Technology

Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?

Yes and no.

Yes in the sense that we have a lot more "fad" economies. There is something new so that needs to be EVERYTHING and the market course corrects, often at the cost of hardship for many.

But "no" in the sense of what "bubbles" tend to refer to. Things like the Japanese Bubble Economy where it causes (I forget if it is officially one but) recessions and even depressions.

The AI Bubble is not going to do that (on its own...). Yeah, a LOT of companies are going to be left holding the bag when they realize LLMs can't solve all problems for them AND manifest a Cyber Stana Katic to give them a blowie while it does that. But what will they be left with?

1. A LOT of "prompt engineers": This is bad because that is going to be a LOT of people who, increasingly, went to school to get a degree in something with very little utility. That said... Art History majors have been showing us how to do that for decades and at least they did something they loved on their way to service industry jobs.
2. For the companies that gutted their workforce over the past few years: A need to rapidly hire talented workers who don't require ChatGPT to do their job: This is REALLY good for the people who have been hurting and should actually lead to a lot of job mobility... for the old hats who predated this fad
3. For the companies that purchased hardware: A lot of edge computing devices are going to be of questionable value. But for the folk who "just" bought a shit ton of GPUs from Daddy Jensen? They have a shit ton of GPUs they can either sell for cheap (not horrible) or repurpose (good)

Don't get me wrong. There is going to be upheaval and it is going to be bad. But it is also important to remember that drawings like the above are actively misleading and bordering on manipulative. Because basically all the biggies, except OpenAI, have non-AI uses. Oracle ballooned massively because of the OpenAI injection but... they are still god damned Oracle. Same with nVidia who, when they aren't powering every LLM on the planet, are also one of the companies that makes all the cards that power stuff like computer vision and the like in cars and what not.

Because... remember the dot com bubble? Remember how basically the entire world still runs on The Internet? It was just a case of rebalancing and pivoting for the most part.

All that said... the US is in a really bad way because the fascists have been increasingly gutting the economy and stopping basically any industry that involves manufacturing or communicating with external countries. We are gonna have a massive stock market crash when OpenAI et al pops...