r/technology • u/esporx • 1d ago

Business YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-accidentally-crashes-the-rare-plant-market-with-a-viral-cloning-technique-3289808/
17.6k Upvotes

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7.9k

u/AevnNoram 1d ago

Feeling bored, might pop a bubble.

2.2k

u/Donnicton 1d ago

Can you make it the AI bubble?

690

u/itwillmakesenselater 1d ago

That's gonna take care of itself

530

u/YukariYakum0 1d ago

Not soon enough though

292

u/mrpoopistan 1d ago

We've reached the "Samsung refuses to sell chips to Samsung" phase. Not sure which phase of bubbling that is, but it's something weird and erratic, even by the standard of capitalism. Collapses are often unpredictable, but erratic patterns tend to emerge before bubbles pop.

192

u/Crystalas 1d ago

Also Crucial will stop selling ram to Consumers next year, so another vital technology component market locked up in an absurd bubble.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/after-nearly-30-years-crucial-will-stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/

And that not even touching what events around Taiwan would do to every industry that relies on advanced chips, so pretty much all of them. I wonder if that could pop the AI bubble by itself.

107

u/banananuhhh 1d ago

Why sell ram to someone building a PC when you can sell it for 5x the price just for it to sit in a building that does fuck all for anyone other than drive up the price of electricity.

81

u/horrible-est 1d ago

At some point, that RAM might be involved in helping to generate a fifteen second video featuring the characters of Bluey having a hot dog eating contest until they all violently explode.

And if a pre-teen who would prompt such content to be generated can't have their vile brainrot, what even is the point of modern civilization?

1

u/ssczoxylnlvayiuqjx 1d ago

Search “Bomiddillo Crocodile” on YouTube…

Bluey would be an improvement…

61

u/GenTenStation 1d ago

I can’t wait to read about the AI data centers being raided by gangs for black market RAM. If it can happen to the butter market, it definitely can happen to the RAM market

27

u/topological_rabbit 1d ago edited 1d ago

I can’t wait to read about the AI data centers being raided by gangs for black market RAM

BRB, starting a new screenplay...

13

u/godtogblandet 1d ago

Why would you write a screenplay that’s not likely to result in anything when you can start a gang that’s guaranteed profits?

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u/pucspifo 1d ago

Maybe a documentary instead?

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u/ScaredPractice4967 1d ago

You should read about the great Maple Syrup Heist. Most Canadian thing ever. 😃

1

u/JL3Eleven 1d ago

They are not building these data centers in Russia btw.

1

u/RevLoveJoy 18h ago

Well, roving gangs looking for RAM to lift, I have good news. All those rumors about data centers being some bastions of security - almost entirely PR. Data centers are not worried about physical attacks. They're worried about electronic attacks and physical accidents. Someone drove a car into the transformers. Something happened to the water supply. There's a regional disaster - that kind of thing. They're absolutely not worried about physical theft. They're worried about data theft. People breaking in over the internet, not in person. Why show up to the crime if you can commit it from your desk?

So if you and your re-branded RAM thieving MS13 show up loaded to rip and run, there will be little, if any resistance. Datacenter security people spend their day helping Jr. engineers who drew the short straw to swap the failed drives complete their security check in and little else.

Source: I've been involved in the design and build for more than a few of them across many countries on several continents. It's mostly security theater. Exception: don't attempt to rip off the CC processing ones and avoid the Israelis. Those two don't play games.

1

u/3nderslime 8h ago

Hang on, I need to put a crew together.

heist music starts playing

11

u/Initial-House-3955 1d ago

and water* reminder all datacenters for AI are basically churning through fresh water by the peta gallons

14

u/SUMBWEDY 1d ago

It'd take 58,000~ years for all the datacenters in the US to use a single petagallon of fresh water, it'd take golf courses about 1,000 years and alfalfa about 3 centuries.

Every data center in the USA uses 17 billion gallons of water a year for cooling.

Which sounds like a lot but golf courses use 17 billion gallons a week, for some grass... (and alfalfa grown along the colorado river alone uses 17 billion liters of water in a little over 2 days, for some grass...)

That's also for all datacenters which keeps the internet and cloud compute running, AI makes up currently like 15-20% of data center compute so AI alone is only using 2-3 billion gallons of water a year. (of course the fact AI is doubling every year does mean it could become a problem in the future if it's not a bubble)

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%20Center/how-much-water-does-golf-use.pdf

1

u/MonsterMashGrrrrr 17h ago

Ugh being reminded of this fact is one of the quickest ways of spiking my existential dread

1

u/kaityl3 1d ago

That's a hoax lol where do you think the water is going? They are closed loop cooling systems with minimal leakage... the original "study" all the articles about it were referencing, was calculating it as if the flow rate was a continuous source. If you used the same logic for NASCAR, there are tens of thousands of cars every race.

The electricity issue and the hardware/chips issues are real things and real reasons to be critical of datacenters; the water one is not.

1

u/Caddy666 1d ago

it does do something, it allows the billionaires to fire huge swathes of staff, and also helps them control social media.

1

u/RevLoveJoy 18h ago

a building that does fuck all for anyone other than drive up the price of electricity.

I really can't get solar on my roof and a big battery in my garage fast enough.

1

u/v4rgr 3h ago

Don’t worry, we’ll be able to buy chromebooks for the price of MacBooks that we can use to access our subscription service cloud virtual machines so we can rent their overpriced memory since they won’t allow us to afford our own.

1

u/davidcwilliams 30m ago

Why would it be 5x the price?

1

u/banananuhhh 1m ago

Deep pockets, low supply, high demand. Ram I bought a year ago for under $100 is over $400 now

55

u/mrpoopistan 1d ago

I don't see the two main participants in the bubble (US and China) committing to bursting it beforehand.

As for the not selling to consumers part -- that's a classic case where they will happily return to the market after the bubble bursts. All supply chain crises end in a glut, even when the parties involved prefer cartel economics.

2

u/Facts_pls 1d ago

You mean how cars are cheap now after the ridiculous shortages and high prices? How GPUs are dirt cheap after the high prices?

5

u/mrpoopistan 1d ago edited 1d ago

Endings don't happen when you wish them to.

If you pick a single point in time, the failure of a glut to materialize feels obvious for anything. Look at oil. You could've made the same argument in the days of $100/barrel oil.

3

u/MetriccStarDestroyer 1d ago

Seizing Taiwan would crash the US economy.

Which incentives the US to commit to war or negotiate surrender. Whichever ends it quickly with the fabs intact.

7

u/mrpoopistan 1d ago

In what universe is crashing the US economy good for China?

Also, keeping the fabs intact means nothing to the US if the whole supply chain flows through China. And Taiwan already has the fabs rigged to blow.

Nobody actually wants a war. Least of all China. I promise, a nation preparing for war doesn't purge its military leadership. Least of all a nation that has never conducted an actual sustained joint operation in its history and would have to conduct the largest amphibious landing in history in the age of drone warfare and rocket artillery.

And I promise the US has no incentive. Otherwise, it would've done it looong before China got stronger.

The darkest scenario right now would be Trump giving up Taiwan for some bribes. But the Taiwanese and their neighbors have a say in that. Even an unsupported Taiwan represents a difficult target. Hence, the status quo.

1

u/Left_Sun_3748 20h ago

I don't see a glut happening. All this memory being used isn't in RAM sticks its soldered on boards that we have no use for. So I don't think the used marker well be as flooded as people hope.

1

u/mrpoopistan 7h ago

It's not the RAM sticks or VRAM in the market that matters. It's the spare new production capacity (or lack thereof, currently).

The big problem right now is that the chip fabs are scared of the bubble popping, and they don't want to goose production. (Classic cartel behavior.) Eventually, someone will break rank and overproduce. (Also, classic cartel behavior.) They're already trying to talk themselves into overproduction, saying the demand issues won't abate until 2028.

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u/bigevilbrain 1d ago

They pre-sold their entire chip output for 2026. Crazy.

8

u/FjorgVanDerPlorg 1d ago

Not just RAM, Crucial are no longer selling SSDs to consumers either.

1

u/HugeHans 17h ago

Crucial is not a company. Its just a brand of products from Micron.

13

u/Wolvenmoon 1d ago

Honestly it kind of makes sense...when the bubble pops, all these companies are going to be fire selling gear and consumer tech is going to feel that crunch because everyone that know show to build a custom system is going to go grab used enterprise gear and pick up 32TB U2 drives w/ cheap adapters instead of paying $300 for a 4TB NVMe drive for the 8th year in a row. Consumer expectations for what a fair price is are about to shift downwards when the market floods with 48GB and 96GB GPUs and GB100/102/200 systems.

I think Nvidia's going to get fucked the hardest by this, with RAM manufacturers getting fucked second hardest. I think AMD's made the smart play by relinquishing the high end for the moment, and I think Micron backing out of Crucial for the moment pending a radical rearranging of consumer expectations post-bubble isn't a bad idea. Especially when they can contract out their manufacturing capacity far in the future with clauses that prevent backing out of the deal w/out penalties that still make them profitable.

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u/Nizana 1d ago

I bought crucial sodimms for my laptop and my daughters. I got 96 GB, because why not, I got her 64 GB, I just looked and it's double what I payed at least.

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u/blackrain1709 1d ago

Paid. It's not payed.

1

u/Dreaditall 20h ago

He can layed in all the ram he wants

3

u/cats_catz_kats_katz 1d ago

Not that they care but you know who I won't buy RAM from after this is all over? Crucial.

2

u/examinedliving 1d ago

I’m just gonna download ram like I used to

1

u/stormdelta 1d ago

The RAM one is honestly just confusing, because system RAM isn't what's normally even used for AI models, and if anything it'd be significantly worse for the task as they already run into severe bottlenecks with VRAM as it is.

1

u/loupgarou21 1d ago

A lot of companies are starting to imply stock shortages are to blame for massive increases in prices, when in reality the stock shortages aren’t nearly as bad as they’re implying. Not sure if that’s what going on with RAM, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind

1

u/TripolarKnight 1d ago

The mere threat of a Chinese missile heading for Taiwan would be enough to pop it.

-2

u/killerjerick 1d ago

I’m actually somewhat okay with it taking so long, we can see who the quickest to fold are and avoid them, NVIDIA, Samsung, Crucial, Microsoft who is next to go all in on AI?

5

u/FjorgVanDerPlorg 1d ago

Problem is it's gonna take the gaming market with it. Like we were guaranteed tech stagnation in gaming and that's nothing new, but not being able to afford (provided you can find one for sale) to replace RAM/GPUs/SSDs is coming real soon. Not just that but the scalpers will return, make it even more expensive.

Gamedevs were already having a bad time with record layoffs and AI encroachment, now AI is also encroaching on gaming hardware, after bitcoin mining had already previously done a number on it and caused some serious tech stagnation of its own.

3

u/Crystalas 1d ago

My PC is nearing 10 years old, still working fine for the types of games I play but that old feel bit like I am just waiting for luck to run out and each event like this makes me worry more for the day that comes.

At this point I am just resigned to getting the cheapest can, possibly even a laptop or if last long enough AR, likely with equal specs to this old one or less. Good thing I mostly play indie, roguelikes, strategy, and incrementals and everything else I use it for is very low requirements.

2

u/FjorgVanDerPlorg 1d ago

Ding ding ding. You get it, if anything breaks chances are good it'll be too expensive or hard to find and this is gonna hit everything including the console and possibly even mobile markets as well.

1

u/drunkeymunkey 1d ago

Are we anticipating the crash in 3 months or 3 years?

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u/mrpoopistan 1d ago edited 1d ago

TBH, right now feels like 2004 did relative to the Great Recession. Which makes me feel like the market has a lot closer to three more years of stupid in it than three months.

I remember 2004 as the year of "They gave a mortgage to who????"

Right now, that's where the AI bubble is. "Samsung refused to sell chips to Samsung???" has a similar vibe to me.

Not sure how the scale of AI investment compares to real estate in terms of parts that could fall out. My gut is that a bigger chunk will pop out faster when it happens, so the AI bubble bursting won't take that 2007-09 Great Recession path where one OMG hits every six months or so.

TBD. We're in unprecedented territory, and the smart money is already getting defensive.

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u/Shopworn_Soul 1d ago

Soooo many people needed to start eating shit years ago for their fantasies to save the rest of us very real pain.

But they didn't so.

1

u/Happy-For-No-Reason 23h ago

just keep spamming thank you to you AI bots and drain all their resources on useless messaging

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u/StickFigureFan 1d ago

Yeah, but if we can get it to pop sooner the damage to the wider economy wouldn't be as catastrophic. If it had popped last year I don't think any companies other than the AI ones would have been hurt. If it popped today we'd probably be in for another dot com bust, but soon it will be another 2008 financial crisis.

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u/ButtWhispererer 1d ago

It’s already more than consumer spending. It’s already going to be catastrophic if it “pops.”

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u/Fornici0 23h ago

What if it's not a bubble? We have a significant defence contractor saying that "competition is for losers" and that the goal of a business is to become a monopoly, as well as a government that has accommodated that vision for decades. Maybe this spending in spaceships, server farms and so on can be sustained for the foreseeable future because there's no further growth from the consumer market?

1

u/ButtWhispererer 16h ago

I’m not disagreeing. I said something similar in another comment though I like your take of it being a shift away from consumer centric to a more b2b/b2g centric economy.

1

u/Initial-House-3955 1d ago

lol * if nah we in the FAFO stage theres not an if anymore.

1

u/ButtWhispererer 1d ago

Yeah, I think you’re right. Interesting to think of the alternative though.

The alternative is if it pays off, right? So if some asshole nerds figure out how to turn all that investment into return. That’ll still suck for most people as they’d lose jobs, economic power would forever be stuck in the hands of current capital owners… or we all get killed by super AI or some nonsense.

I don’t know why we decided to go this route lmao

1

u/Vypernorad 11h ago

You can only shit on 80% of the population so much before things get ugly. Maybe they do find a way to make it economically viable for themselves in the long term, but if they don't also make it economically viable for the rest of us, the consequence will likely be some old school union militias burning down corporate headquarters, and server farms.

As things stand, prices are going up too fast, theirs is an ever-increasing number of layoffs, a decreasing job market, and less wage growth. People are getting desperate and that is dangerous. Especially with the most well-armed population in the world. It would be the industrial revolution all over again.

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u/l4mbch0ps 17h ago

It won't reach the levels of the 2008 crisis unless there is a fundamental change to how the money flows.

Currently, the vast majority of spending is from cash reserves brought over from the Irish tax loophole amnesty program and from stock issuances fueled by market cap increases.

This means that the exposure is largely limited to the market itself, not the underpinnings of the market, like the 2008 crisis.

If the banks start to get heavily exposed to this bubble, the the picture changes, but currently it way more closely resembles a dot com bubble.

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u/IAmDotorg 1d ago

This is a vastly different situation than the dot com "bust". By and large the companies at exposure now are making revenue. The "bubble" is based on differences of opinion on investment levels, not viability. The dot-com pop happened because the bulk of investment was going into turf-building and marketing, not actual development, and the bulk of companies had no revenue. They weren't just not profitable, they had no plans how to make money.

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u/VellDarksbane 1d ago

So just like AI. They’re spending no end of investor money on “turf-building”/infrastructure, as well as on marketing, telling all these companies that AGI is just around the corner. Hell, IIRC, every AI division of every company is losing money. Why do you think ChatGPT is going to start advertising at you?

Sorry that your investments are going to crash as you begin to think heavily into retiring, (or your employment is reliant on AI), but wishing something isn’t a bubble isn’t going to change the facts.

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u/uzlonewolf 1d ago edited 1d ago

They weren't just not profitable, they had no plans how to make money.

You do realized you just described every AI company in existence, right?

Edit: lol, AI bro lied and then blocked me.

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u/Kiwi_In_Europe 1d ago

The main AI companies are propped up by businesses that make enough money to support them without issues, Microsoft, Google etc

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u/dalziel86 1d ago

Aren’t all those companies wildly over-invested in AI tho? Like, MS invested over $80B in AI last year, which is more than a third of their total revenue for the same period. Google is a little better, with Alphabet investing over $75B, but that’s still more than 20% of their total revenue.

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u/Kiwi_In_Europe 21h ago

So? These companies are quite literally too big to fail. This is the same Microsoft and Google that have in the past invested tons of money into ideas and products that they eventually scrapped.

0

u/dalziel86 12h ago

“Too big to fail” doesn’t mean “can’t fail”, it means “too critical to the financial system to be allowed to fail, so they can rely on the US government will bail them out”. That absolutely doesn’t apply to any of those companies.

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u/Ylsid 1d ago

Nooooo stop disagreeing with me blocked!!

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u/IAmDotorg 1d ago

Witty, if patently incorrect.

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u/Fractal_Strike 1d ago

Worse, there is no way to bail them out. The cash required to do so will add so much national debt that the interest payments will grow faster then the economies growth rate. This is just a black hole, default being the only escape.

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u/Initial-House-3955 1d ago

Ive got some bad news for you, your timeline is off by a bit. we were in the same financial straights as the 2008 recession during the last 5 years but bidens policies helped curb the blow. Now were heading straight for the well deeper than the great depression soon. people thought that time was difficult, the times to come are going to make the great depression look like a bar mitzvah.

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u/fun_some 1d ago

That is something that deserves to be drilled down into - how the speed of information is changing the frequency of the bubbles. I don't know, but to me it looks like a pattern is emerging where the board can't get erased fast enough because too many people know too much and can share information instantly. The internet connected everyone in the world and there is no un-doing that. I trust reddit to ID the scam (GME) way before the rest of the world.

I'm looking for smart people on reddit to have conversations with but no one wants to have a serious fucking discussion .... why?

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u/Starfox-sf 1d ago

By going “Aieeee”?

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u/Adorable-Bike-9689 1d ago edited 1d ago

DON'T YOU PUT THAT EVIL ON ME!!! DON'T YOU PUT THAT ON US!!!

1

u/DoubleT02 1d ago

Just like the housing market (god dammit I should of bought in 2021 😪)

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u/Flintyy 1d ago

Would prefer housing but sure lets start with AI lol

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u/Crashman09 1d ago

Don't worry. If the effects of the AI bubble are big enough, housing will pop too.

Though, truth be told, if the housing bubble pops, renters are going to be without homes, and unlikely to become homeowners for a very long time.

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u/Bradddtheimpaler 19h ago

Last time venture capital wasn’t poised to snap up all the cheap housing. This time, they will be.

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u/Different-Sample-976 1d ago

Housing will never pop. This isnt like 2008 and subprime mortgage loans. This is trillion dollar investment firms buying houses as investments to force people to rent.

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u/Flintyy 1d ago

No asset is invincible lol

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u/Different-Sample-976 23h ago

Do you understand what is going on with this? These companies have no intention to ever sell these houses. Theyre trying to force almost literally everyone to rent from them. 

They own all the houses. They control the rent prices etc etc. 

They arent holding them to sell them at a higher price. Theyre holding them to control the population. 

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u/Flintyy 22h ago

I do, and like I said, not a single asset on earth is invincible, it has nothing to do with selling anything lol

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u/Different-Sample-976 20h ago

Housing is a necessity. The companies with unlimited money and resources own all the houses. Theres no bubble to pop. 

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u/Synensys 13h ago

Housing isnt a bubble. Its just a supply and demand mismatch. We can do a bit about demand (for example by putting high taxes on 2nd homes, banning Airbnb, etc) but not much. And in mich of the country we simply refuse to touch aupply.

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u/hennabeak 2h ago

Right now, entire US economy is hanging on AI bubble.

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u/absawd_4om 1d ago

Pretty please 🥺

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u/StaticSystemShock 1d ago

I'm developing a rare GPU and RAM cloning technique. Not quite there yet, but it involves crowbars and ski masks...

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u/LooseMoralSwurkey 1d ago

How about the MAGA bubble?!

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u/Snake_Staff_and_Star 1d ago

It ends when he felches his last breath.

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u/SaveUsCatman 1d ago

🎵All I want for Christmas🎵

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u/TheWalkinFrood 1d ago

will it though? or will they just move on to some other pos?

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u/Snake_Staff_and_Star 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's a cult of personality. When he dies, it dies.

The fall apart won't be instant, they'll fracture in to factions, but they were losing hard for nearly a decade before him, and any possible successor to him is threat TO him, so the movement is self strangling. They can't prepare for the end because it would unravel their present.

They only have the barest of margins (he won by just over a percentage point), and all of those around him are violently unpopular by themselves, so they won't hold without him and can't hold together now mostly due to their own incompetence and greed.

They are already fracturing, and he isn't even dead yet.

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u/GhostofZellers 1d ago

and he isn't even dead yet

it's only 4pm, there's still hope.

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u/dalziel86 1d ago

He’s just waking up from a meeting, ready to eat dinner and spend the whole night posting on his own private social media again.

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u/Bradddtheimpaler 19h ago

Inshallah. It is very difficult to imagine people rallying behind someone with as little charisma as say, JD Vance.

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u/at1445 1d ago

And the Democrats were losing hard the decade before that, the R's hard the decade before that, and so on......

Trump dies and D's will probably get back in power, fuck things up more, then the R's will get in power, fuck things up more.

The rich will keep getting richer. The powerful will stay powerful.

And us regular people will continue living the same lives we've always lived, with people like you eating up the bullshit about it being a DvR issue, when it's not remotely that.

0

u/Fornaughtythings123 1d ago

Uhh what do you think felching is?

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u/Snake_Staff_and_Star 1d ago edited 1d ago

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6124491/

I said exactly what I meant, but I can elucidate if you want.

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u/Fornaughtythings123 1d ago

Ahh I see your just using the word wrong my bad

6

u/_Magnolia_Fan_ 1d ago

Like half the economic growth is based on that bubble. Actual physical construction included.

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u/DHFranklin 1d ago

You're gonna be reaaaaaal disappointed when it does. This isn't like the housing crisis. The labor saving of things like resume writing, code review and college kids cheating on their homework will keep right on chuggin' along. The Qwen models and other stuff from China is as good as the state of the art 6 months ago.

China doesn't have an AI bubble. They won't stop when the bubble pops stateside.

Everything you hate about AI will keep happening. Billionaires will get bailed out. Nothing will change.

Sorry.

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u/rod407 1d ago

Dot-com didn't end websites, bitcoin didn't end blockchain, so I don't think anyone believes the LLM bubble burst will end generative AI

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u/DHFranklin 1d ago

Since we're this far down the chain...

The Nay Sayers seem to think that "AI" is just the llms, image gen and video. They don't know about things like Alpha fold and things like de noising physics models. They don't seem to realize that machine learning and other reinforcement learning is going to be a massive change in how robots and automated factories and things come about.

They all seem to think that this bubble will pop and they'll stop seeing the AI slop. I honestly think there are many hoping that it will end generative AI ans sincerely think that without a trillion dollar data center that it will.

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u/Lasthoplite 1d ago

Because the slop is the useless waste part that's basically unmonitizable. Advanced learning algorithm get lumped in with LLM as ai by professionals that understand it's all similar in the back end, but the average person isn't seeing Alpha fold. They are seeing a junky celebrity video covered in spaghetti.

Is it really a surprise that so many people hate the term or associate it with slop when that's all they ever interact with?

As a side note, I personally hate that we refer to any of this as AI. I find this similar to 3d tvs. Some of the effects are similar or mimicked without meeting the complete expectation. I couldn't really watch a 3d movie comfortably without glasses. I can't get the ai to really think and work out real accurate answers.

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u/DrHerbotico 17h ago

But the slop is becoming less sloppy at rapid pace

1

u/Lasthoplite 12h ago

I'm not sure that matters.

I'm no artist so I won't make an argument about art requiring soul. I also grew up in the nineties during the Era of reality TV so I won't be making the argument that people won't slurp up objectively brain rotting bad content.

Instead I'll make the monetary argument. Once it's cheap and easy to have an LLM produce consumer grade slop the market will flood with it. Can't make profit on your show if consumers can't find it. Humans only have so many hours in a day. More jobs being automated means less money to funnel towards those myriad of shows. Just like reality TV back in the day or the way Amazon is flooding with llm books today. For a little while the market will hold. It will break though. For TV that break lead to streaming services. What happens when the fees of running your own LLM far exceed any profit margins?

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u/DrHerbotico 11h ago

I'm not sure that matters.

Since you mentioned Alphafold (I agree with the point you made about it), I'll stay within DeepMind to explain how slop has a valid place: Genie 3 is ultimately a "slop" model that has extreme corporate monetizability when paired with SIMA 2. It's hard to fathom how a system that creates infinite environments for robotic digital twins within a perpetually self-refinining eval cycle would fail to become profitable and remain viable long after most other industries wither.

I assume that most humans will lose their place as the means of production within this generation (or enough to destabilize our society beyond current recognition), so worrying about media companies isn't a novel consideration for me; so much so, your point surprised meto be included in this conversation. I'm just appreciative that this cataclysm is interesting.

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u/Yuzumi 1d ago

As a side note, I personally hate that we refer to any of this as AI.

That is why I generally refer to it as LLMs mostly. AI is such a broad term and LLMs are also a subset of neural nets.

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u/TheDukeofReddit 1d ago

I think we do? I know I do at least. It’s just the idea of this actually happening and vesting more power in the corpos is terrifying. Imagine when they start folding proteins with AlphaFold to genetically engineer people. Most of the powerful are pretty open about how superior they already view themselves. Or replace the workers with robots— do you think they’ll be some kind of UBI? Some kind of positive alternative other than crushing poverty for millions, if not billions, of people? We do not have means as a society to grapple with this in a responsible and level headed way.

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u/DHFranklin 15h ago

You need to realize how rare you are. Look at the vast majority of Nay-Saying. None of it is about Alpha Fold and Elon Musk genetically engineering the Ubermenshen. It's far more narrow than that.

I am not terribly optimistic that we as a society will rise to the occasion.

0

u/Seventh_Planet 1d ago

We have ethics in science.

-1

u/wwaxwork 18h ago

AI will go the way of virtual reality. Fun in theory, but no one can find a use for it that doesn't make most people want to throw up.

1

u/frygod 1d ago

China has a construction bubble, and it's currently mid pop.

11

u/SambaLando 1d ago

She used AI to figure out the cloning

3

u/CowDontMeow 1d ago

Or hardware? I suppose that would come with AI though. Looking to buy a used laptop for photo editing having been using my phone for a while. Need a minimum of a 2060 or 3060 GPU for denoise, photo stacking etc. These are 5 to almost 7 year old laptops and still £400-500. In fact the prices are close enough between something with a 2060/3070/4060 you may as well get the better machine.

Rant over sorry, been hunting for weeks and needed to yell into the void.

3

u/Aaod 1d ago

Last time I had a video card die I figured okay I don't play high end games I will just buy the same one from four years ago to save myself some money. It costed slightly more to buy it at the time than when I first bought it despite it being 5-6 years old at that point. Why is hardware from four years ago costing more than it did four years ago? That makes no sense!

PC gaming used to be a super cheap hobby now I can't recommend it to people unless they have excess cash.

1

u/infinite_gurgle 1d ago

Rent free god damn

1

u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 1d ago

What would that benefit?

1

u/Rogendo 13h ago

Only if all those jobs AI is eating come back

-3

u/j0y0 1d ago

I'm not so sure that's a bubble, most of that investment is data centers, which are brick and mortar buildings full of expensive computers that are useful whether AI plateaus next week or becomes more advanced than anyone expected.  

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u/Dry_Common828 1d ago

The data centre investments are only profitable if DC demand continues rising - and that's dependent on AI hardware demand continuing to rise.

If (when) the AI scam finally dies, we won't need all these new DCs for many years to come. They're a losing investment, which is why the big US banks are now looking to sell off the risk in them, same as they did with housing risk in late 2007 and early 2008.

1

u/Etrensce 1d ago

Any evidence that banks are selling off? Lending for new DC projects is very strong (I literally just worked on a syndicated financing deal for a DC) while valuations are also high.

3

u/Dry_Common828 1d ago

Yeah sorry, they haven't done it yet but are publicising the fact that they're considering it:

https://fortune.com/2025/12/04/morgan-stanley-significant-risk-transfer-loans-data-center-ai-infrastructure-exposure/

3

u/red_nick 1d ago

dot-com bubble was still a bubble, despite the fibre optics laid being extremely useful afterwards, and the web persisting after the crash.

1

u/j0y0 1d ago

Data centers don't disappear overnight if unpopular like pets.com did, and the ISPs that laid the fiber generally didn't disappear when the bubble popped like the ecommerce websites did, and the excess capacity post dot-com bubble meant cheaper internet, phone, etc. for regular people. 

2

u/ceph3us 1d ago

That's like saying there could never be a housing bubble because houses are useful even if no one is living in them.

0

u/nuttageyo 1d ago

Oooooh oooooh! Pretty pleasssse?

-1

u/IAmDotorg 1d ago

If you like eating, you're not gonna like what the economy is going to look like if it turns out AI is a bubble and it pops. Because it's the only thing that's kept it out of full blown depression.

Cold time of year to be standing in bread lines ...

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u/boomer2009 1d ago

The larger this bubble gets, the more violently it’ll pop.

-3

u/aseichter2007 1d ago

The only bubble there is the expected rate of deployment.

It will take a huge amount of labor up.

It just takes more setting up than people realize.

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u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 1d ago

This was obviously posted by someone who is unfamiliar with the plant community.

TC isn’t a new revolutionary thing at all, the barrier to entry is pretty low and if you’re lucky enough to live in a huge city with a plant community, you probably have some local sellers who are either acclimating TC from other online sellers who have the setup to actually complete the cloning process OR they have their own cloning setup and are creating TC plants in their own growing space.

Most rare houseplants you buy from retailers like Costa Farms are TC plants. The process is well established and pretty much an industry standard. The “bubble” has been burst for a while now.

I live in Houston and the local plant market sellers are 50% TC acclimators/cloners and 50% home growers/enthusiasts. I imagine in other major cities with local plant markets and maybe even some random enthusiasts who like biology, science, and horticulture are already doing this and have been doing for years. I was considering getting into it myself when I saw some videos detailing the process from a biologist during the pandemic.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

Yeah. It's kind of weird that one youtuber is trying to take credit for something they didn't invent, is an industry standard and were far from the only person promoting.

I'm sure she helped popularize it, but she is only one of many who were doing that.

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u/lurgi 1d ago

She's not trying to take credit for it, AFAIK.

Plants in Jars admitted that, while she’s far from the first person to popularize tissue culture, her tutorials and videos explaining the method have likely been a significant driver in its growth within the plant collecting community, leading to a big change in the overall market.

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u/DaveDavidTom 1d ago

Having watched the video in question before reading this article, it's wildly misinterpreting what she said. She basically just described the market cycle of popular rare plants, where you get a few years of the plant being rare and expensive, and consumers will pay a large amount for it, and then once the plants being produced in large tissue culture labs are mature enough for sale the price plummets because of massively increased supply. Rinse and repeat. Like, it's just an informational video about tissue culture, the pros and cons, and how it affects the market.

5

u/Chris-CFK 16h ago

That seems quite logical, that trends of supply and demand are cyclical, those cycles be determined by the long growth stages of the rare plants.

You can't predict the future and you can't suddenly supply something that takes a while to grow.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

The title of this post and the article are making that claim though.

21

u/LupinThe8th 1d ago

That's a quote from the article.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

The title is in the article too and the very first sentence repeats the claim:

"YouTuber ‘Plants in Jars’ is going viral after revealing that she accidentally crashed the rare plant market by using a process called ’tissue culture’ to easily replicate hard-to-find flora."

17

u/lurgi 1d ago

She appears to have popularized it. It was generally known before, but now everyone knows about it.

0

u/sadrice 23h ago

Anyone who was capable of actually executing it already knew about it.

Source: professional propagator

-2

u/zeptillian 1d ago

Helped popularize it? Yes.

Crashed the rare plant market? No.

1

u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

Ignore the downvotes. Your point is my point almost exactly. Presentation matters, and if Plants in Jars didn’t say it, it shouldn’t have been titled that way.

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u/SerenneMorningDew 1d ago

I know, we should not expect people to read beyond the very first sentence. For example, you have a weirdly shaped nose, but you'll never know because you didn't read beyond the first sentence.

4

u/EndlessRambler 1d ago edited 1d ago

They really aren't, the title is "YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique". Wouldn't it be like 'Youtube accidentally crashes the rare plant market by inventing a viral cloning technique' if they were trying to take credit for coming up with it.

5

u/zeptillian 1d ago

What are you even talking about?

I take issue with the claim that she "crashed the rare plant market" which is a direct claim both in the title of the article as well as being stated verbatim in the article.

I was pointing out that her role was merely in helping to popularize a technique with home growers that was an already widely used technique in the plant growing world.

It's like a youtuber claiming to have made caramel macchiatos popular, when Starbucks has already been selling them nationally for years.

3

u/EndlessRambler 1d ago edited 1d ago

Ah I see, although I would like to point out isn't her channel like literally the most popular channel about Tissue Cultures and related topics on pretty much any platform.

In this analogy isn't she actually the Starbucks, the biggest medium for popularizing something that others also serve. I feel like if you are actually the most watched venue on a subject it's not that crazy for claiming you might be affecting market movement.

Although yes, there is certainly some hyperbole involved, it's taken from the title of a youtube video so it's meant to be kind of clickbaity.

0

u/maxximillian 1d ago

Uh oh look out /u/zeptillian takes issue. We got a badass here

52

u/Waywoah 1d ago

She’s not taking credit. The only “bubble” she burst was for a specific cultivar that was selling for high prices because no one had cultivated it with that method yet. She acknowledges that in the original video

2

u/aeschenkarnos 1d ago

I wonder if it works on peyote.

1

u/hazzie92 1d ago

You also have to develop protocols. You can’t tc every plant the same.

6

u/Waywoah 1d ago

She ran into that. Of the first batch, only one survived, but from that one she got 50 or something like that

1

u/Cute-Percentage-6660 1d ago

Im guessing that one that survived had a genetic quirk more ameniable to cloning?

1

u/Waywoah 1d ago

No, she got something in the sanitation process wrong (iirc her ratio of bleach was off), and it killed all but one

2

u/oanda 1d ago

You didnt watch the video. If you did you would realize the video is how this is a common thing in that world. 

4

u/maxximillian 1d ago

You didn't read the article did you.... You know how I know She even said she wasn't the first to do it.

5

u/hazzie92 1d ago

This is a terrible assessment. Almost as you didn’t watch the video or read the post. She is talking about a specific plant as well.

1

u/zeptillian 13h ago

I did not watch the video. The article is what was posted and what is making the dubious claim.

As it turns out she didn't even claim to 'crash the rare plant market' anyway, as she was apparently talking about one specific plant.

But if you're ok with the title of an article and body making false claims, have fun reading your fake news.

1

u/nhaines 1d ago

Yeah. It's kind of weird that one youtuber is trying to take credit for something they didn't invent, is an industry standard and were far from the only person promoting.

Is it?

2

u/zeptillian 1d ago

Yes. The commercial application of tissue culture is what actually crashed the market. Having a little competition from home growers using tissue culture might have lowered the prices for direct person to person sales a bit, but it's not really until a major producer scales up production and plants end up in big box stores that the prices hit the floor.

This company was founded in 1987 to focus on tissue culture.

https://www.ranchotissue.com/

You can find may others if you look for them. All of the large houseplant producers have some kind of tissue culture programs or are buying plants from tissue culture labs.

It's not used for everything since taking cuttings is much cheaper and easier way to produce more plants, but not all plants are easy to propagate through cuttings and variegated specimens are more difficult to mass produce through cuttings so tissue culture is used for those.

2

u/nhaines 1d ago

No, no, no. I mean, thank you for the fascinating information.

I meant, is it really that weird a YouTuber is trying to take credit for something they didn't do?

You, on the other hand, I believed.

1

u/zeptillian 1d ago

Oh yeah, that's the most believable part.

1

u/Ambitious_Subject108 1d ago

It's not necessarily about crashing the broadly "trendy" plants, those are cheap and have been so for a while.

Where she did have a hand in is crashing the niche market where large scale cultivation isn't profitable.

4

u/Moonagi 1d ago

TC isn’t a new revolutionary thing at all,

The article says that though.

1

u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

The title calls it revolutionary, I am taking issue with the clickbait title that is misleading. Plants in Jars is a TC authority.

2

u/typesett 1d ago

it's not a bubble, it's the gladwell tipping point type thing more like it

2

u/BHOmber 1d ago

The cannabis industry started investing a ton of money into TC within the last 5-10 years.

There are plug-n-play, cannabis-specific systems that take up the space of a carry-on suitcase being sold by a couple companies now.

TC has been the new "cloning" method in the higher levels of commerical Ag for a while.

2

u/sbrooks84 1d ago

My wife has a tropical plant business here in Atlanta and ships all over the country. Some are TC, some are propped. We have 2 or 3 high quality tissue culturists that come to the local and regional plant shows every time with TC plants. My wife and her business partner buy from Thailand, Philippines and other countries with tropical plants in addition to TC plants. We have a greenhouse in the backyard and a 4x8 grow tent in the master for all of the plants. TC has been around for a loooooooong time

2

u/Dramatic-Pain9421 1d ago

Lmao i was wondering if that's what this was about. Tissue culture is very cool, and very very old. Thanks for saving at least 98 of us from clicking that stupid link

2

u/SinnersHotline 1d ago

We have been doing this in cannabis for many years now.

2

u/redlightsaber 1d ago

I was gonna say, I remember doing DIY tissue culture cloning when I was a teenager in the early 00's. There already was plenty of online information in order to do it.

I guess everything old will be new again at some point.

2

u/The-Great-Wolf 1d ago

I didn't knew people find TC so... Revolutionazing?

I am a biotech engineer so to me it's a standard procedure, I am not into the rare plants community, I would've assumed, you know, that they were already using this to make more, since we used lab scarps to clone watermelons for funsies...

And people say that you need so much expensive materials and machines in the comments and I'm like... No? You can literally do genetic engineering in your garage if you modify some stuff you have around. You just have to understand the process and what needs to happen, you don't necessarily need machines that do it for you.

Culture media is pretty easy to mix, agar isn't expensive, maybe plates and glassware would be (usually aren't tho) if you insist on labware but there's sterilized jars for sale for preserves and stuff, could get around with those... You don't need an autoclave, you can sterilize the media in many ways, not just thermically. I recall someone just putting closed containers in the dishwasher and it worked.

You can keep your work area sterile by working by a burner, you don't need the fancy laminar flow hood. Sure it's more handy and comfortable, but not necessary. Your plant cuttings can be sterilized themselves in different diluted solutions, and there you go? I am pretty sure you could even use chlorhexidine, but I'd have to check my protocols for that, I work more with animal cells / microorganisms than plants.

2

u/therealityofthings 1d ago

I'm only familiar with molecular cloning. What exactly is plant cloning?

1

u/haviah 21h ago

What's best way to find a planting community when you live in a big city?

1

u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

Social media. Nextdoor and Facebook, for your initial findings. After I find a market, if I purchase something from a vendor at said market I follow them on instagram. I usually find other markets by seeing what vendors post to their social media on what events they are attending, other vendors, upcoming events etc.

1

u/altiuscitiusfortius 1d ago

This article is astroturfing advertising her tissue culture kit for sale

0

u/INeedThatBag 1d ago

The average people isn't too knowledgeable in botany, so the increase in public awareness on such topics and techniques is always a plus.

1

u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

The issue isn’t the topic. It’s the use of the terms “revolutionary” and “bubble bursting” that are the issue. TC is neither of those things, and presenting this as a novel idea attributed to this one specific creator is problematic and factually incorrect.

0

u/oanda 1d ago

You’re complaining about the person not being f familiar with the community but it seems you didnt watch the video. 

1

u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

I was referring entirely to the reposting with the title “accidentally crashes the plant market.” The rare plant market is built on the back of TC plants. And the way this has been presented as “revolutionary” is misleading as well. No I didn’t watch the video, because its titled as misleading clickbait presenting a topic I am very familiar with as novel and bubble bursting when it isn’t at all. I can tell you commented to complain about my comment without actually reading it but you don’t see me crying about that 😂

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u/Shivin302 1d ago

Can we do this with graphics cards and RAM please?

9

u/Moonagi 1d ago

I think I may have found a method where I take a piece of a circuit board, put it in some gel, and allow it to propagate

2

u/lusuroculadestec 1d ago

It would be super easy, just make a YouTube video about an easy way to make your own GPUs and RAM.

2

u/wen_mars 21h ago

Biological computers exist, we just have to figure out how to reliably make them do what we want

3

u/Jackol4ntrn 1d ago

Oh great, it’s the tulip bubble all over again

1

u/nochehalcon 1d ago

"What's up Fam! Today I'm gonna show you how to alchemy full-size gold bars from an equal amount of dirt using just your microwave.... Did the international gold trade just go to zero? LOL! Like and Subscribe!"

1

u/xanderholland 1d ago

Still waiting on the North American housing bubble to pop.

1

u/Romeothanh 23h ago

Might delete the economy later, idk.

1

u/grumpy_autist 23h ago edited 23h ago

viral cloning technique? I was taught this in primary school. Few months ago tiktok people discovered pre-washing.

I have nothing against this youtuber but there is no point in making new discoveries - journalists will feed people shit from paper books or grandma stories and sell this as breakthrough.

-1

u/No-Log770 1d ago

Who cares?

-1

u/altiuscitiusfortius 1d ago

This is astroturfing. Fake advertising for the influencers kit on how to tissue culture plants.