this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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51
What will it mean for the 'AI' bubble to 'pop'? Will it get Copilot off my work computer? (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 weeks ago by KuroXppi@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

When it pops, will the current pervasive LLM and Gen'AI' slop dry up as their companies go under? Will LLM and agentic chatbots be removed from all the apps that have been shoehorning them into everything? Or will just some companies go under, some stocks lose value and people's 401ks are hollowed out

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[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 33 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Right now your consumer usage is subsidised by venture capital funding, especially from Gulf States parking oil money. If they don't offer you more than the cost of token generation for free or near-free, you have plenty of competing models that do the same thing for free. If none of them are free, there are plenty of locally-run models that are. The AI bubble popping is when the investor funds dry up and the cost of token generation is passed onto consumers. It will try to follow the same enshittification process that streaming services have, but with a less valuable product. Trying to pass those costs onto businesses that are using AI to cut costs is so contradictory that the bottom falls out for the entire market.

Copilot won't leave your computer, it will just become like Office. I remember using Word and Excel for free but now they expect a subscription that's almost as obscene as Adobe's. Basic functionality of your computer will be paywalled to make up for the costs these companies sunk into AI bullshit, during the depression they caused where nobody can afford their products.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Copilot won't leave your computer, it will just become like Office. I remember using Word and Excel for free but now they expect a subscription that's almost as obscene as Adobe's

Right. Yep, I've already seen that at my current employer. Copilot is free for the time being but there is a strong push by Microsoft to get us onto an M365 paid Copilot licence at a nominal cost per user.

The only difference between the 'baked in' Office Copilot (which is literally now the Office 'apps' landing page) and the M365 copilot is that the latter purportedly will not use your tenant data to train models.

The app is functionally the same, and the only business units who want M365 paid version rolled out are governance and IT. All staff just use the free Copilot now or use other LLMs.

So if the app is functionally the same for user output, I guess the only way they can go is to remove the free one and have people clamour for the company to pay to get it back? So like, hopefully it may disappear from some parts of the Microsoft suite?

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 20 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I've been using Windows since 3.1 and Microsoft stopped making good decisions after XP. They're such a bloated company that they're institutionally incapable of coming up with something new that's good, only doubling down on the things that have brand recognition. I could totally see them do something like make copilot run locally in the way Deepseek does but still charge a subscription fee to unlock half the functionality of Windows 12 with it.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago

I could totally see them do something like make copilot run locally in the way Deepseek does but still charge a subscription fee to unlock half the functionality of Windows 12 with it.

This sounds plausible. They'd still need to strike a balance so they can retain some of the data for training, presumably, so it wouldn't be 100% local? Who knows, they may do something similar with paywalled logic models that require online compute, and then hamstring the local only version. We'll see.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

i mean 7 was nice.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 10 points 3 weeks ago

7 was inoffensive and I'd go back to it over 11, but I liked Windows 7 because it felt like they undid all the Vista shit to restore Windows XP with a more modernised UI.

[–] marxisthayaca@hexbear.net 29 points 3 weeks ago

It means copilot will stay in your computer but do even worse, and cost your company 3 times as much.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 26 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Copilot will never go away. The only way you can get that thing off your computer is by removing Windows. The AI bubble is gonna burst but Microsoft is still gonna have LLMs baked into their OS.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That makes sense. I'm not at liberty to change the OS on my work PC, I'm already on Linux on my home laptop. How about the absolute deluge of AI slop? Do you anticipate that as those companies/platforms go under (or there aren't the data centres to run the compute) that it will ameliorate in any way?

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The AI slop is here to stay unfortunately. The bubble will pop and like 99% of AI companies will die, but LLMs are actually very easy to run locally AND at least one of the big AI companies will "win" and capture most of the AI traffic, kind of like how Google "won" search. As models get more efficient all those data centers are gonna be unnecessary, but they'll only become unnecessary because it's easy to run frontier models on your own phone or whatever. AI slop will never disappear, that's a Pandora's box that cannot be closed.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Understood.

As models get more efficient all those data centers are gonna be unnecessary, but they'll only become unnecessary because it's easy to run frontier models on your own phone or whatever.

I've read commentary here that the excess compute will go towards AI analysis for surveillance (to a greater degree than it already is), but I'm guessing there will be many un- and under-utilised data centres. Maybe we can turn them into ice skating rinks, indoor ski slopes and swimming centres after the revolution.

[–] hotcouchguy@hexbear.net 2 points 3 weeks ago

I think the reason all the AI companies want intelligence & defense contracts is a) they can claim they're essential, and should get preferential bailouts, and b) surveillance/intelligence is basically an infinite market for the excess capacity they'll be left with after the crash.

[–] tactical_trans_karen@hexbear.net 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It's going to become a new Bonzi Buddy, but it's going to be embedded into the kernel.

[–] KuroXppi@hexbear.net 15 points 3 weeks ago

The corn kernel, yim yum corn-man-khrush

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 16 points 3 weeks ago

It means Copilot will be abandoned by Microsoft but will still be on every PC and be used as a backdoor for easy hacking.

[–] Tabitha@hexbear.net 15 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

It won't be as clean and permanent as the NFT crash was. Hard to say for sure if you'll get the specific wins you're looking for.

[–] neo@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago

It's a lose-lose proposition whether the bottom of it falls out or not. The investment in AI is the only healthy looking "growth" sector in our economy. So if you don't want what feels like the looming recession to happen, then you want this fantasy to continue. But this fantasy is built on this evil technology.

And so when the bubble pops, and suddenly everyone has to pay for this shit by way of enduring a recession, at least that will make using AI itself less palatable because it won't be available for its current highly subsidized pricing, but those unemployment rates and prices on things will likely be going up.

But the technology isn't going away, much like how the atomic bomb isn't going away. It exists. It's part of reality now.

[–] gayspacemarxist@hexbear.net 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

LLMs have some uses, NFTs were pure fiction. AI will definitely deflate, but I don't see the tech going anywhere. It'll probably become way more expensive tho.

[–] rubber_chicken@hexbear.net 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Blockchain has a use and all the companies who were trying to jam blockchain into irrelevant shit are gone. I think AI companies shifting away from grabbing eyeballs to actually making money will help raise prices of enterprise licenses so more companies stop forcing it on all their employees and start rationing it. Right now our fucking chats are fed into it so when everyone signs off for the night, we get a notification that says something like "various participants wished the others a pleasant evening." That might cost a penny now but it made somebody feel like they were on the cutting edge of something. When it costs a dollar and is clearly going to remain precisely that useless, I sure hope that same somebody pulls the plug.

[–] gayspacemarxist@hexbear.net 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Blockchains aren't necessarily good or efficient things, but they do still exist. Unlike NFTs. I don't have any reason to think AI won't be the same. Transformers and LLMs are way better at NLP than anything else that has been invented so far. That's not going away, people will just have to actually justify their use once the prices start to match the costs.

That said, I think looped models, RYS, and other alt model architectures will continue to drive the training costs down like Deepseek did and totally demolish the AI company valuations. Just make it bigger was never going to be a winning strategy, it's completely naive. That's really the source of the bubble. The technology has nothing to do with it, the tech bros are just desperate for a machine god and they got caught up in their chat bot delulu about it and made it everyone's problem.

[–] krakhead@hexbear.net 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What impact do you think the LLMs will have on software engineering and the jobs in that field in the medium to long term as a technology?

[–] gayspacemarxist@hexbear.net 1 points 2 weeks ago

LLMs are extremely useful for any kind of Natural Language Processing workloads, you might need to do. They're like an order of magnitude improvement over previous techniques. Which is interesting, because Transformers actually didn't come from natural language research. They just happened to be really good at encoding language.

I am definitely a skeptic when it comes to AI usage, but I have seen case studies. Where if you meet certain very high preconditions, you can use tools like claude to port an entire application from, say react to sevelte. For this to work, though, you have to have a precise description of the semantics of your entire application. So ~100% test coverage, ~100% meaningful types coverage. Maybe not universally useful, but it does make rewrites into safer or faster languages somewhat more tractable, at least while tokens aren't too expensive.

[–] Ekranoplane@hexbear.net 1 points 3 weeks ago

You can already run quantized Chinese models on consumer hardware. The bubble is gonna burst because LLMs are becoming a cheap commodity, but the technology isn't going anywhere.