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Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

(www.theatlantic.com)
51 points ForHackernews | 3 comments | 07 Sep 25 19:59 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dijit ◴[07 Sep 25 20:37 UTC] No.45161904[source]▶
Is it even a question that we’re in a bubble?

The effects of the technology would have to rival that of.. idk, soap and the locomotive combined? In order for us not to be in a bubble.

It has swallowed nearly all discourse about technology and almost all development, nearly every single area of technology is showing markers of recession.. except AI, which has massively inflated salaries and valuations.

I can’t even think of a scenario where we don’t look back on this as a bubble. What does the tech need to be able to do in order to cover its investment?

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vmg12 ◴[07 Sep 25 20:41 UTC] No.45161938[source]▶
> The effects of the technology would have to rival that of.. idk, soap and the locomotive combined? In order for us not to be in a bubble.

Can you quantify this or are you going based on vibes? If I were to compare this to previous bubbles (ie crypto, dot com bubble), in valuation multiple terms we haven't gotten started. And a number of tech companies eventually grew into and surpassed their bubble valuations.

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1. dijit ◴[07 Sep 25 20:52 UTC] No.45162022[source]▶
Soap was essentially the onset of what we’d consider urban living, before soap (and even for a long time after to be fair) medical operations had a stupidly hi morbidity and city life was also quite.. unsurvivable. Soap itself may not have been an investment, but it unlocked a lot of capabilities for our civilisation. Almost impossible to quantify how much.

Locomotives were something that had a definite upfront cost, unlike soap, and we invested so much money - up to 3% of GDP in some years in the 1800s.. but the economic benefits were ridiculous.

Spending on AI data centers is so massive that it's taken a bigger chunk of GDP growth than shopping! (according to Yahoo!: https://consent.yahoo.com/v2/collectConsent?sessionId=3_cc-s...)

I mean, it’s really apples to oranges, but I can’t imagine us getting the returns anywhere close to what rail gave us in the 1800s.

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2. vmg12 ◴[08 Sep 25 12:49 UTC] No.45167627[source]▶
I dont know why you keep on bringing up soap. Soap, something anyone with knowledge can create in their own home, is not comparable to gpus and ai models which both require massive capital investments and skills to produce and thus are able to command massive margins.

> Spending on AI data centers is so massive that it's taken a bigger chunk of GDP growth than shopping

You havent compared this to previous bubbles like the internet, smart phones and personal computing in general. Your argument isnt convincing.

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3. dijit ◴[08 Sep 25 13:42 UTC] No.45168168[source]▶
I have in my other comments.

But AI investment is outpacing all the things you mentioned.

I mentioned soap not because of capital investments, but because of what the GDP growth was following the invention. If AI is qualitatively lower than the GDP growth caused by SOAP then we're going to see a lot of unemployment. So, it's a bubble- nothing could possibly match soap.