunderstanding)
swatcoder
today at 2:12 AM
Railroads, semiconductors, plastics, networking... the utility was there for all of them, and so was the potential profit.
Everybody knew it.
But some investors don't have the patience for these "sure things" to mature into their commercial destiny and others know they can siphon off a killing by taking advantage of them as they speculate.
These bubbles aren't about potential, they're about timing.
And today's AI, for as revolutionary as it may be, is taking just as long to mature as anything in the past.
Most of the top players involved in AI right now are going to be rich. And in 20 years, the world is going to involve a lot of AI in soooo many things. But a lot of shirts are going to be lost below those top players and a lot of companies are going to fold because infrastructure, refinement, and integration take time while the FOMO speculation starts as soon as the big discovery is recognized.
bkandel
today at 2:14 PM
The logic here is so flawed it suggests to me a significant lack of financial understanding. For example:
>If the AI industry has to pay off 5 trillion dollars over the course of 20 years, that's 250 billion dollars a year. For context, Alphabet (parent company of Google and Youtube) reported earning almost 162 billion dollars of revenue just in 2019. Adjusted for inflation, that's an even more impressive 213 billion dollars.
Alphabet's REVENUE was $162B, not earnings! You can't use all your revenue to pay off your debts because you have to use some of your revenue to pay operating and other expenses. So even if AI generates as much revenue as Alphabet did in 2019 (adjusted for inflation), there is no chance it could pay back $250B/year.
viktorcode
today at 8:39 AM
The author talks about revenue growth on the basis of Anthropic's S-1 filing, but ignores the third quarter results which were posted later.
The growth slowed and operating profit has swung to a loss. The company can still make money, just not at a pace that has a chance to pay off the investments.
Also, the author conflates AI's technical potential with the market potential, naively assuming the demand will also grow as technology matures.
fraywing
today at 2:46 AM
Big red flags that I think point the other way:
- anthropic IPO repricing
- pareto frontier gap decreasing by the month between open and closed models
- SpaceX disappoinment
- enterprise buyers as main consumers of closed tokens are being displaced by OS competition for pennies
- job loss and entry level hiring collapse
- massive discounts of current data center contract debt
- consumer open weights model efficiency improving constantly
- the Chinese arms race
- a possible rapid downward spiral that may force governments to step in and subsidize
Am I missing anything?
hmontazeri
today at 8:06 AM
No one seems to worry about the demand of ai. That makes me wonder. My neighbors for example are normal working ppl they don’t know how to open a zip file (they call me to help them with something like this) and they are in their early 40s so not that old. Sure companies and workflows are going to become agentic but not everyone needs it or even wants it. Then there are smarter small models like Qwen 27b running on a Mac mini and this will also continue to get better and develop further. If the usage is easy I see ppl downloading a desktop app that’s dead simple instead of paying for ChatGPT. I just don’t see this growth curve going for 20 years for these companies to pay off their dept
AngryData
today at 2:25 AM
Im not convinced by the claims of infrastructure only being expensive to build initially. Hardware doesn't last forever especially in a data center, maintenance isn't free, electricity is not going to get significantly cheaper. If models get more efficient we won't need super expensive and expansive hardware build outs, if models keep getting more powerful and needy and are hardware limited, each new hardware generation will stomp over all this expensive and soon to be old hardware in electrical efficiency requiring another massive round of funding that players already holding debt will struggle to afford.
maxnevermind
today at 6:45 AM
> Profits Can Grow, By A Lot
Profits are mentioned but then only revenue is discussed, Revenue != Profit. Revenue can grow yeah but experimentation/token-maxing stage is ending and price wars have started, so I'm not sure about rising profits, AI Labs won't necessary be able to capture the margin(>>China<<), it might be companies/consumers who will capture most of it, if so there is a bubble - it is in AI labs with their trillion $ valuations and they might end up in a race to the bottom, BigTech is not in a bubble for the most part, they will endure a correction and fall back on their existing business.
treebeard901
today at 7:12 AM
The entire premise on whether it is a bubble depends on if LLMs can be more than a next token prediction machine or not. Adding reasoning agents, agent swarms, and so on to enhance the results from what is essentially just predicting the next token still means this technology at its core only predicts the next token. It is not AGI and unless something fundamental changes, it never will be. There are certainly valuable applications for this technology as we have seen in coding, math, and other sectors. But it is still not more than taking in a lot data and predicting the next token.
Meanwhile, the major tech companies first financed this build out using the cash flow from their existing revenue. Once this became more difficult to justify, they literally set up companies to keep this off their books directly, and these companies are ultimately designed to take a loss and fail. But before reaching this failure stage and defaulting on debt and obligations, they went to the criminals on Wall Street and designed a financial product structured not all that different from mortgage backed securities. Also, as the "AI" aspects of their existing businesses expand, it eats into the traditional revenue generated by their core business, which if we remember, is the original collateral being used to justify all the debt in the first place. Now these core tech companies have to win "AI", whatever that ultimately means, to not only pay the debt from the build out, but to also replace their existing collateral from their original products. Think in terms of Google Search being replaced by AI. Maybe a clean transition, maybe not. Really just depends on the technology living up to the hype. If not, the hyperscaler companies designed to take a loss a fail, will fail and with it, the circular financing will pop the very real bubble that exists.
Speaking of IPO valuations as well, it's not to say that LLMs are not a valuable technology. Just look at what they have done to computer science already. But there may be increasingly limited returns on investment if every valuable problem to be solved isn't as well defined as logical computer science problems. Without solving the hallucination problem (as a result of the next token prediction limitations), the wide application of LLMs as being sold will never happen.
AJRF
today at 10:32 AM
McDonalds doesn't have a moat? Eh - yes they do.
They've global procurement, the franchise model means the franchisee shoulders a lot of costs, they own the land the restaurant is on in 50%+ of the locations, and they own the technology system that underpins their app + ordering.
It's a massive moat.
pj_mukh
today at 1:52 AM
I dont know if the valuations make sense, but the usability is all there and so are the potential profits. Over a decade, that's probably all that matters. If the valuations pop or dip (anytime soon), I think that's mostly irrelevant. I get that the press probably doesn't like to hear this boring conclusion.
P.S: A Matlab/Physics simulation guy running for a Liberal party seat in Canada? Say more!
xscott
today at 2:37 AM
I'm not imaginative enough to see more use cases and who will pay. You can burn a lot of tokens and dollars on math proofs. Same for white hats finding vulnerabilities in all the software. Generating video.
Personal assistants dealing with your email, filling out paperwork, and booking reservations don't use a lot of tokens.
If every software developer paid $200/month, every academic paid what they pay for Matlab or Mathematica licenses, every YouTuber paid for whatever video processing, and every normal person paid a subscription comparable to their TV subscriptions and cell phone plans - does that justify the valuations?
The government pays for surveillance? Companies pay for customer service replacements and target advertisements?
It seems like there are a few small categories that use a lot of tokens, and a large category that doesn't need many at all.
etempleton
today at 5:27 AM
I don’t think the question is so much of AI is a future market, it is has the capital been allocated appropriately. And no one knows. The challenge Anthropic has is they have a narrow lead on the use case that makes a lot of money today, but new models come out every month and one tiny slip or wrong decision and they are toast. There is also a reliance on the idea that two things continue to happen:
1. Revenue growth increases 2. There are more highly profitable uses cases like code.
Neither are guaranteed.
I also think the narrative that these companies are profitable on compute is erroneous. You can’t ignore the other costs and no they don’t magically go away. Anthropic can’t stop training new models now or in the foreseeable future. Gemini 4 Carbon is about to come out and is apparently competitive. Google has other revenue sources. They are in the ball game. They can wait for Anthropic to run out of money.
Traster
today at 1:00 PM
I think there's just some core arguments here that you can totally reasonably disagree with
>In theory, an AI company has to be worried about their users switching over to a competitor or using an open source model instead. In practice, this isn't a major concern. For starters, the average person...
There's two things to disagree with here. First, this isn't theory, I work at a company and use AI heavily, switching model is as simple as changing a line in a json file. And would I do it? I've done it like 5 times this year. Claude was good, then openai was for a while, then there were times gemini was great for quick trivial tasks, now I'm mainly back on opus-5-5 with astra for some more complex tasks. Secondly, I'm not the average person, no, I'm the person openai and anthropic actually make money from. Sure, a consumer might be stickier, but so far they're not really making money from consumers, they're mainly doing B2B.
The core thing that bugs me is not so much that AI is going to be massively unprofitable, I think there's definitely going to be profitable companies. I just think if you're Google, the best case scenario is you're transitioning from fantastic economies of scale in a monopoly business to a business with costs roughly proportional to revenue and no moat. That is really bad for Google and it's not unreasonable to think it's motivation enough for them to try and undercut Anthropic and OpenAI until they're bankrupt.
pmg101
today at 9:28 AM
> Most (or maybe even all) programmers [...] are worse at their respective field than an AI swarm equipped with a good harness
Is this the consensus view now? I'm not any kind of denier and I do recognise that motivated thinking may cause me to overestimate my own value.
But trying to be brutally neutral I'm still not sure this is true. AI doesn't make certain classes of mistakes that humans do, granted. But I'm still surprised daily even in 2026Q4 at things it does seem to make a mess of. Usually, changes that are locally good but subtly globally poor.
vb-8448
today at 9:09 AM
> These expenses are one-off purchases, not regular operating expenses. Once all the data centres are built, AI spending is going to plummet.
What is the most expensive thing in an AI datacenter? The GPU! And what it's its lifespan? 3 - 5 years!
Bubble or not, there is no way AI spending is going to plummet. It will decrease, obviously, but thinking that after 5 trillions of investment everything is profit is so naive.
potato-peeler
today at 5:39 AM
> The reason why AI companies are spending so much money is to rollout data centres to run the AI in the first place. These expenses are one-off purchases, not regular operating expenses. Once all the data centres are built, AI spending is going to plummet
Unless nobody is working on miniaturisation, then this reasoning might hold true.
As seen throughout history, any sufficiently absurd tech starts largescale (refrigerators, computer, radios) and eventually become portable.
Amortising data Center cost will take a long time. Within that time, if someone figures out how to make ai run on cheaper hardware, these data center cost will Become harder to recover.
> AI companies can also cut costs by no longer allowing people to use their products for free and temporarily suspending expensive AI research
That will just kill the industry.
bergen
today at 9:17 AM
>For starters, the average person isn't going to use a locally hosted model, ever.
Let's talk about that in 2-3 years. There is a very clear incentive to have models running locally, from data privacy to cost effectiveness. The software will pop up to easily power this, and if it is cheaper than non-open frontier models it will be used. This can be done today with a bit of hassle, and will only get easier. The consumer hardware vendors are clearly heading this way.
jxcole
today at 2:22 AM
If you don't talk about competition from DeepSeek you haven't really thought it through all the way. You might argue it's like Windows vs Linux, but operating systems have huge natural motes. Any person can just switch to a provider of an open weight model instantly. Most people don't know about it but we may very well see people learn about this broadly in the next few years. Changing models is not super complicated. Anthropic is unlikely to make $2 to the dollar when competitors are taking only pennies of profit.
TrackerFF
today at 8:25 AM
Two things can be true at the same time:
1) There's a huge demand for AI.
2) AI is way too expensive for the companies building it.
Panzer04
today at 9:03 AM
The conclusion I've come to is that AI is still revolutionary, and the buildout is probably necessary to some degree, but it is way overestimating the demand and pricing power providers will have.
SW can use a ton of AI. Lots of other applications can't, and they don't need the super smart frontier versions either. We just don't need all that much compute to serve AI for these applications, and people won't need to pay the margins necessary to get access to that AI. SW alone is not going to be enough to pay for all the investment.
I don't buy brand loyalty either. If I can pay 1$/m for the same thing from someone as I pay OpenAI or Anthropic 10$/m for, I'll do that, which almost zero barrier to entry.
The buildout is paying stratospheric prices on the assumption they can charge that much on the other end, but if demand tapers off (or model efficiency doubles again), prices will start falling. Everyone talks about Jevon's, but I don't really see why I'd spend more on AI than I need to do the things I want. I already run out of stuff to ask it to do on a basic subscription, I hardly need more.
The crux is this: I can spend x for y results. If I spend more, I probably don't get 10x for 10y results - I probably get, say, 2y results. So on that equilibrium I just don't spend all that much more because the reward for all that extra spend is not worth it. And if models get better this tradeoff starts to look worse, since I get more of the super-effective benefits for cheaper. Now I'm spending 0.1x for y results, and spending even x for 2y might not make sense, let alone 10x for 3y.
reilly3000
today at 4:51 AM
Other than the fact that we’re due for one, this one is differently shaped in that there isn’t really widespread “irrational exuberance” and constant reporting about AI fortunes. I think your general investor is quite skeptical about AI and worries about exposure in their portfolio. Sure there is plenty of irrationality happening, but there is also a lot of real growth and changes in assumptions. Like the job market is way stronger than expected for even AI-threatened sectors (not entirely and I’m sorry if this affects your circles) but like we’re really just getting started here. I don’t think AI in today’s form will be the same as this time next year and that real growth is just beginning. All of the destruction of value that PE has wrought will only serve to motivate a new generation of entrepreneurs to build fundamentally better, more nimble and customer-oriented institutions.
zeroonetwothree
today at 6:41 AM
McDonald’s is considered to have one of the biggest moats of any business. They have an extremely valuable brand, excellent locations, optimized supply chains, and so on.
doosdoos
today at 8:42 AM
Napkin math: if the 5 trillion investment is paid back by 1 billion customers, every customer pays $5000. If they want to write off the investment in 5 years, that's $1000 per year. Even with the current AI capabilities, with the right products that seems doable.
physicsguy
today at 10:49 AM
> When a bubble happens, it's usually preceded by the companies involved reaching obviously inflated evaluations, which makes the burst obvious in hindsight. With public AI companies, we don't see that happening. Alphabet, Meta, and NVIDIA are all AI companies that have seen their market capitalization explode over the past few years, but all of them have stable P/E ratios in their 20s. If the increase in their valuations were irrational (or even just in expectation of future growth as opposed to current earnings), you would expect the P/E ratios to go up. Instead, their valuations look exactly what we would expect from a healthy trillion dollar company. When the dot-com bubble happened, it was largely driven by companies that couldn't turn a profit or had P/E ratios in the hundreds. I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert on financial bubbles, but I've never heard of a bubble where the companies involved had such a modest valuation based on their earnings, even if their earnings (and therefore their evaluations) are enormous.
My worry isn't so mcuh the large players ability to raise funding, it's the long long tail of "AI" in everything else and especially small startup companies that looks more worrying to me.
At the moment you have young grads getting $20-30 million with basically limited evaluation of their skills, all over the place. The area I am interested in is physics and engineering, and the number of Physics AI startups for where there there are not physicists or mathematicians with at least PhDs in numerical computing as founders for example looks to me like a total mess. And I keep seeing things where very clearly solvers haven't converged then getting used as training data and publicised in press releases from companies like this. I assume that most technical areas are seeing similar. This is where the dotcom bubble comparisons are most apt.
wmf
today at 1:44 AM
The only modification I'd make is to amortize the investments over 5-6 years instead of 20 because most of the cost is GPUs not the buildings. This increases the required revenue by 4x.
signalcollapse
today at 2:59 PM
Your post repeatedly confuses evidence that the AI industry is commercially viable with evidence that the AI industry's current valuations and investment levels are economically sustainable.
teejaypeeps
today at 6:07 AM
I enjoyed that article, thanks for sharing. It is nice to hear that people are still having a "rage against the machine" in these heady times. For me, I think a lot of us at high market cap companies think AI is going to do xyz, but most folks are employed way outside of that boundary.
darkwi11ow
today at 7:59 AM
```
  When I look at the current capacity of AI, it really feels like there's so much potential for frontier models to be used that just aren't being applied yet. Most (or maybe even all) programmers and mathematicians are worse at their respective field than an AI swarm equipped with a good harness, and a good deal more expensive as well.
```
This is a strange conclusion. AFAIK in mathematics it doesn't work yet like article says: there is a problem, point agent swarm on it, and mark it done. The math results from OpenAI and Anthropic were achieved by seeding the surface of known problems and randomly trying to grow solutions; while they got some good solutions indeed, it doesn't mean current LLMs will work for arbitrary math problems.
Correct me if I am wrong on this, I am only a student of mathematics and by no means a researcher.
For the programming part, I think author already says that automated solutions require a good harness, and this is indeed correct, but in my experience building good harness is hard and agents can not do this currently without human closely guiding them. And in pre-LLM programming practice we did not need harness at all, or needed only small part of it: so, solving programming problems with LLM involves more work than without LLM, even if big part of this work can be automated.
The rest of the article seems to be a speculation mostly based on the premise that LLM can really replace human in the loop, which seems to be not the case currently.
sholladay
today at 5:19 AM
I’m not convinced that something has to be overvalued for it to be a bubble. A lot of the dotcom stocks that went bust probably could’ve taken some piece of the pie, even if small, and made a business out of it if the money hadn’t run dry. Or if they had just come along later. Turns out the internet pie is enormous and it’s still growing. And now people are much more willing to use it for payments. Even some previously bad ideas might be workable now. But investors don’t have infinite patience, and the market can spook them.
Also, great products don’t always make great money. Some companies just never figure out how to monetize and eventually go belly up. Users may not be willing to pay what you expect, and the amount they pay may not be able to pay back your debt. Not every LLM chat app is going to survive the next few years. That’s just how it is when there’s sudden growth. Our economy tends towards boom and bust cycles.
itissid
today at 10:07 AM
> These expenses are one-off purchases, not regular operating expenses.
But no one really knows what the operating expenses are, Anthropics s1 does not mention them as far as I read them.
Max-q
today at 11:47 AM
I mostly use Chinese models now. Last 30 days the average token price has been 98% lower than OpenAI. This from my dashboard today. So I now use 10x the tokens on the Chinese models. More people will discover this. I can’t understand how OpenAI can recapture what they have spent.
coldtea
today at 2:24 PM
>The reason why AI companies are spending so much money is to rollout data centres to run the AI in the first place. These expenses are one-off purchases, not regular operating expenses. Once all the data centres are built, AI spending is going to plummet.
First mistake. No. Data centers are depreciating. And they're one or two hardware changes away from having most of the hardware in them worthless (because even if you're contend to keep running those, your competitors would move to the next tech).
>For example, I pretty much only use ChatGPT, not because I have any really reason to, but because it was the first LLM that I ever used. This partially offsets the risk of losing customers to a different product.
Never helped browser vendors maintain their base. Not even social networks, where the graph serves as an incentive to stay. And there's also generational churn. Facebook is a boomer wasteland now, for example.
dofm
today at 3:16 AM
Unless I misread it, this article simply doesn’t mention training or the cost of it.
robinduckett
today at 12:02 PM
Is it me or is this a lot of extremely dense information?
Schlagbohrer
today at 7:56 AM
Is this worth reading? I have to ask because of the anime avatar, which strongly discredits the author all by itself.
NBJack
today at 2:50 AM
I like the sentiment, but the author doesn't appear to be accounting for some harsh truths:
- Anthropic is already expected to have junk bond status; this is going to make dealing with their existing debt rough while costs likely continue to rise
- Datacenters are 'cheap' once they come online, but that assumes they will. Power infrastructure hasn't been able to keep up, and several pending datacenters (I've seen estimates in the 50% range) meant for AI growth have been significantly delayed because of it.
- The US has a lot of debt coming up in 2028. The AI investments have been far more lucrative than the traditional 30-year bond. The AI bubble doesn't have to pop at all for the global market to plunge.
benrutter
today at 10:15 AM
> When a bubble happens, it's usually preceded by the companies involved reaching obviously inflated evaluations, which makes the burst obvious in hindsight.
I think this highlights a big issue with both sides of the "AI is/isn't a bubble" debate - the idea that there's an established pattern that economic bubbles cohere to. There really isn't, and economists haven't been able to find a consistent pattern that past bubbles have conformed too (that isn't also the case of non-bubbles). "Bubbles for Farma" is a cool paper that tries to do this[0].
Like everyone else, I have my own opinions on whether there is/isn't a current AI bubble. But we should all stay humble and try and avoid stating anything as if it's an absolute fact.
[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23191/w231...
est31
today at 2:00 AM
Just because a technology is going to be successful in the future doesn't mean that the current beliefs are accurate of which company is going to capture the most profits from that technology.
The internet is successful and cisco is having a blast but its valuation has still been enormously wrong during the dotcom bubble. Same goes for pets.com, etc.
So in other words, maybe the valuation of some companies is totally wrong. Maybe Anthropic is not worth two trillion, or even a hundred billion, but Nvidia is worth 20 trillion. Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe the legal framework changes and the value will be captured by the major rights holders, reddit, twitter, bertelsmann, etc.
xbmcuser
today at 2:42 AM
I think the biggest problem is people are conflating current AI being useful with current AI companies being financially viable. Dot com bubble had its winners and losers but the biggest thing is that many of the current AI companies are valued at prices the winners were decades after the dot com bubble. My prediction the big 3 infrastructure AMZ, MSFT, GOOG will lead openai and anthropic to a point where they owe them trillions in payments and use it to take them over.
teiferer
today at 9:18 AM
What exactly are the author's credentials?
Some indications in the text suggest that their insights are somewhat limited.
> In other words, once you ignore the cost of building infrastructure, AI is very profitable.
Once a provider stops such investments, they stop being "frontier" which makes them unattractive immediately. These two things are tightly connected.
> If the AI industry has to pay off 5 trillion dollars over the course of 20 years, that's 250 billion dollars a year. For context, Alphabet (parent company of Google and Youtube) reported earning almost 162 billion dollars of revenue just in 2019.
Revenue vs profit
> Most (or maybe even all) programmers and mathematicians are worse at their respective field than an AI swarm equipped with a good harness
Anybody doing serious software engineering will wholeheartedly disagree.
> People can theoretically switch from model to model, but people tend to settle in with a product and develop brand loyalty. For example, I pretty much only use ChatGPT, not because I have any really reason to, but because it was the first LLM that I ever used
LLMs are just one piece of the tool chain, a mostly interchangeable one. Which one a concrete product uses is not of concern to the end user. This quote very much misses the role of LLMs and their providers in the big tech picture.
> In 2023, a memo from Google called "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" was leaked, which outlined how the open source community was keeping pace with AI labs
Labs releasing the weights to their models is not what is typically called the "open source community".
I could go on but it's just not a very well-argued opinion piece. Unclear how it made it to the HN front page.
origini
today at 8:48 AM
I'm actually convinced that an AI Bubble doesn't matter at all.
The quality of models like Opus 5.5 are already here, smaller labs can mimick these with a little bit of a delay.
Alone the current status has massive impact.
The status quo will get just faster and cheaper.
Then we have labs like Deepmind, companies like Google and then countries fighting over it (US America vs. China). At this point its not just private VC investing in it, its also countries aka military budgets or Research Budgets.
In parallel universities are doing their research anyway and if an AI bubble would burst tomorrow, Open Source and community driven would finally have a little bit of time to coordinate.
There was just last week an article about open post-training data. I think we want this but as long as frontier is as fast as it is, its not fun to play catch up with a moving target.
saturnus
today at 8:01 AM
Yes, people dream of going back to the way things used to be, and irreversible steps have been taken regarding artificial intelligence. But while a certain segment of society is getting richer economically, humanity is heading toward irreversible sociological destruction.
To use an analogy, just like the scenario in post-apocalyptic movies where people eat each other, we are heading toward a grim end as a species.
hyperpallium2
today at 9:29 AM
What people don't realize is the exponential runaway growth when AI can make its own buyers.
bob1029
today at 10:11 AM
I am increasingly open to the possibility that AI is undervalued. There have been recent applications of GPT 6.1 to the client business that genuinely threaten to fully eliminate their development team and put the business in the captain's chair again. I'm inches away from convincing them they have what it takes to prompt the robot to manage their codebase 100%. AI adoption is entirely a people problem now. It's a much better developer than me in most ways the business cares about.
Everyone keeps pricing this as a technology thing for some reason. This is more like a new kind of thermodynamic cycle than a new kind of software. The downstream applications are inevitable. We can't continue milling grain by using live animals walking in circles if we wish to remain competitive.
I think the bubble narrative is a necessity for some technology people. It now comes off as a fantasy that this will all blow over soon and we might go back to some semblance of normal. I'd argue that we've burned the proverbial ships at this point. There is no going back.
Think about how far we've come in such a short time. It's barely been one year of competent coding models. Some parts of tech/media seem only impressed by instant and globally successful results for some reason. Something this disruptive takes time. It took two fucking decades before I had a broadband internet connection. There are massive crow eating buffets that are still attended by those who missed the eventual consequences of the internet.
keeda
today at 4:59 AM
> As one final note, I don't think the rhetoric about the AI bubble is really about finances. Conversation about the AI bubble is too widespread for it to be a contrarian position, and too gleeful to be driven by investors' fear. More than anything, I think the supposed AI bubble has become such a large talking point because it represents the hope that things can go back to how they used to be.
I call this “SchadenFraud”: reveling in and playing up every little negative thing that happens in the AI world to make it look like it’s all just hype or completely irrational and will come crashing down any moment now.
There are enough people aggrieved by GenAI -- traditional media, creators, artists, coders, Mathematicians, and the list is fast growing fast -- that this kind of narrative will have an audience for quite a while.
They're not looking for solutions, they're just looking for rageviews. Worse, it gives folks the hope that things have not irrevocably changed and will go back to normal after the bubble pops.
Me, I’d rather get a stark but realistic picture of what’s happening now so I can prepare better for the future.
keithnz
today at 2:42 AM
so many variables here. Do anthropic and openai as "AI" companies last longer term? If LLMs curve off in terms of what they can do, and local hardware becomes capable of running local models, seems like they won't last that long. But if they keep improving such that massive amounts of compute will always be needed beyond what can be done locally? Then sure. But then does it just become a commodity market where all the margins get stripped right down? Do they invent AI tech well beyond what LLMs are capable of at the moment? I would imagine, no matter which way it goes, hardware companies will win.
robeym
today at 12:52 PM
Great post. Entirely agree
impure
today at 4:09 AM
Well, first of all, these are not one off purchases. GPUs do break and newer generations come out rendering the old GPUs outdated. I don't know if the 2.08 figure is very valid. This is based on costs of leasing GPUs from companies that may not be making money on the lease deal. What I do know is that Anthropic weren't profitable in Q3 and I'm hearing rumblings they are losing even more money in Q4.
Also Popeyes never had over $800 billion in uncancellable compute agreements. And I'm glad you're having fun with GPT, but I've moved all my projects to use DeepSeek 4.1 Flash. There are plenty of different providers. And as I use OpenRouter the change is one line.
The reason I think the PE ratios are lower than previous bubbles are because everyone already knows its a bubble. Also all these tech companies already have massive businesses and AI is not going to change that.
phorkyas82
today at 8:15 AM
>There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for. [would -> should]
There is no logical contradiction even, just another race to the bottom, drying out of markets. The good ol' disruption playbook, like Amazon shrank or destroyed the markets to capture them, only now they are targeting all white collar jobs.
The conclusion starts: >I didn't write this article as some big takedown of the AI bubble theory. Even with this evidence, there are serious risks to the financial sustainability of the AI industry.
But the presented "evidence" is largely only: I don't know, nobody can tell the future. I mean there are also good reasons to be skeptic of skeptics like Ed Zitron, but Idk "modest valuation" seems like a big stretch. Also, I'd challenge the notion, that you'd only ever have to build that data centers _once_. Especially with the AI pace the chips are said to be replaced every three years, while the building itself could last 25 yrs. So even, if the run at the frontier cools down, I don't think running your data centers and models would come for free.
petermcneeley
today at 5:13 AM
>Shameless Self-Plug I’ve applied to seek the Liberal Party of Canada nomination in Sudbury East—Manitoulin—Nickel Belt
bpiroman
today at 8:42 AM
Why do I always jump to the HN comments before opening the link
Toutouxc
today at 8:14 AM
> Most (or maybe even all) programmers and mathematicians are worse at their respective field than an AI swarm equipped with a good harness, and a good deal more expensive as well.
We can START discussing this when someone defines "worse" and we all agree on it. For SW engineering, we've been trying to define "good" for decades and we still don't know shit.
> There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for.
No, that's a total straw man. For example, I am afraid of how AI will change the world, but for that it doesn't have to stop producing slop. I'm afraid of how the slop is CURRENTLY changing the world, people and societies. Frankly, I don't even care whether someone ever pays for the slop. This isn't a "I'm going to lose my job" kind of fear, it's a "we're running education into the ground and rapidly transforming into a low-trust society" kind of fear.
today at 10:32 AM
dmje
today at 8:05 AM
It’s orthogonal to the point of the article but:
“AI can't replace lawyers and doctors, but they can automate their paperwork and free up time for them to do other things”
So my question is - in software engineering (where this has bitten hardest): does anyone know _anyone_ who is less busy and has time to “do other things”? Nope, nor me.
diffeomorphism
today at 8:00 AM
The bubble is not about whether AI is profitable or whether profits can grow.
The question is how much? If they grow 5x, then these companies are very profitable, changed entire industries,... etc. Yet, the bubble still pops because investors assumed 10x at least.
Sol-
today at 9:49 AM
I liked his point about bubble theories being more about antipathy towards the tech firms rather than rational thought. I definitely experienced this myself, where acquaintances are like "the bubble will burst any time now" and when talking to them, it's very clear that it's an anti-AI stance that motivates them to say it rather than any sober economic analysis.
tossandthrow
today at 5:40 AM
My thoughts has been: what would happen if GPU prices fell 50% over the next weeks?
My gut feeling is that there would be such a massive demand to buy them to run our own models.
I am also not sure there is a (structural) bubble.
I do speculate whether some companies will survive, also some of the big ones.
vannevar
today at 2:10 AM
>Anthropic's S-1 filing says that they make $2.08 for every $1 of compute. In other words, once you ignore the cost of building infrastructure, AI is very profitable.
If you ignore the cost of building cars, they are also very profitable.
>Profits Can Grow, By A Lot
They can also decline by a lot, and Anthropic's S-1 suggest that is what is happening, as their losses are widening, not narrowing.
>Google Has No Moat, But Neither Does McDonald's
That's why no one is sinking several trillion dollars into a new fast food chain.
>Alphabet, Meta, and NVIDIA are all AI companies that have seen their market capitalization explode over the past few years, but all of them have stable P/E ratios in their 20s.
The "E" in their PE ratios is circular revenue that is ultimately derived from debt and equity, not real end-user demand from profitable companies. For some of these bubble companies, if you subtract the debt-fueled private stimulus money, their actual PE ratios skyrocket.
belZaah
today at 6:01 AM
What a weird thing to say: a business is profitable if we ignore a key part of its cost base. That’s true of any business, you know. Even if they make a 100% coverage of every request served, it’s still a far cry from the usual internet business model where responding to a request is almost free and most of the expense is the initial investment in software and its upkeep. This is why Alphabet used to be flush with cash and we get free services.
The trouble with Anthropic and OpenAI is, that not only do they need to get operationally profitable, they also need to be sufficiently profitable to provide a return on capital on all the money they have burned to date. Much of which has gone (and keeps going) not to assets but to expenses like the electricity bill. Thus, once the models are efficient enough to be served profitably, a relatively small amount of assets needs to be generating income for a relatively large amount of capital. It is my understanding, that currently the efficiency of the models does not grow even fast enough to outpace the need for new capital.
One more thing, that gets conveniently ignored when talking about AI cost is the cost of training the models. From one hand, there’s but a few institutions capable of building them and, from the other, it’s like the models grow on trees. Yes, you could run your open-weight model on your own hardware and pretend it’s profitable because you don’t have a comprehensive costing model and the infrastructure costs from security to electricity to risk are mixed in with your general cost base. But someone has spent astronomical amounts of money training that model you run and would probably like to get it back with some interest. Let’s hope that return is just money and not, say, the ability of a certain country to control the global software development process.
keyle
today at 5:05 AM
> Google Has No Moat, But Neither Does McDonald's
Sounds like a valid argument until you realise McDonald's is a real estate business.
There are many problems with this article. I think the bubble is real and at some point the investor money will fall off a cliff.
The value is there but the cash burn rate is extreme to say the least; and the moat is only in what you haven't released yet.
cwmma
today at 3:20 PM
reminds me of Dow 36,000 [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_36,000
noodlesUK
today at 9:40 AM
I think one of the things that people analysing the finances of the AI sector often miss is that the capital expenses associated with data centre buildout involve spending a lot of money on compute hardware which depreciates and becomes obsolete very fast.
Large companies have often changed the depreciation schedule for server hardware to 6 years rather than 3. I think it remains to be seen if this is justified as it’s not as though the pace of change in hardware has slowed down by 50% arbitrarily.
I think it’s pretty obvious to me that a data centre full of ampere GPUs is worth less than a data centre full of Blackwell GPUs. I suspect this is also why AI companies prefer to talk in terms of gigawatts of compute, as if efficiency per watt does not exist.
Data centre costs are not one-off. Some are, for buying land and building buildings and infrastructure. The actual compute however is a constant investment. I’m not familiar enough with the market to know what proportion of expenses are ongoing but I bet it’s higher than people think.
hattmall
today at 2:18 AM
The 16% yield on Coreweave bonds probably indicates otherwise.
tombert
today at 3:16 PM
I don't think these companies would be calling for regulation if there wasn't a bubble. I think they know that these models cannot keep the same progress forever, and potentially not even a lot longer. Instead of admitting this to the shareholders, they instead want to go the government and say "REGULATE ME DADDY", and blame them for not being able to keep all the promises that they're implying.
somenameforme
today at 6:47 AM
His analysis fails to consider trend lines in inference costs. A couple of years ago inference required a supercomputing cluster. Today, you can run quantized frontier tier models on video cards with a $1600 MSRP. At current trends we'll be running frontier models on a typical gaming computer setup in a couple of years. That is going to destroy centralization possibilities.
It also fails to consider the impact of 'good enough.' A lot of the build-out right now is in anticipation of trying to push the frontier level. But there comes a time, a time we're already arguably past, where models being used for a specific task will already be able to complete that task efficiently. Going way beyond the present should enable LLMs to solve ever more esoteric problems, but in economic terms if a company's goal is to harvest corn, and your corn harvester works well enough, they're not going to care whether or not that corn harvester can also solve Fugazi's 7th Great Conjecture in exomathematics.
Nekorosu
today at 7:58 AM
I'm not convinced by this article. It's as weak as it is long.
qwery
today at 1:56 PM
This is a remarkably weak article to be getting as much attention as it is. It would be easy and boring to shred the whole thing systematically, so here's one example:
> When a bubble happens, it's usually preceded by the companies involved reaching obviously inflated evaluations [...] Alphabet, Meta, and NVIDIA are all AI companies that [aren't that]
Alphabet, Meta, and NVIDIA are not AI companies, and [I don't really need to explain this, right?] ignoring the inflated elephant here is a hell of a thing.
Honestly, criticising this is beneath me (sorry) and I don't really want to be here, doing that. Oh, but the irony. This article ("I'm not convinced the AI bubble exists") -- this copium -- being a busy front page submission today is such a neat way to demonstrate the bubble's existence. Truly, a thing of beauty.
ranyume
today at 5:27 AM
> The reason why AI companies are spending so much money is to rollout data centres to run the AI in the first place. These expenses are one-off purchases, not regular operating expenses
Companies are investing in scaling models. Doesn't that mean that they'll need to keep investing to stay on the edge? After all, when they lose the edge they lose customers.
> For starters, the average person isn't going to use a locally hosted model, ever
If open weights weren't a problem for these companies, ram altman wouldn't have accused the people of stealing his compute.
throwaway_new_1
today at 8:47 AM
When are we getting an AI_OS? I just tell the prompt what to do and the entire OS is run by an agent (likely Linux with sudo permissions). Everything including browsing and copying files and what not is an agent driven task.
This sounds like a nightmare but so is using windows and office everyday and everyone is already using it.
charles_f
today at 2:16 PM
Just replace AI by block chain or Internet and you'll see that none of these arguments hold water to claim there's no bubble.
> I don't think the rhetoric about the AI bubble is really about finances
But that's purely what bubbles are about though. People see something become popular, want to be in, over invest, and the thing becomes overvalued.
Internet was a bubble. I don't think anyone would claim the value people saw in it doesn't exist, and there's way more investment in internet today than there was when the dotcom bubble burst. It was a bubble nonetheless.
> Nomination in Sudbury East
Go Bulldogs!
germandiago
today at 7:58 AM
I am convinced for a long time. Just the way the companies CEOs talk and move suggest that they are looking for infinite investment without delivering AGI or singularity and we are always "almost there", though it does not arrive.
AGI and singularity are the Nuclear Fusion of energy.
alpineman
today at 8:22 AM
To write such an article with zero mention of interest rates tells me everything I need to know
delis-thumbs-7e
today at 8:50 AM
Like others have said, it is not that AI/LLMs//ML is not perfectly valid technology, it is a auestion of whether the current investment into it is justifiable relative to the demand and profit. We still buy and sell tulips y’know.
> Outside of generative AI, self-driving cars are becoming a reality, with some evidence to suggest that they're even better than human drivers.
Haven’t they have been just around the corner for 10 years now? And the problem is not technology as such, but the fact you are inventing trains that use roadnetwork hardly large enough for cars?
> AI adoption takes time, but there's no reason to think that AI usage isn't going to massively skyrocket, even if AI doesn't get any better than it is today (and it certainly will get better). In other words, there's massive unmet demand for AI companies to profit from.
[Emphasis mine]. This might a good example of a person writing and thinking with an LLM and letting the model enchant you with its sycophantic bullshit. We might speculate endlessly about AI or any technology, but none of that is a basis on which you should throw money at, especially not as a retail investor. We can see value production of AI in software development, but the productivity increase promised is either not in the data, or it is too early to say yet. So the real valuation of AI is really difficult say still, a lot of things needs to happen, before it can be seen to produce concrete value increase. People need to stop really really fucking hating it for one.
It kinda pointless to talk whether there is a bubble or when it will pop if there is. It might happen today at market open or never. Timing it is a fools errand. Also it is kinda pointless to shout into the void how much you love/hate AI. Better use of time would be to develop the different systems and applications that will produce value for somebody. It all sounds too similar to crypto to me still…
0xbadcafebee
today at 4:59 AM
Going in reverse:
"The AI Industry Doesn't Look Like Any Bubble We've Seen Before" - It looks exactly like the two railroad bubbles. Potential profit is there, in the future. But you have to invest in the infrastructure first. If you can't make a profit and pay back the loans fast enough, the infrastructure goes bye-bye, along with all the funds used to finance it.
"There's Still Plenty Of Capital To Raise" - IPO is not how you raise a trillion dollars. A million, sure. A billion, maybe? But a trillion puts retail investors - mom and pop - at risk. IPO is not how you raise funds for a railroad.
"Once AI companies become profitable" - there's the big red flag. This isn't Uber or Lyft that can float along on tens of millions in corporate hand-outs every quarter. They need 100x that much money, and nobody has it to hand out. So you can't wait around for profits. There's no magic cushion to float on.
"For starters, the average person isn't going to use a locally hosted model, ever" - They will in 4 years. "normal users don't want to have to deal with the hassle or expense of setting up something" - What hassle? You download a program with a fancy GUI and run it. There are a half dozen of these projects already, that provide ChatGPT on your computer from one binary. All you need is a GPU.
"Profits Can Grow, By A Lot" - Only if they remain cheaper than local hardware or open-weight inference providers. Which won't happen because they owe more money than they can make.
The sign of the bubble is all the investment made not based on stable returns, but on hype. The weird geniuses from San Francisco said the future will depend on this one technology, all work will be changed forever, and only their company can deliver it. If you don't get in now, you'll miss out on a fortune! That hype just doesn't work out. And the proof is here: the superhuman machine sucks at writing, the documents it creates are lies, and we seem to be spending more on it than we get out of it. Because it's not magic. It's just a machine.
fwlr
today at 4:23 AM
```
  There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for. You can't really have it both ways here.
```
This argument only works because the author uncharitably and incorrectly added “nobody would ever pay money for” to the end of it. If you remove that sabotaging clause, you can “have it both ways”: Ai is gonna change the world, it’s gonna be slop, and you’ll have to pay for slop while grumbling that things used to better.
genxy
today at 2:29 AM
Meta, I have constructive feedback on your choice of titles with this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50415422
There are very few people in the world where when they declare that they have an opinion on it, that the declaration itself is title worthy.
anonymous908213
today at 2:23 AM
It's more accurate to say that there's an OpenAI-Anthropic-X bubble. Financially sustainable investment in LLMs is useful and not going anywhere, as China shows. Dumping trillions of dollars into companies that make models that are 1.2x better than Chinese models at 100~1000x the cost, ehhh... good luck with that.
maxglute
today at 5:54 AM
This analysis marginally better than Rob Ford smoking crack, I'm not convinced you should run for office, but if you succeed, please get us more Shorsey.
negura
today at 3:34 AM
Putting data and rational analysis aside, the style of this post is so similar to what I was seeing during the crypto bubble.
usernametaken29
today at 9:21 AM
Sure, the largest IPO in history was slashed by fifty percent before it came onto the market because no investor wants to underwrite its original offering, but it’s not a bubble
anon_anon12
today at 6:53 AM
I love the AI doomerism in this thread
beloch
today at 2:43 AM
"If you check any online discussion about the financial situation of the AI industry, it's essentially taken for granted that the bubble exists and is going to pop any day now."
-------------
If everyone, or even the majority, believed that there is a bubble that's going to pop with near certainty, that would tank stock prices immediately. Why would anyone hold a stock they know is going to go down precipitously? If the majority of people know it's a bubble, the bubble immediately pops. AI stocks still have worth, so most people believe there is no bubble or that prices will go up before going down.
People talk about bubbles. They worry about bubbles. For the most part, though, they go on investing as though there isn't going to be a bubble. Every bubble looked like a solid investment to most people right up until it burst, or it wouldn't have been a bubble.
So, no, most people do not think AI is a bubble. That doesn't necessarily it's not though.
war-is-peace
today at 6:33 AM
if i plug my ears and close my eyes the 16% neocloud bond yields suddenly don't look so bad
44mkultra69
today at 7:54 AM
am i getting this right`?
dump n pump. day trading. long term strategies. build up for the next big thing or delusion or hysteria or lie.
if you read mainstream narratives like "AI bubble", translate it to several millions of people making lots of bucks via a lot of fraud mixed into some good, genuine, valuable work of productive people.
investors and wall street people doing anything financial is not tied to bottom up signals but to insider knowledge and top down supply chain LEGAL manipulation by people not directly involved in the actual work done.
or it's a wrap up ( made money, time to shift or prep something that will hypergrow again, maybe already re-pre-hyped ).
or it's reactions to having maxed out some part of the supply chain which had negative consequences to some other market which reduced overall gains enough to realize "oops", if we don't re-act now, future gains in other markets will be reduced almost catastrophically.
bubble talks always feels like a mix of hyped people really getting fucked over by fraud runners
the details are not too relevant for the moment as I can't have play money to invest but the narratives are interesting because they directly translate into what I read in the suggestions and advice, subliminal or direct, from people to other people.
brador
today at 11:57 AM
Profits will drop from competition. McDonalds has a moat.
Those are errors just from the subheadings.
It’s the unemployment that will disrupt not the AI.
elAhmo
today at 9:31 AM
This person lives in a bubble. IPO of Antropic is literally a sign there is no more capital in private markets and it’s up to the public to take the shit bucket.
Let’s not even talk about the second headline that costs are constrained, while one company spends few dozens off billions per quarter.
meherabhossain
today at 8:58 AM
The thing is, the bubble exists because even though there is no guarantee of any big profit coming from the big techs, there are billions of dollars funneling into these companies. If you look at their current numbers, they are drowning in losses. Yet they are forcing to keep this bubble alive
rayiner
today at 2:29 AM
The discussion of the “AI bubble” often conflates two different things: (1) is AI going to justify the valuations we are seeing? and (2) are the specific AI companies we have going to justify their own valuations.
The rapid progress of multiple closed frontier models, along with the rapid progress of open models, suggests that LLMs will be like electric motors, not like social media. Are electric motors worth a huge amount of money economically? Sure. But none of the companies who invented electric motors are especially valuable today, because the technology became a commodity.
croes
today at 4:43 AM
> The reason why AI companies are spending so much money is to rollout data centres to run the AI in the first place. These expenses are one-off purchases, not regular operating expenses. Once all the data centres are built, AI spending is going to plummet.
Because hardware doesn’t need updates. Newer hardware is more capable which gives competitors with newer hardware an advantage.
> Outside of these expenses, AI doesn't cost that much to run
Outside the expensive stuff it’s cheap.
locallost
today at 9:10 AM
So if a shoeshine boy tells you which stocks to buy, it's time to cash out.
But if the shoeshine boy tells you it's a bubble, it's time to buy?
If only shoeshine boys still existed, I would know what to do.
today at 7:49 AM
gspr
today at 8:41 AM
> If you check any online discussion about the financial situation of the AI industry, it's essentially taken for granted that the bubble exists and is going to pop any day now.
You complain that people take the bubble as a given. Yet you continue by doing what a lot of people on the other side do:
> Most (or maybe even all) programmers and mathematicians are worse at their respective field than an AI swarm equipped with a good harness, and a good deal more expensive as well.
This isn't established. Like, at all. There's serious doubts as to whether AI-driven codebases remain maintainable, understandable and trustworthy over time. You look at a snapshot and conclude, while riding the hype wave.
harsh_264
today at 7:36 AM
The technology itself is here to stay i believe, but until they figure out a way to make it more efficient and not just burning money, a part of it does feel like a bubble
indymike
today at 11:22 AM
I think AI is fine. I suspect there is a data center bubble.
dimpalo
today at 11:20 AM
ok
dijit
today at 6:51 AM
“Its a bubble”
“Its a bubble”
“Its a bubble”
“Its a bubble”
“Maybe its not a bubble”
*bubble pops*
every time.
badgersnake
today at 9:05 AM
Deluded
michaelt
today at 8:11 AM
> There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for.
One thing to keep in mind when you're "debating" things online is you're actually debating with a tag team of people, with a whole spectrum of views. And at any point people with stronger arguments (starting from different precepts) will reply while people with weaker arguments will fall silent.
That's why "the average hacker news poster" is simultaneously rich and poor, powerful and powerless.
metalman
today at 8:42 AM
title is an attempt to switch from wild singularity tone, hype, to a mature reasonable tone, hype.
npilk
today at 2:06 AM
> More than anything, I think the supposed AI bubble has become such a large talking point because it represents the hope that things can go back to how they used to be. People are afraid of what's going to happen with AI, and rightfully so.
> So, people wishcast. They tell themselves that this is all a giant bubble, and one day soon, everything will crash down and immediately go back to how it used to be.
+1 to this. I think this is why Ed Zitron gets so many readers - people want someone to tell them things will go back to “normal” someday.
api
today at 1:40 PM
I think a data center bubble exists and may have just been forcibly popped. But that's never really been an AI bubble. It's a real estate bubble wearing a shirt that says AI.
syngrog66
today at 5:38 AM
I stopped reading after the 10th sentence or so demonstrating AI-pilled psychosis and hand-waving. That it is obviously this or obviously that and obviously some other thing.
I look forward to these types of posts fading in frequency much more so than AI use itself.
blltprfmnk
today at 1:57 AM
Meta’s margins are apparently getting crushed as a result of AI investments.
The lack of a clearly profitable operating model and huge (trillions) in commitments for buildout is what concerns people.
I am not convinced by this person who is not convinced there is a bubble. The bubble, by the way, specifically refers to the valuations. Is Anthropic worth 1.2 trillion when it’s not clear they will have positive cash flow in the foreseeable future?
stego-tech
today at 3:10 AM
A fair critique. Even I, someone who started as a (righteous) angry doomer over it, have come around for the most part.
My viewpoint also shifted around the shape of the bubble. The technology isn't going away, obviously, but the valuations of these companies like OpenAI and Anthropic feels divorced from reality. Inference continues to go down, most folks don't need frontier models for common tasks (including coding), and local models provide a competitive edge in several domains the frontier labs cannot (namely value and privacy). Combined with demand still largely subsidized and the companies being deeply unprofitable, and I just don't see the investments in Anthropic or OpenAI or the sort actually paying off. That is the bubble I'm concerned about, not the tech itself.
...now when the debts get written off and all this compute is just sitting around idle, available for bottom-dollar prices to try and eke out any sort of ROI for whichever creditor(s) inherit the assets? That's going to be pretty cool times.
protocolture
today at 9:06 AM
>In other words, once you ignore the cost of building infrastructure, AI is very profitable.
Its not clear that the infrastructure will ever be paid back. Its also not clear that once models are trained and distilled that the infrastructure will be useful. Ignoring 1.9 trillion dollars of debt is probably not the greatest financial analysis.
>However, there's no reason for why this level of spending has to be maintained in the first place.
Exactly. So Anthropic and OpenAI might be holding the bags for latecomers who distill their models and get ahead. Sort of the Commodore64 and Atari of the AI space.
>Once all the data centres are built, AI spending is going to plummet.
Well data centers need maintenance, and GPUs and similar do have a very short lifespan. But even if spending plummets repayments on existing debt needs to be accounted for.
>In a pinch, AI companies can also cut costs by no longer allowing people to use their products for free and temporarily suspending expensive AI research.
Research keeps them in the headlines, see above about the latecomers.
>For context, Alphabet (parent company of Google and Youtube) reported earning almost 162 billion dollars of revenue just in 2019. Adjusted for inflation, that's an even more impressive 213 billion dollars.
Yep, so all Open AI or Anthropic need to do is get acquired by a much more profitable business to pay back their debt.
>at some point, the rate of increase has to level off, but that doesn't have to happen anytime soon.
The rate of increase of revenue in the AI sector also doesnt need to be apportioned to OpenAI or Anthropic. If it wasnt for their generous loss leading subscriptions or their rnd, theres not much there to hold on to people.
>it's hard for me to see AI consumption not being 10x what it is now.
Right AI consumption will increase very likely. But will it increase at the cost of an already subsidised subscription, or increase the use of cheap Deepseek 4.1 tokens.
>For starters, the average person isn't going to use a locally hosted model, ever.
Isnt this expressly where Apple Intelligence is heading? Building small low cost models that run on Apple hardware? If I was nVidia I would have both plans being run down at the same time, looking towards selling GPUs to hyperscalers on one side, and working with OEMs to deploy AI coprocessors in laptops on the other side.
>For example, I pretty much only use ChatGPT, not because I have any really reason to, but because it was the first LLM that I ever used.
N = 1. OpenAI is already what halfway to their trust thermocline anyway?
>A potential way for a bubble to pop is for the companies involved to run out of capital to spend while they grow, causing them to fail.
Isnt Anthropic already down to BB+?
> NVIDIA are all AI companies that have seen their market capitalization explode over the past few years
NVIDIA is a hardware company that can has so much demand on their products they will likely survive 3 AI market collapses.
>Alphabet, Meta, and NVIDIA
Alphabet, Meta and NVidia all have other sources of revenue. They are companies building AI, not AI companies.
>When the dot-com bubble happened, it was largely driven by companies that couldn't turn a profit or had P/E ratios in the hundreds.
Anthropic and OpenAI dont have "E" (as in earnings)
Anthropics Debt to Equity is 363%.
>A potential way that this could be a bubble is if AI proves to be a fad.
A potential way this could be a bubble is if the makers of consumer devices point customers at cheaper or local models as part of their onboarding experience. OpenAI and Anthropic get thoroughly zuckerberged by the people holding the primary relationship with the customer base.
Or perhaps, the funding to the top 1% of token purchasers also turns out to be loans, and that dries up too.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/ope...
>As one final note, I don't think the rhetoric about the AI bubble is really about finances.
The people bringing it up every 10 seconds are doing it to spread FUD about AI. That doesnt really change the financial picture.
Vaushite
today at 4:15 AM
A bubble can't pop as long as most people, or at least most dollars, still think it's a bubble. Bubble pops can only take the market by surprise.
shevy-java
today at 7:31 AM
> The AI bubble is a speculative concept that the AI industry is extremely over-valued. If true, the value of most companies involved in AI (several of whom are worth well over a trillion dollars) will collapse, devastating the entire economy. If you check any online discussion about the financial situation of the AI industry, it's essentially taken for granted that the bubble exists and is going to pop any day now. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption, though.
Matteo's analysis is very flawed though. For instance, he projects that the outcome is "devastating the entire economy". Why would that have to be the case though?
The AI bubble can collapse partially. There are tons of examples of how this has happened in the past. Not everything is dot-com 2.0. What we see right now is a "consolidation" bordering on partial collapse of some of the companies' projected revenues. It makes sense to assume that there is not a complete collapse, and some companies will end up dominating more than others.
keybored
today at 7:00 AM
> If you check any online discussion about the financial situation of the AI industry, it's essentially taken for granted that the bubble exists and is going to pop any day now. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption, though.
To say that it is (essentially) taken for granted isn’t a great start to a rebuke. You have to engage with the arguments that they have, and they have presented arguments. Just see born-again clanker Dan Luu respond to Zitron’s claims.[1]
I don’t see any engagement with skeptic’s arguments in this piece.
[1] https://danluu.com/zitron/
> In other words, there's massive unmet demand for AI companies to profit from.
Of course. There are hundreds of millions of white collar workers that are jealuously hoarding their unrightful wages.
> There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for. You can't really have it both ways here.
But you can. A bubble of this magnitude will negatively impact the world, not just AI investor cretins. You can take the extreme position that AI is useless and still be worried about the fallout.
> It's completely valid to be afraid of AI taking your job, but money is going to change hands when that happens.
The conjunction here implies a contrast which I fail to see.
> As one final note, I don't think the rhetoric about the AI bubble is really about finances. Conversation about the AI bubble is too widespread for it to be a contrarian position, and too gleeful to be driven by investors' fear. More than anything, I think the supposed AI bubble has become such a large talking point because it represents the hope that things can go back to how they used to be. People are afraid of what's going to happen with AI, [...]
The always-amazing observation that your intellectual opponents have motivated reasoning. Likewise, most AI positives have motivated reasoning, like that they can enrich themselves or that they are getting so much code out of their current subscription prices.
When I write about AI it’s clear when I argue against AI itself and when I am whining about my boo-boo thoughts about losing all of my economic prospects.
> I’ve applied to seek the Liberal Party of Canada nomination
That tracks.
feearent
today at 10:01 AM
I think the last paragraph puts it pretty well
>>> As one final note, I don't think the rhetoric about the AI bubble is really about finances. Conversation about the AI bubble is too widespread for it to be a contrarian position, and too gleeful to be driven by investors' fear. More than anything, I think the supposed AI bubble has become such a large talking point because it represents the hope that things can go back to how they used to be. People are afraid of what's going to happen with AI, and rightfully so. Beyond fear for the future, AI in the present has become uncomfortably common, with AI slop everywhere online and increasingly even IRL. This has all happened so fast, it's easy to forget that ChatGPT came out a little less than 4 years ago. Our world has changed in such a scary and odd way, and while I have a pretty optimistic view of AI overall, I get why people would want it all to go away. So, people wishcast. They tell themselves that this is all a giant bubble, and one day soon, everything will crash down and immediately go back to how it used to be.
And on a personal note, this probably goes against all economic theory, but I think the larger the scale gets of money, the less "real" it becomes. The US national debt is $40.5 trillion. I personally don't think a fraction of that will ever really be paid. There are rich and poor, but once you become rich, that added richness is essentially useless, and the debt we see is a mixture of money missing from the poor person's wallet, or the money missing from a billionaire's portfolio. One of these is more sensually palpable than the other.
If your product is good enough, shows potential, and has meaning, it will get funding. I have never done a startup or gotten venture capital so it's pretentious for me to say, but I think the money just comes, through effort (and I think 100's of pitches for the new startup), and we can't always know from where. It's just there. My brain is too small to consider where that money comes from. We're not valuing money at a certain point, but just sheer utility, and so investors will be there to back you up. In decades-long terms, sometimes centuries-long.
The debt will keep building up, but so will be our infrastructural changes. Early adoptees will get rich to degrees, and investors who held a conservative view on major progress like AI (will still be rich but) will be slightly less rich. Maybe there will be unpaid debt, like the 500 billion incurring a $400 billion loss during the dot-com crash. But the technology will continue growing.
After all, money doesn't mean anything anyway (in the theoretical sense). It buys us soup, clothes, and a place to pay rent to, but it is just an agreement. And with the changes in the world economy that some of us are expecting to see after the AI revolution grows even more, I really don't know what the meaning of money will become.
roosterIllusi0n
today at 2:41 AM
Large data centers never made sense. If an additional pc with a graphics card was put into every home, we wouldn't need power grid upgrades. Our power grid is designed around human distribution i.e. homes. Large data centers cherry pick where it may be possible to quickly connect power connections up. Data centers need to secure their power connections before the utility rate hikes on everyone else generate public opposition.
If large data centers cannot secure free power connections paid for by everyone else, they cannot make any of this profitable. The whole thing was a scam from the start. This is why cloud AI companies bought up so much pc and server hardware. Artificial scarcity was the only way to slow down local llm adoption and sell the false narrative that cloud AI has value.
Plucking a graphics card out of every home and centralizing the cards to a handful of large data centers that require a trillion dollars in power grid upgrades is an idea so dumb, we should all be laughing at it. They even have to use active cooling or evaporate drinking water instead of free air cooling. The consumer doesn't benefit in any way from this. Consumers would essentially be paying more just to be datamined.
LLMs are not a bubble, large data centers are a bubble. Look at how large data centers are now the first target in any war. A graphics card in every home, doesn't give someone a concentrated target. National security makes large data centers extremely bad.
Bengalilol
today at 11:04 AM
[dead]
today at 7:38 AM
JeppyG
today at 6:13 AM
There's also the fact that the US and China are in an AI arms race. So there's an inherent existential benefit to being ahead in AI regardless of where the financial feasibility/profitability discussion lands.
And at least currently, keeping up in that arms race means a maximal push on growth at the expense of profitability. Realistically, this will go until we hit some bottleneck.
bambax
today at 7:33 AM
> There's a weird contradiction you see from AI skeptics where they're afraid of how AI will change the world, but also seem convinced that AI will only ever produce slop that nobody would ever pay money for.
Fair enough. But the real problem, it seems, is that people love slop.
My family is trying to sell a house in the South of France; the real estate people are sending us 500-words emails every so often, that are so obviously AI it hurts. Well written, and content free. Nobody cares. I'm the only one having issues with it.
At work, a new team let Claude do all their work and write all their status reports. Everybody seems to love it. It's so fast! And mostly correct! And so fast to correct when it's wrong! And here too, I'm the only one having issues with it.
A Canadian author wrote a book in French that turned out to be 100% AI ("C'était ça ou mourir"). Before that was revealed, every critic loved it, in Canada, in France and everywhere else (25 translations were started). The public loved it too: it's one of the top best sellers, and success continued even after the "scandal".
We are drowning in slop and nobody cares.
seydor
today at 3:36 AM
most of the infrastructure will be garbage in 4 years. As before, it will become a monopoly of 1-2 big players and everyone else's datacenters will become ... crypto miners or something.

I'm not convinced the AI bubble exists

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