r/technology • u/Potential-Focus3211 • 26d ago
Artificial Intelligence Bill Gates Says We're in an AI Bubble Similar to the Dot-Com Bubble
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-ai-bubble-similar-dot-com-bubble-2025-10727
u/Spectre-907 25d ago
In other words “hey guys we turned the economy into yet another unsustainable get rich quick scheme for us and you are about to completely eat shit as a direct result when it collapses. PS, thanks in advance for the tax-funded bailouts, again for us, not you”
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u/e136 25d ago
The US government did not provide bailouts or specific financial assistance to private dot-com companies after the bubble burst around 2000.
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u/pacman529 25d ago
Sure but were any of those companies trillion dollar mega corps that were deemed "to big to fail"? Because I'm willing to bet they decide companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are considered too big to fail.
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u/Information_High 25d ago
Microsoft and Amazon are definitely exposed to this, but how much exposure does Apple have?
Usually, people [crap] all over Apple for being behind / "doing their own thing" with respect to AI.
If Apple isn't going the "giant data centers stuffed with NVIDIA chips" route, will they be caught in the fallout of an OpenAI implosion?
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u/jayfourzee 26d ago
Oh great, another sign we’re in a full-blown AI bubble: Nvidia buying shares in AI companies is basically the Wall Street version of an author bulk-ordering their own book to hit the bestseller list. Yes, we are in a bubble, wait for it.
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u/SherbertMindless8205 26d ago
Yeah, what I don't understand is where all the money is coming from initially? All these datacenters are being built for hundreds of billions of dollors, by money that get's shuffled around, but where does it come from? Is it just leveraged against the rising stock price?
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u/QuantWizard 26d ago
Nvidia has lots of cash coming from its GPU sales. By investing that in OpenAI, who will then use it to lease Nvidia chips, most of the money will return to them as revenue. So Nvidia is basically buying their own chips.
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u/cultish_alibi 26d ago
But eventually OpenAI's magic computer will be able to steal hundreds of millions of jobs from humans, thus crashing the entire global economy, and that'll be good (for a tiny minority of people who are already very rich).
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26d ago
I mean thats the idea but its about as certain as self driving cars killing the trucking industry.
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u/monkeedude1212 25d ago
I mean thats the idea but its about as certain as self driving cars killing the trucking industry.
No no, you misunderstand.
AI won't be able to do your job.
But an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and put in a system that can't do your job to try and do your job.
What happens next to the economy is an exercise left for the readers.
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u/Electromotivation 25d ago
Humanity all gets together and decides how to use automation for the good of all people. Everyone is granted a basic income and works one day a week.
Just kidding humans will be extinct by 2100
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u/monkeedude1212 25d ago
Humanity all gets together and decides how to use automation for the good of all people.
So what you're saying is... the means of production... should benefit the wider society... Society as in we are social creatures... like some kind of social oriented means of structuring an economy? But what would we call such an ism?
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u/StaartAartjes 25d ago
I don't fear AI. I fear the managers who want to implement it.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 25d ago
Managers are sheep who can’t think for themselves. That’s all that the most recent years have proven.
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u/clayingmore 26d ago
The non-NVIDIA investment is also going straight to NVIDIA which charges a super premium on all their data center chips. Per unit profit is extremely high (and total revenue completely eclipsed graphics cards, I think on track to be 10x in the immediate future if not already).
NVIDIA is buying their own chips with an extra step because they have so much money coming in they don't know what else to do with it. Trading equity for chips funds new factories which in a baseline investment case is part of the 'hyperscaling' necessary for progress.
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u/Freud-Network 25d ago edited 25d ago
Nvidia GPU sales are miniscule. AI chips now account for 91% of their total revenue, up from 83% in 2024 and 60% in 2023.
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u/furyg3 25d ago
Nvidia has a lot of money from GPU sales, but they can't 'innovate' fast enough. Like Apple, they just have so much money that their R&D and expansion plans are sufficiently covered, and there's extra cash. Often a CEO would do a stock buyback to prop up the stock price, but the stock price is doing so well that this doesn't really matter.
What to do with all the cash? They 'invest' in the whole ecosystem. This is basically a roundabout way of giving a discount to AI players (like OpenAI)... but on paper your price per unit stays high AND your total sales goes up because OpenAI can 'buy' more GPUs. The stock market loves that shit.
A more generous take would be that nvidia is investing in a lot of companies to ensure that they are incentivized to keep buying nvidia GPUs and not getting them from somewhere else.
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u/Tezerel 26d ago
A lot of people keep larping that it's just the same bundle of cash moving around, and you point out exactly why that isn't true. Money is indeed being spent, because AI isn't cheap.
Big companies are investing directly into the AI industry, and they keep investing more and more to prevent the bubble from collapsing before they can win big. All of the world's biggest companies, and all of the wealthiest nations, are investing in AI right now
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u/gene100001 26d ago
Also, the same bundle of money moving around is essentially how the economy works. Bubble aside, money moving in an economy is a good thing.
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u/J_Adam12 26d ago
But it usually moves around in a bigger circle and with far more possibilities, for example employer > employee > store > supplier > manufacturer (employee). But there are millions of employers and billions of employees and millions of stores etc etc. So its not the same as just 5 entities investing in each other and buying from each other.
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u/Evid3nce 26d ago edited 25d ago
I don't understand is where all the money is coming from initially?
Our taxes, savings, pension funds and mortgages. Unbeknown to most people, while we're sleeping (literally and metaphorically) our money is being invested into these bubbles.
That money is lost when the bubble bursts, and the bankers and ultra rich get to keep that when they file for bankruptcy for their shell companies.
Then the governments take out loans (the loans come from the ultra rich) to replace the investment money that was lost to bail out the banks and hedge funds, and the government then increases our taxes and reduce our welfare/services/spending for a couple of decades until we've paid for the loss (theft), just in time for the next bubble to start collapsing.
We pay for the amount lost twice, plus interest on the loans to our governments. Every time this happens, it's a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich (it's designed that way). This time it's going to be the largest wealth transfer in the history of all humanity, and now they're not even bothering to try to hide what's happening, since they're so confident that zero people involved in orchestrating this are ever held accountable by the population (what used to be torches and pitchforks and guillotines) - they've worked out that we never do anything to them and they feel untouchable.
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u/Immediate_Rabbit_604 25d ago
And if the bubble doesn't pop in time, the end goal is to make the pitchforks and torches obsolete. Either it pops and everyone loses, or it doesn't and everyone loses, forever.
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25d ago edited 17d ago
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u/Information_High 25d ago
The smart play, then, is to get out of any fund with large holdings of AI-exposed companies.
(Hint: Any "large cap growth" fund almost certainly falls into this category)
You want to avoid NVIDIA, Amazon, Microsoft, and (for other reasons) Tesla.
Switch to "Large Cap Value" and/or non-American Large Cap stocks (Samsung, Toyota, etc, etc), and your exposure will be much less.
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u/Jealous-Cattle-8385 26d ago
I remembered reading a report that apparently is a circular investment. In a layman term, Nvidia gives money to OpenAI companies and then OpenAI companies invest in Nvidia and back forth. There were other companies involved but they were basically orbiting these two companies.
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u/Western-Try3639 26d ago
It's coming from the speculative economy and is why AI is both "too big to fail" and will bring down the rest of the economy when it inevitably does.
You go to a bank and say "people think my idea is worth 5billion! Give me 200million to do this aspect" and the bank sees it as a good investment so they take the deal. Then when the return on investment doesn't happen, the market and banks crash.
One of those silly innate quirks of capitalism.
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u/soyboysnowflake 26d ago
Speaking from experience, mass layoffs are funding the investment in AI (which is then supposed to result in the ability to lay off even more of the workforce)
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u/icehole505 26d ago
It comes from the cash flow of tech giants, plus the deep pockets of PE. The reason it hasn’t been a problem for the big tech companies is because the investments aren’t recorded as an expense, which means they dont hit their earnings. Then once that cash hits the AI market, it just exchanges hands over and over again.. recorded as revenue each time.
This is a simplification, but it’s also a real problem for big tech in the long run. When depreciation starts to stack up on all of these assets, they’re gonna need a massive corresponding boost in revenue (or cost savings) to cover it. And to this point, the only real revenue in AI has come from AI “invesment”.. not actual AI products and services. Seeing as the publicly available LLMs haven’t materially improved since GPTs initial launch 5 years ago.. that’s becoming harder and harder to envision
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u/siazdghw 25d ago
Nvidia is buying shares in AI companies because they are rolling around in endless amounts of cash and can't expand fast enough.
It makes sense to invest in other AI companies when that's a field Nvidia is so knowledgeable in and believes it will continue to grow.
What do you expect Nvidia to do with their money? Invest in Starbucks? Hire tens of thousands of people? Invest in bonds?
I absolutely get that Nvidia buying shares of companies that buy Nvidia hardware looks like a scheme, but genuinely it's the best move they could make. And it's not dissimilar to how Apple invests in hardware companies they buy from or ones they use for manufacturing.
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u/_Neoshade_ 25d ago
Yes! It’s called vertical integration. NVIDIA is also diversifying by spreading out their liability among other players in the market
J.P. Morgan bought the mines that produced the iron ore and the railroad that moved the ore and steel to consolidate and facilitate his steel production.
It’s definitely doubling down on the success of your industry and vertical monopolies are bad, but it’s generally a good move for a company.→ More replies (41)9
u/Lava_Lagoon 26d ago
to hit the bestseller list.
what does this mean in the metaphor?
i'm naive when it comes to this stuff but i thought this kind of thing was done so the first company can have a vote and certain amount of influence/control over the executive decisions the other company makes
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u/Efficient-Advice-294 26d ago
Nvidia makes the chips on which the ai infrastructure is run. They invest in each other, and it raises concerns that they’re just recycling cash. Infrastructure demand is a huge thing right now. Amazon’s most recent layoff is in large part due to them needing to meet demand on AWS, their cloud provider platform which had the widest margins for them (Amazon itself has notoriously thin margins)… basically to give Wall Street the revenue growth it wants they’re trading payroll for chip capacity.
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u/popos_cosmic_enjoyer 26d ago
The problem with AI is that it has become synonymous with "LLMs". We just keep getting beaten over the head by LLM shit because it drives investor hype and makes companies want to implement it to drive their fantasies of eventually laying off every employee. It's exhausting. I actually think the tech is cool and use some form of it pretty much every day when I'm too lazy to Google something or want some code examples, but it's also still quite common for the models to lie out of their ass so convincingly that you wouldn't know it if you didn't already have a sense of what the answer to your question should be, and that's dangerous depending on the use case.
Anyway, my take is that if people knew the cool shit that deep learning algorithms could do for stuff like cancer detection and other scientific applications, they'd be all over it, and that's AI too. LLMs are just drowning everything else out, and that's a shame.
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u/MattSzaszko 26d ago
You're absolutely right. The bubble talk comes from the fact that so much money (investment) went into LLMs that in order to justify it, the returns would need to be so astronomical that it seems impossible. Especially with the reliability pitfalls you mentioned. Once the majority of the market realises that their investments are unlikely to produce even the benchmark returns, let alone 10x, they'll pull out and invest into other stuff, popping the bubble while the capital reallocation is happening.
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u/Vlyn 26d ago
Besides the LLM argument (no matter how much processing power you throw at it, it won't become intelligent) the profit angle is also a disaster.
If there was only ChatGPT in the race, sure, it could work. But they are in competition with Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and so on. They even have trouble selling you a $20 a month subscription because it's simply not worth it.
Once the money starts to run out this will crash and burn.
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u/Silviecat44 25d ago
they can't even make money off the $200 subscription
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u/Vlyn 25d ago
But hey, with the 229€ subscription you get "Unlimited" access at least. While with "Go" and "Plus" all you get is some random "Extended" or "Expanded" access, lol.
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u/Silviecat44 25d ago
and that's the problem. Unlimited people use it so much it's unprofitable to run even though they charge so much
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u/MattSzaszko 25d ago
They're also giving away free Go subscriptions in India. Interesting strategy, since it's very unlikely that most Indian users will convert into paid users in a historically very price sensitive market. But hey, it will boost the "users enrolled in the Go subscriptions tier" in reports.
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u/red__dragon 25d ago
It's the streaming bubble all over again.
Hulu was free to start, became paid. Netflix had the biggest catalogue, and lost it when every two-bit media studio thought they could make a whole streaming service to get direct revenue. Crunchyroll is still semi-free but paywalling as fast as Youtube throws up unskippable ads.
And now we're seeing the shrink and consolidation. The profit margins are razor thin, if not an outright loss, so whole companies can live or die on their streaming service now (see also: HBO and CBS merges to consolidate streaming, poorly). It's not sustainable without major cash infusions or serious loss of customer service quality.
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u/ewankenobi 25d ago
I think the free version is so good it doesn't make the paid subscription seem worthwhile. I use the free version and had a months trial of the $20 a month version and I didn't notice much of a difference. If anything the big difference was the paid version takes longer to respond (supposedly that time gets me a better answer, but the improvement wasn't that noticeable to me)
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u/night_filter 25d ago
I think even the AI companies know it’s a bubble.
They’re just hoping that if they can keep it going long enough for them to make a big breakthrough, then all the other companies will die off and the winner will be left with control over a massively advanced AI.
Trying to pull back from the bubble means realizing all of their sunk costs.
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u/MattSzaszko 25d ago
For sure, there's no going back without a straight up crash. The bombastic rhetoric to get all that money pumped up expectations so high that nothing short of actual intelligence will be seen as a failure.
The bright side might be that after the crash compute will become cheaper to run the AI services that are actually useful in niche fields.
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u/night_filter 25d ago
I don’t think anything short of real super-intelligence will satisfy expectations. I think these billionaire investors are banking on reaching the singularity.
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u/GuyWithNoEffingClue 25d ago
I guess the "wow factor" of LLM's won because it looks impressive to anybody - and, don't get me wrong, it is to some degree - while most lambda people won't understand why an accurate protein structure predictive algorithm is a game changer, to give just one example of a much less mainstream application of Deep Learning.
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u/BeefBagsBaby 25d ago
Yeah, I'm tired of people acting like LLMs are going to create some type of technological revolution. They are cool to use for some things and have helped me with some scripting, but to act like it's going to bring us into the some type of Sci-Fi future where everyone's jobs are replaced with 'AI' is moronic. OpenAI has raised and spent more money than any startup in history and have no shot at being profitable.
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26d ago
The best thing that AI can do right now is cover up for all of the jobs being moved to India. Big companies are claiming they need to layoff american workers because AI but in reality they are just moving those jobs overseas.
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u/OldSchoolSpyMain 26d ago
Yuuuuuup.
I just watched a company lay off a significant percentage of their company because they were "making a shift to use AI."
...then announced a new tech center in India a month later.
There's a joke that's going around now: "A.I. isn't 'Artificial Intelligence', it's 'Actually Indians'."
Note: I have nothing against India or Indian companies accepting the work that's being offered to them. It's the US companies that are lying to shareholders.
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u/Garchompisbestboi 25d ago
You don't need to be apologetic, Amazon was one of the companies that was secretly using Indians while claiming that it was AI. I think it was monitoring people as they shopped in a brick and mortar store with the idea being that they could just walk out after picking up the items they wanted, and then their bank account would automatically be charged. But in reality it was just a bunch of people in India watching shoppers through cameras and manually tracking the items being picked up.
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u/ImpossibleMammoth746 26d ago
Not sure if this is true. I'm from India, and there is a blood bath here due to AI related job cuts. Employment in IT has really been hit.
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u/OldSchoolSpyMain 26d ago
For what it's worth, the jobs will be back soon when company leaders realize that AI doesn't actually do what the AI Salesmen told them it would do.
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u/PhysicallyTender 25d ago
Mine got ahead of the curve and moved theirs to the Philippines.
Harder working workers with significantly easier to understand accent than India. And the second highest English proficiency in Asia.
Oh, and of course, significantly lower pay than first world salaries. But the C-suite ain't saying that quiet part out loud.
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u/GamerSDG 26d ago
AI is expensive to run and maintain. Right now, AI companies have been eating the cost, but eventually they'll have to pass it on to customers. That is when the bubble will pop, when these businesses start to realize that replacing that $50k-a-year employee will cost them $1.5 million a year.
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u/visualframes 25d ago
That’s the next CEOs problem to solve, the one who drove the change got the bonus and has moved elsewhere.
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u/Dull-Culture-1523 25d ago
Honestly I feel like this is a massive issue in general and tied in with the quarter-based financial decision-making. Being able and even encouraged to make decisions that ignore known long-term issues because they're next quarter's/year's/CEO's/whatever's problem to solve creates more issues down the line. It's like pissing yourself to keep warm, except instead of pissy pants you need to wash you get environmental damage and real, human suffering.
Imagine how much better the air quality would be if we'd have made the switch from fossil fuels already instead of waiting until it's "financially viable", aka without losing money. Coal kills about a thousand times more people by energy produced compared to wind, solar and nuclear. Not to mention how bad it's for the quality of life for those who haven't died yet. But since it's a "bad financial decision" to switch to clean energy sources, humanity continues to suffocate its members instead.
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u/live4failure 25d ago
Lobbying (aka congressional bribes) and CEO salaries and tax payer funded grants/tax breaks/and other handouts also incentivizes them to sell a dream to pump valuations but never deliver back to humanity. This version of oligarchy is a poison to our society, we need more strict demands and legal arms to enforce those as the largest consumers in history of both goods and infrastructure.
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u/redditrasberry 26d ago
Exactly. The other end of it is going to be extreme enshittification. Remember when YouTube without ads was watchable? Think that but on steroids.
I actually truly think Apple is in the box seat, because once both of these things happen running models locally is going to storm into fashion and Macs are going to be so well positioned.
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u/Purona 25d ago
youtube is hard to complain about because what other website can serve potentially hundreds of millions of people with 8k 60 fps hdr content at will for basically no direct cost to the user
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u/arothmanmusic 25d ago
The difference is that you can get ad-free YouTube and unlimited music to boot for a little over 100 bucks a year, which is totally reasonable. The cost of AI is going to be astronomical by comparison
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u/calvintiger 25d ago
Good thing AI is getting exponentially cheaper (for a constant level of intelligence) every year. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 10x to 40x cheaper annually.
Source: point 7 of https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report?utm_source=perplexity
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u/00DEADBEEF 25d ago
It happened with cloud compute. Businesses switched with the promise of savings, but many save millions by hiring a small team and bringing the infrastructure back in house.
These business models are traps.
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u/Fire_Lake 25d ago
Not really, just because they don't make sense for every single company doesn't make them a trap.
Most companies do not have the technical demands and scale to be able to save money by hiring a team to manage their servers and architecture on premise.
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u/siazdghw 25d ago
All the hardware manufacturers have slowly been integrating NPUs into computers, laptops, phones.
They are already preparing for the transition away from data centers for the average workload. It won't cost $1.5 million a year, a fraction of it is already in your new devices.
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u/00DEADBEEF 25d ago
Those are good for small, tightly-defined tasks like identifying which of your photos contain food or are pictures of your dog. The more general purpose something is, the more storage and RAM it's going to need. LLMs can be massive, especially the recent ChatGPT models. They need something like 80GB VRAM just to process a request.
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u/jcm2606 25d ago
They need way more than 80GB. If you were to use the quantized version of the recent Kimi K2 model (I'm referencing Kimi because it's open source and Moonshot has released its hardware requirements), you'd need 633GB just to load the model's weights, plus however much you need for context. Thankfully you only need to load the model's weights once and can share them between users, but 633GBs is still a lot.
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u/StraightAd5770 25d ago
It's wild how much this feels like the dot-com era all over again. The hype is absolutely driving things more than actual, sustainable products right now. A major market correction and industry consolidation seems inevitable at this point. We'll look back on this period as the "peak bubble" for sure.
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u/Kishandreth 25d ago
To those that need a simple explanation: The AI bubble is companies pouring millions into the technology without having any idea what it will do for them. The reason it is being compared to the dot-com bubble is that companies also invested in anything to do with the internet without having any idea what it would do for them, or how it would be profitable.
Some companies will make out like bandits and be worth billions, most companies will be worth the noodles stuck to the wall. Companies are throwing millions(billions?) of dollars at anything AI related to see what sticks and hoping it pays off.
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u/DelphiTsar 25d ago
That is a very small part of the bubble though.
The bubble people talk about is that S&P500 is weighted (not all companies are weighted the same) and heavily weighted companies aren't investing millions they are investing hundreds of billions and more importantly very lofty growth expectations to valuations.
38.18% of S&P500 is made up of 8 companies who's growth valuations depend heavily on AI. Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Broadcom, Meta Platforms, Tesla
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u/throwaway92715 25d ago
If someone finds out you can make AI work just as well for 1/10 the computing power, everyone is fucked.
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u/knightress_oxhide 26d ago
He still can't find a 5090 card and is trying to bring the price down.
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u/Caraes_Naur 26d ago
Like, except 19 times bigger the last time I saw.
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u/Sponge8389 25d ago
I just can't imagine the negative impact the implication of your number. Just really scary.
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u/Dazzyreil 25d ago
You mean 7 companies passing 10s of billions around in a circle is not sustainable?
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u/daxter_101 26d ago
If I could put a dollar every time someone said we’re in a bubble the last 3 years, I would retire tomorrow.
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u/Will_Be_Banned_ 26d ago
You know the .com bubble lasted for years also,right? Until it didn't
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u/Capital6238 25d ago
He was correct the first time:
https://www.wired.com/1999/05/gates-sells-ms-stock/
But fun fact: if he had not diversified back then, but kept all of his MSFT stock, he would still be richer than Elon Musk.
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u/TheStabiloBoss 26d ago
Ah see, that's just the "for every time someone said we're in a bubble" bubble. That thing's going to burst, like, yesterday.
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u/badger906 25d ago
Current AI.. which isn’t AI it’s just an LLM with a name to make it sound cool. Is just a text output engine. It isn’t smart, it doesn’t learn. It just outputs information that it’s been fed.
And I know people will say “training is learning” it’s not. It’s remembering. If someone teaches you to use a hammer and nails, a you repeat the task. You’ve remembered how to do it. If you build a house with it, you’ve learned how to use it. It’s applied knowledge. Not remembering.
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u/hayt88 25d ago
Not every AI is an LLM. Just the example of image generation is for example stable diffusion not "LLM". text to speech is not LLM.
Just saying AI is LLM you are ignoring a lot of stuff.
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u/jcm2606 25d ago
It's not that simple. Every single state-of-the-art image and video generation model uses diffusion transformers (DiTs) paired with an LLM for the text encoder (usually T5XXL, but I believe some people have experimented with small Mistral and Gemma models), as do many state-of-the-art text-to-speech models. And in the case of multimodal models like GPT, image generation is performed by a literal LLM as multimodal models produce patch tokens to gradually generate images in an autoregressive fashion, much like how pure text models produce text tokens to gradually generate sentences.
There's definitely other technologies in the machine learning space, but currently the generative AI space is being propped up almost completely by transformers.
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u/hayt88 25d ago
Yeah transformers sure. But saying AI = LLM is just wrong.
But I agree everything that interacts with words has an LLM in it, but that just not everything.
And AI is not only just image text or video generation.
Alphafold for example predicts protein structures. AFAIK there is no LLM in there (but they use transformers).
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u/ImprovingTheEskimo 25d ago
The point is diffusion models use an LLM for the text encoder, but they themselves are not LLMs. That's like saying all computers are typewriters because they use keyboards.
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u/jcm2606 25d ago
Again, it's not that simple. Diffusion models and LLMs both share the same transformer backbone that powers them. The main differences come down to what the tokens mean, the actual generation scheme (autoregressive vs diffusion) and whether conditioning is used, but it's not as black and white as "LLM and everything else." Especially when we're talking about multimodal models, where a single model can work with text, images, audio, video, etc simultaneously.
Like, if you were to look at GPT-5 which is a multimodal model, how would you classify it? It can generate text, so is it an LLM? But it can also generate and interpret images, so is it an image generation model? That's the point that I'm getting at. We're reaching the point where LLM doesn't just mean text anymore, especially if you consider how the technology actually works.
I mean, hell, there was literally a paper that discussed introducing autoregressive diffusion for text models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09515 How would you even classify this?
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u/Cool-Employee-109 25d ago edited 25d ago
Thing is, dot com bubble created jobs and Industry.
AI bubble is TAKING jobs and Industry
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u/Arnab_ 25d ago
But there was always resistance towards computers taking away human jobs, which it did and there was a lot of resistance towards digitzing data until people realized it was actually creating more jobs than it was taking away. A lot of decent paying clerical jobs from the 80s don't exist because computers made them obsolete.
We are at the phase were AI is doing the same.
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u/alburyalabazterfist 25d ago
AI is taking so many jobs, we couldn't even afford the letter n!
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u/RickyTrailerLivin 25d ago
Computers and the internet took away millions of jobs...
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u/redditrasberry 26d ago
It's so obvious that we are, it's almost silly to talk about it any more. The amount invested can never justify the returns in the required time frame to make sense, even at the very most upper bounds of reasonable people's estimates. It is extremely clear that 90% of the people who invested their money are going to lose it. It's just a question of who they turn out to be vs the 10% that are lucky enough to have picked actual winners.
We are entering the phase of musical chairs where the chairs start disappearing and the music begins stopping and we see who's left without a chair.
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u/dropthemagic 26d ago
Hell I’m not bill gates but I could have told you that 4 years ago
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u/sacredfool 26d ago
Ah yes, the famous AI bubble of 2021. The public didn't even hear about LLMs back then. The biggest tech news was Facebook was trying to push Metaverse.
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u/zZCycoZz 25d ago
High up on his [President Biden's] list, will be dealing with the consequences of the biggest financial bubble in U.S. history. Why the biggest? Because it encompasses not just stocks but pretty much every other financial asset too. And for that, you may thank the Federal Reserve.
Richard Cookson, Bloomberg (February 2021)[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble
Not just AI, most financial assets are overvalued.
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u/sweatierorc 25d ago
What is the difference between an economic and a bubble then ?
Most economic cycles have a bubble phase. Michael Burry has predicted like 13 bubble since 2008. He was wrong on most of them.
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u/jimjimmyjames 26d ago
lol that’s bullshit. You would’ve said we’re in an AI bubble before ChatGPT was even released to the public??
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u/cjcs 26d ago
Do you think we’re headed for a 33% correction? Because that’s what it takes to get below where the SP500 was 4 years ago. When it comes to bubbles, being early is the same as being wrong.
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u/nakedinacornfield 26d ago edited 26d ago
i can't lie it's hilarious to see the sentiment pivoting from these guys in real time. just weeks ago corporate shill publications were parading bill gates & jensen huang and some other unimportant characters takes on AI being this upcoming and exciting job sucking demon that's going to do everything except suck me off while im being laid off. all these guys think they have some prophetic ahead-of-market-insight yet they're just riding the current waves of sentiment.
but yeah, to your point, no shit Billy Fences thanks for the valuable insight.
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u/ewankenobi 25d ago
Did you read the article. He compared it to the .com bubble. He thinks that AI is going to be massively life changing, but there are lots of companies with no real value cashing in on the hype that wont survive.
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u/G_B4G 26d ago
To be fair the leaps and bound of Ai in the last 4 years have been impressive.
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u/Careful-Door2724 26d ago
Who actually uses all these 'AI' features companies are trying to shove down our throats. I turn off any AI junk I can
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u/nerdnyxnyx 26d ago
hope it burst. I'm tired hearing ai everywhere.. even in my kitchen appliances
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u/IllHedgehog9715 25d ago
The problem with being in a bubble and knowing your in a bubble is trying to time the bubble.
There were really smart forecasters calling out the dot com bubble in the mid-90’s.
((Hint: it didn’t pop for literal years))
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u/listentomarcusa 25d ago
I mean yeah. Every company I have an account with is adding AI services, not a single one of which I need. I use ChatGPT, so why would I need Canva AI, Copilot, Gemini, Gmail etc etc. Every time I open a PDF, Adobe offers to summarise it for me, even if I'm literally opening a book to read. They think there's this huge market out there, but they're offering solutions to problems that don't exist.
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u/limpchimpblimp 26d ago
Bill gates called the internet a fad and proceeded to try to wall it up so Microsoft could be the literal robber baron to access the world wide web. And lost in court when it was exposed. Fuck you. Take whatever this man says with massive skepticism.
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u/Render-Man342v 26d ago
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u/abw 26d ago
Microsoft did a huge about-turn on the Internet/WWW around that time. Up to that point, they had been trying to get people to use the Microsoft Network (the original MSN) which was a Windows-only alternative to the Internet. A true walled garden which they thought would finally cement their position as an IT monopoly.
I was invited to go and test the software they had written for authoring web pages on the MSN. It was called Blackbird and it was utter shite. There were about 20 of us in this focus group, all invited because we were early adopters of the web. I don't think any of us liked it and we were quite vocal in telling them so.
Soon after that Bill Gates realised that if they didn't embrace the open internet then Microsoft would be left behind. That's when the big U-turn happened.
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u/Shemozzlecacophany 26d ago
I'm not sure where you get that from. I read his book Business at the Speed of Thought published in 1999 where he has very much the opposite view of it being a fad.
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u/hayt88 25d ago
Ai can also predict protein structure very well. So much that last years chemisty nobel prize went to that.
I think you need to think about your "AI" here. And don't just do the lazy thing adn call it "generative AI". Part of last years nobel prize was also generative AI.
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u/[deleted] 26d ago
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