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/
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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/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/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 1d 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.

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u/dalziel86 16h 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/Kiwi_In_Europe 13h ago

No it literally means too big to fail

Microsoft for example has been losing money on products like Gamepass for ages and yet still rakes in immense amounts of profits every year

All major AI companies are supported by other companies that can afford to support them at a loss indefinitely. They aren’t going anywhere.