this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
940 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
76986 readers
2650 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AI is funded solely by sunk cost fallacy at this point. I wonder how long it will be before investments start getting pulled back because of a lack of ROI. I can already feel the sentiment towards AI and it getting pushed in everything turning negative amongst consumers recently.
Investment is done really to train models for ever more miniscule gains. I feel like the current choices are enough to satisfy who is interested in such services, and what really is lacking is now more hardware dedicated to single user sessions to improve quality of output with the current models.
But I really want to see more development on offline services, as right now it is really done only by hobbyists and only occasionally large companies with a little dripfeed (Facebook Llama, original Deepseek model [latter being pretty much useless as no one has the hardware to run it]).
I remember seeing the Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 ("the first AI phone", unironic cit.) presentation and listening to them talking about all the AI features instead of the real phone capabilities. "All of this is offline, right? A powerful smartphone... makes sense to have local models for tasks." but it later became abundantly clear it was just repackaged always-online Gemini for the entire presentation on $2000 of hardware.
They're investing this much because they honestly seem to think they're on the cusp of super intelligent AGI. They're not, but they really seem to think they are, and that seems to justify these insane investments.
But all they're really doing is the same thing as before but even bigger. It's not going to work. It's only going to make things even more expensive.
I use Copilot and Claude at work, and while it's really impressive at what it can do, it's also really stupid and requires a lot of hand holding. It's not on the brink of AGI super intelligence. Not even close. Maybe we'll get there some day, but not before all these companies are bankrupt.
The dot com bubble 2.0 is on the horizon
Comparing the coming crash to the dot com crash is like comparing a rough landing to the various crashes on Sept 11th, 2001.
The dot com crash was mostly isolated in high tech. Because it was lead by the Japanese economy starting to fail, and followed by the Sept 11th attacks, the various combined crashes resulted in the S&P 500 falling by about 50% from its peak to the bottom, but it was already back up to the peak value in 2007, then the global financial crisis hit.
This bubble is much bigger. Some analysts say the AI bubble is 17x the size of the Dot Com bubble, and 4x the size of the 2007/08 real estate bubble. AI stocks were 40% of all US GDP growth in 2025, and 80% of all growth in US stocks.
Nvidia's stock price has gone up 1700% in just 2 years. OpenAI is planning to go public on a valuation of $1 trillion despite losing vast amounts of money. Just 7 US tech companies make up 36% of the entire US stock market, and they're all heavily betting on AI.
At least when the dot com bubble popped, it left some useful things behind, like huge amounts of dark fibre. But, the AI processors are so specialized they can't be used for much of anything else. They also wear out, sometimes within months. The datacenter buildings themselves can maybe be repurposed to being general purpose datacenters, but, a lot of the contents will have to be thrown out.