It's in the title. I've been waiting and hoping for some counterexamples, but I've concluded, and I think people need to be ready for the eventuality that the AI bubble is NOT going to burst.
That's a bold claim, but I'm prepared to back it up.
- Not adopting the AI paradigm is going to become increasingly costly
First of all, it's not going to not burst because AI is good or useful. In fact, right now, we see lots of companies pushing away from AI because it is unreliable and problematic.
But the alternative costs from the other side are creeping up. If you are a company looking to hire developers to write software, you need to provide development machines to those developers. A development machine that might have cost $2000 a couple years ago is well on the way to $6000-$7000 in the near future.
And that's small potatoes. Even if you buy those for your developers, who are still highly paid, mind you, the software they're going to be writing will NOT be for PCs - regular people are NOT going to spend that for a PC. Which means most of the software that's going to be developed will target iOS and Android... and that's it. Which will continue to put 30% of all development profits RIGHT back into the locked down AI nightmare ecosystem. It's a disgusting, negative feedback loop that's about to accelerate in ways that would've made the most nightmarish predictions 5 years ago seem conservative. You might not want to swim in the ocean of crap, but they are actively eating the pier under your feet, and using the bodies that hit the water to take it apart even faster. They are going to change the world in ways that will FORCE you into their system - you don't get a choice.
- Bubbles don't HAVE to burst anymore
Tesla hasn't put out a successful new product in 20 years, and it continues to barrel right along, with its useless hack CEO hanging on as the richest person in the world. The old rules do not apply, and the sooner we acknowledge it, the sooner we can prepare for the new normal.
- NOBODY who is responsible for enforcing anything like responsible economic activity will EVER allow the bubble to burst
WHO is going to allow the bubble to burst? The investors who would lose everything? The SEC that would collapse the entire economy by not turning a blind eye? The captured politicians that are being paid billions to be complicit?
Let's be clear... the invisible hand of the market, to the extent it ever existed, certainly does not now. The idea the market is fair and responds properly to economic activity requires all actors to act, if not in good faith, at least SELF-INTERESTEDLY against each other as checks and balances on each other to verify the veracity of real claims about the economy. Is ANYBODY deluded enough to think that's happening? Everyone who could potentially blow the whistle or pop the bubble knows each other and they all have guns pointed at each other's heads knowing they all go down together. It will NOT be allowed to pop, and if that means making up numbers out of whole cloth, it's going to happen. If people won't rise up when their pedophile president is murdering people in the streets, they're certainly not going to when OpenAI claims 1 trillion in profit out of nowhere. Add to the fact that small investors who MIGHT get skittish are SUCH a small and irrelevant piece of the pie in these economic transactions that even if they all pulled out, the machine could not be stopped, and you realize that there is no stopping this nightmare.
It's not going to pop. Barring a revolution, we are on an inexorable course to the most awful tech dystopia imaginable. And even revolution is unlikely to be enough. Most people are so addicted to corporate tech that they're more likely to link arms and defend the headquarters of their favorite social media than take up arms against it. Make no mistake... the end of consumer facing open hardware is not a temporary redirection of resources to a failing bubble - it is a complete shift in the entire paradigm of how people use technology, bringing it under the complete control of a very few. This is not the latest salvo in an ongoing battle - it is the final bomb that has ended the war, and there's nothing left but slow attrition until personal computing and the very concept of devices you own and control sit in the dustbin of history with cars you could work on yourself.
I want nothing more than to be wrong. I am not happy to doomsay here. But to pretend this is some kind of blip in a machine that's going to stabilize someday is to ignore every single bit of functioning pattern recognition I have.
I don't have a good conclusion. I guess - hug your families, hoard what tech you can, and maybe make offgrid plans now. Good luck to all of us.
This isn't true because development doesn't have to be on a max powered system. Myself, I work on AS400 stuff. The compiler is on the remote machine. The database is on the remote machine. The JVM is on the remote machine. All I need is an editor and the ability to SSH into the machine, that's all that's required for development. SQL queries? I do those in a web tab, the query is ran on the remote machine.
I could easily write all the code, debugging, SQL queries, ORM, the Java stuff, node.js stuff (Yes, AS400 has node.js and it works pretty well with COBOL objects), and so on, on a Raspberry Pi if I needed to. And this might surprise people and then there will be people who this won't surprise. Because waaaaaaaaaaaayyy back, that's how it actually worked. You had a terminal and the machine you wrote code for and debugged and what not was in the basement and you were talking to it via some twinax. We've done way more development on a machine nowhere near us than we have on our own machines historically speaking.
As for the mobile stuff. That'll figure itself out. Or it won't and we just have wrappers called apps, that are just fullscreen web page. But again, the AS400, we had a product from Profound that basically wrapped a web app into a "native" app and the product from Profound handled all the stuff like taking a picture and putting on the IFS for an RPG program to pick up.
There's all kinds of ways around this notion that devs won't have beefy laptops, that's literally the way we used to do it for nearly forty years.
This conflates a ton of unrelated things. Tesla has been unseated by BYD, but the US Government still is hung up about Chinese car makers enter the US market. Musk is the richest person because his wealth is largely predicated on the US economy, which because of the previous international cooperation stood as the leader. Everyday we are witnessing the US becoming weaker on the global stage, which means that his wealth translates less and less to things outside of the US. The US Stock Market is only a big thing because the US and the dollar is the thing so many things are pegged to. When that ceases being the case, the US Stock Market loses value in an international sense and since Musk's wealth it largely tied to that, so too does his wealth go down.
But the success of Tesla, isn't actually success, it's story of the incredibly sorry state US automakers are in that they can't provide a solid alternative. But don't get confused. Tesla sales are slowing drastically. This why we are seeing consolidation of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX. They're being consolidated because they're hitting rough patches standing alone.
So please don't confuse the odd situation of Tesla with
Bubbles don't HAVE to burst anymore. Those are not correct conclusions here. Ford, GM, and the rest of US automakers are so down BAD at the moment that Tesla is able to shine. That's really the only thing keeping them floating, US car makers are jokes at this point.Greed. That's what you are speaking of. But greedy people come in all kinds of flavors. And there's no shortage of people who short the market and make mad cash doing so. Greed is universal, but the "upside" (I guess we'll call it that) is that the system allows greedy people to bet against the system. There are people putting money into this whole thing crashing down and the bigger the fall the bigger the reward. There were a ton of people who make billions when the housing market crashed. People watched 9/11 and were betting that the market would collapse in response. Don't underestimate people's greed. There are people who would bet money on innocent people getting shot if the odds were good.
Now all that said, there's a difference between this AI bubble and the technology. Like if the bubble pops, AI will still be a thing, the bubble is not AI itself, it's how we're developing AI at the breakneck speed we're going at.
This is a fantastic perspective overall that I'm glad to have read.
One quick note that's very minor is I just sort of threw out the $6-7000 for the increasing costs of development machines, not as an absolute factor, but as a stand-in for the idea that the consumer hardware capture by AI companies gives them a huge amount of leverage to artificially increase development costs for most companies, not the idea that development can't be done on cheaper hardware. I should've probably been clearer about that up top.
Well I can say technology stack cost is a consideration, but it isn't a leading consideration. Even in the scope of AI, the machine cost isn't the primary factor. The single biggest cost for development is scope and complexities. This is the thing AI is looking to address, ease complexity of projects. And I don't say that as a promotion for AI, just, that's what the advertisement is all about for the stuff.
The largest cost is things just being way too complex and right behind that is hiring. I've known companies to let go of staff too soon and it's cost them when they need new talent back in. It's cheaper in the long run to just give raises to people who've been there than fire them and look for new young blood. I usually say this to C-staff as. We don't need a lot of energy to keep a rock shaped as a wheel rolling, but if you stop it and it falls flat, you're going to paying to upright that stone. Sometimes that is what is required, sometimes that is not the case. But it's a choice no one should be making lightly without a serious consideration of what's to come.
Third party integrations are also a big cost and again, that's something AI is "supposed to" help with. And it's kind of the same reason as the first. Complexity. And that's the big thing you should keep in mind when normal people talk about AI. Complexity. It'll help you to understand kind of both sides of the AI debate. We are asking for more, faster, with more complex interactions and a team trying to keep on top of all of that is ..... really hard to say the least. You know we've come up with all kinds of "solutions" to solve that complexity, which I won't go into but things like CI, agile development, etc are examples of that. And ask anyone, quote/unquote agile is a ... complicated topic to broach. It absolutely has it's fans and detractors, there's no one universal consensus.
But as AI eats all the hardware in existence apparently, there's a tipping point where even if it ate all of it, that consumption cuts off people from getting to the product itself. At some point people will need a device to access AI for AI to be useful. We don't have grocery stores located in a remote location far from everyone in a forest for a reason.
The more likely thing is that AI carves out the upper end of the industry. Think for a second. The nVidia 5090 Blackwell architecture surpasses the H100/H200 Blackwell architecture in AI performance. That 5090 is consumer grade. It's wild to think about that the consumer market has the room for such a massively powerful device. But I feel that's going to change. Let's imagine the nVidia 6090! A hypothetical next-gen GPU. In the AI world, the 6090 isn't marketed toward consumers, it's a enterprise device. Just like you wouldn't run into some average gamer running a Threadripper CPU, that's HPC territory. Instead the 6090 becomes consumer grade after five years, and it's the top of the line consumer GPU when it hits. The reality is that they're just putting the 6090s that they couldn't sell into consumer friendly boxes.
We have to understand that consumer grade has encompassed a LOT. And yes, we are having a massive knee-jerk to that right now. I say that the over reaction that's playing out is going to hurt the "AI bubble" more than it helps. We've yet to see if AI companies have "bit off more than they can chew". If these chips are produced and the AI companies miss a payment, that's one thing. But if they keep on missing payments for hardware delivered, it will topple the whole effing thing that we'll be replacing Humpty Dumpty with Sam Altman in children's songs. Not that they went bankrupt or anything, but we would see a surge of GPUs hitting the market causing prices to plummet faster than a Boeing aircraft. The sheer ripple would begin ripping apart start ups, slowly moving it's way up to the end points that provide AI services, and it would just keep going like a snowball down a Swiss ski resort's freshly tended to snow.
AI companies would indeed have leverage, but that's a double sided sword to swing. They can do a lot more harm to themselves than good. We just don't know right now because this is all new. And yeah, our monkey brains hate it when we don't know something, but that's really all that can be said at this point. We just don't know, the interwoven chart everyone panders around where A is buy B, selling to C, who sells to A and buys from B, etc, etc, etc usually ends badly. But this situation has a lot of "unique"... "investors", aka, there's a shit ton of corruption Governments around the world are overlooking. But there's still very greedy people betting against them all because if their bet pays out, they'll be billionaires overnight.