When people say the AI bubble will burst, what exactly does that mean? - eviltoast

I see lots of talk on Lemmy about the AI bubble bursting. That AGI isn’t going to happen in the near-term, maybe it won’t ever happen. And so the the AI bubble will burst; ala the dot-com bubble.

But what exactly will burst? OpenAI and Claude? Those are private companies so maybe they will downsize or merge, but that’s not a bubble? NVIDIA & Microsoft? I don’t really see those companies imploding. They have a pretty large and diversified customer base. Besides, Apple and AWS are already moving away from NVIDIA by making their own hardware. I genuinely don’t understand where the big implosion is. Can someone help me understand this?

ETA: Is there an example analogous to pets.com for this AI bubble?

  • IMNOTCRAZYINSTITUTION@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    there’s a lot of AI based startups promising their investors all sorts of outlandish results. eventually it’s going to become clear that those results are not coming and the investors will come calling.

    • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 day ago

      It’s extra frustrating for those of us working in companies where ML is actually a useful tool that we’ve been leveraging for years.

      • iii@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        I remember when I was arguing “It’s not ‘learning’, it’s algebra”.

        Now the hype has gone from learning to intelligence.

        It’s still algebra.

        • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 day ago

          Well yeah - but technically everything is just algebra.

          If it happens on a computer, it can be expressed in s expressions.

          • iii@mander.xyz
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 day ago

            Sure, but I do think there’s a difference between your message arriving here, and MNIST recognition algorithms.

    • KittenBiscuits@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      Yes. They don’t have to be public companies for investors to lose their shirts, and employees to lose their jobs.