The AI Investment Boom

Reading this makes me willing to bet that this capital intensive investment boom will be similar to other enormous capital investment booms in US history, such as the laying of the railroads in the 1800s, the proliferation of car companies in the early 1900s, and the telecom fiber boom in the late 1900s. In all of these cases there was an enormous infrastructure (over) build out, followed by a crash where nearly all the companies in the industry ended up in bankruptcy, but then that original infrastructure build out had huge benefits for the economy and society as that infrastructure was "soaked up" in the subsequent years. E.g. think of all the telecom investment and subsequent bankruptcies in the late 90s/early 00s, but then all that dark fiber that was laid was eventually lit up and allowed for the explosion of high quality multimedia growth (e.g. Netflix and the like).

I think that will happen here. I think your average investor who's currently paying for all these advanced chips, data centers and energy supplies will walk away sorely disappointed, but this investment will yield huge dividends down the road. Heck, I think the energy investment alone will end up accelerating the switch away from fossil fuels, despite AI often being portrayed as a giant climate warming energy hog (which I'm not really disputing, but now that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, I believe this huge, well-funded demand will accelerate the growth of non-carbon energy sources).

I'm sure you are right. At some point, the bubble will crash.

The question remains is when the bubble will crash. We could be in the 1995 equivalent of the dotcom boom and not 1999. If so, we have 4 more years of high growth and even after the crash, the market will still be much bigger in 2029 than in 2024. Cisco was still 4x bigger in 2001 than in 1995.

One thing that is slightly different from past bubbles is that the more compute you have, the smarter and more capable AI.

One gauge I use to determine if we are still at the beginning of the boom is this: Does Slack sell an LLM chatbot solution that is able to give me reliable answers to business/technical decisions made over the last 2 years in chat? We don't have this yet - most likely because it's probably still too expensive to do this much inference with such high context window. We still need a lot more compute and better models.

Because of the above, I'm in the camp that believe we are actually closer to the beginning of the bubble than at the end.

Another thing I would watch closely to see when the bubble might pop is if LLM scaling laws are quickly breaking down and that more compute no longer yields more intelligence in an economical way. If so, I think the bubble would pop. All eyes are on GPT5-class models for signs.

You can never really tell, though following some market tea leaf readers they seem to think a few months from now, after a bit of a run up in the market. Here's one random datapoint, on mentions of "soft landing" in Bloomberg https://x.com/bravosresearch/status/1848047330794385494

I read through a few pages of tweets from this author and it looks just like another perpetual doomsday pundit akin to Zerohedge.

Well yeah there may be a bit of that. I find them quite interesting for the data they bring up like the linked tweet but I don't really have an opinion as to whether they are any good at predicting things.

I was thinking re the data in the tweet, that there were a lot of mentions of "soft landing" before the dot com crash, before the 2006 property crash and now, it is quite likely there was an easy money policy preceding them and then government policy mostly focuses on consumer price inflation and unemployment, so they relax when those are both low and then hit the brakes when inflation goes up and then it moderates and things look good similar to now. But that ignores that easy money can also inflate asset prices, eg dot com stocks, houses in 06, or money losing AI companies like now. And then at some point that ends and the speculative asset prices go down rather than up, leaving people thinking oh dear we've borrowed to put loads of money into that dotcom/house/ai thing and now it's not worth much and we still have the debts...

At least that's my guess.