Technology

And what happens when a bubble bursts? Did the internet die when the dotcom bubble burst, or is that just when it really started to get going?

I share most of your sentiments against AI, but a bubble popping won't make it go away, and it won't even rectify it to be more to people's likings (i doubt it). It takes more than just waiting around to accomplish that.

That’s the usual business plan. However, people don’t really like ai. The results aren’t great, so, if they jack up the price, people will likely cancel. The lock in is poor as the product and convenience is poor. It doesn’t really save money as promised.

There is another factor in this which often gets overlooked. A LOT of the money invested right now is for the Nvidia chips and products based around them. As many gamers are painfully aware, these chips devalue very quickly. With the progress of technology moving so fast, what was once a top of the line unit gets outclassed by mid tier hardware within a couple of years. After 5 years it's usefulness is severely diminished and after 10 years it is hardly worth the energy to run them.

This means the window for return on investment is a lot shorter than usual in tech. For example when creating a software service, there would be an upfront investment for buying the startup that created the software. Then some scaling investment in infrastructure and such. But after that it turns into a steady state where the input of money is a lot lower than revenue from the customer base that was grown. This allows to get returns on investment for many years after that initial investment and growth phase.

With this Ai shit it works a bit different. If you want to train and run the latest models in order to remain competitive in the market, you would need to continually buy the latest hardware from Nvidia. As soon as you start running on older hardware, your product would be left behind and with all the competition out there users would be lost very quickly. It's very hard to see how the trillions of dollars invested now are ever going to be recovered within the span of five years. Especially in a time where so much companies are dumping their products for very low prices and sometimes even for free.

This bubble has to burst and it is going to be bad. For the people who were around when the dotcom bubble burst, this is going to be much worse than that ever was.

A lot of startups whose entire business model relies on OpenAI's small model API calls costing under $1/Mtok, are going to go bust when OpenAI finally runs out of money and ramps the cost up tenfold.

Yeah I'm getting real dot com bubble vibes from all of this.

aka enshittification

Already the cost is quite high. A prolific dev can easily burn 100usd a day in tokens and they have not even started to enshitify.

Some of the cost to run these models will come down a bit if Nvidia gets some actual competition which I'm sure will happen in the medium to long term because the hyper scalers definitely don't like paying Nvidia's AI ransom and the Chinese don't want to be beholden to a company the US can influence.

We will see which happens first.

I was in a local bike store looking at red tail lights yesterday.

One brand Lezyne had several versions. There was an "AI Alert" one. I looked it up and it just has a sensor to detect when you brake and it changes to a different flashing mode at that time.

Thats barely even "smart" let alone "AI".

The stupid thing is, because of this dumb claim they needed to confirm that it doesn't collect and transmit any data about your riding habits. Its a light with no connectivity other than a charging port.

The dumbfuckery is astonishing.

if valley had fresh ideas for profitable business, they wouldn't go full into ai in the first place. lol

big brained sfba ceos try to make reality in the image of scifi that they misinterpreted when they watched it 15 years ago, and go around building torment nexii. behold, disruption! (snow crash|ready player one|who knows what else)

Ed Ziltron has a good piece regarding whether the losses are “just another startup” or something more. I am very much leaning towards “burning money at an insane rate just to give the impression of growth”.

you're VERY justified in feeling skeptical, I'm seeing it first hand, you're correct.

I'm a consultant/freelancer and I'm booked for the rest of the year and well into the new year with jobs that pretty much consist of me reviewing and cleaning up AI slop.

Most of my clients are startups and small companies that went full in on AI and vibe coding. Now they're discovering that their attempts to save a few bucks by leveraging AI, cutting devs, etc is costing them more that what they envisioned on saving. The stuff they've built with AI doesn't scale, is full of exploits, and breaks quickly. With the recent Tea App thing many of my clients are now in a panic because they essentially did the exact same thing. They don't want their startup to be next in the news because some rando came across their house with the front door left open by AI.

the tech debt is massive, It's costing many of these places more to fix their vibe coders/AI mistakes than what it would have originally cost if they just used a solid dev team. Make no mistake, I'm charging them a good amount also.

All if it could have been avoided though. They could have continued to use their LLM's if they had all just kept a leash on it. if they dismissed the concept of vibe coding. A good chunk of it could have been avoided if the person feeding the prompts simply REVIEWED the code before hitting enter. I'm not kidding, IF they just LOOKED at what was being spat out things would be different. none of them did. they just trusted the AI to be smarter because they were lead to believe it was.

Holy crap, has anyone ever attempted to create an "AI fork bomb"? Go to one of these agent bots, and tell it to create accounts with the other agent code bots. These new accounts will all be told to create accounts on all the other code bots services. And do this recursively forever. So the flow would be 1 bot makes lets say 5 bots. Each of those 5 bots make 5 more bots. And each of those 5 bots make 5 more. So the total number of running bots becomes like 1 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5...

Obligatory, this is purely hypothetical, and you should never do this for legal reasons.