• Octavio@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    The funny thing about people who say it’s not a bubble because AI has value is that the asset category having value doesn’t prevent valuation bubbles from forming.

    Houses have value: you can live in them. Yet there was a housing bubble.

    The internet has value: you can watch cat videos on it. Yet there was a dot com bubble.

    Tulip bulbs have value: you can grow pretty flowers with them. Yet there was a tulip bulb bubble.

    In my experience, whenever you start reading news stories asking if something is a bubble and quoting investment bankers say, “no, it’s not a bubble,” well, usually it’s a bubble.

  • xylogx@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    There is definitely a bubble. But also what Nvidia is doing is smart. They have boatloads of cash. They are investing that cash in the companies that are using their products to create money making services. If one of them can create a killer app or viable service this will create demand for their products and they will have an ownership stake in it. Is this guaranteed or even likely? Probably not. We have reached the point where we were in 1996 where the chairman of the fed came out and said we are in a period of “irrational exuberance.” That bubble took four more years to pop. This one may end quicker, but it is impossible to tell when it will end or what will come out of it from where we sit today.

    • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      Goldman Sachs also though NINA mortgages were a good idea, and they also thought it was a good idea to bundle bad mortgages in with good mortgages, and find a rater to mark them AAA investments.

      And then we saw how that worked out.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        yeah, how could this go wrong?

        at least after the crash those houses could be lived in. these datacenters are made for one purpose, AI, and really would have to be completely gutted and refurbed for general purposes… fun.

          • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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            3 days ago

            I wish it were safer to make these sorts of sweeping gambles. Shorting Nvidia right now is like a pretty obvious bet but getting the timing right is the difference between generational wealth and a lifetime of poverty and debt.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        right? I just figured the “it’s not a bubble, guuuuys” crowd could find someone a tiny bit more credible lol

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    It’s objectively a bad thing when a country’s entire economy is being propped up by seven companies and the vast majority of consumer spending is concentrated in the top 1%.

    • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
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      5 days ago

      Specially when those companies are valued in TRILLIONS. Nothing is worth trillions, somehow these surreal numbers have been accepted as hard fact.

      • ILoveUnions@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Nothing is worth trillions,

        There is things worth trillions. Like full countries, and the largest pension funds and social security funds. Having a single company be comparable to those massive collections of people is insane, and it’s because they think it can replace workers–when it can’t, not yet, and not for a long time

        • bobalot@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Production must equal Consumption plus investment.

          An excess of production leads to companies closing down.

          Reducing consumption (via getting rid of workers, reducing wages, etc.) will lead to an imbalance that must correct itself.

          This can be forestalled by private debt, government debt or exporting the surplus but this is unsustainable.

      • IllNess@infosec.pub
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        5 days ago

        Evaluations of everything is crazy. Net worth of celebrities with make up lines in particular is crazy. Look how many celebs are worth a billion dollars. To be worth that much, they should be selling at least $50 millions a year of product with no prediction of winding down.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      The most optimistic take I’ve seen: AI is a drain on the entire economy that sucks up all investment and this is why the rest of the economy is basically in a recession. Once the bubble pops, investors will flood back into the real economy and correct the problem.

      I’m not optimistic.

      • jabberwock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        I’ll play devil’s advocate here: agreed that the rest of the (US) economy seems to be slowing or shrinking but remains buoyed by AI / Mag 7 stocks. That said, a lot of the investment reflected above is in data centers and hardware (Nvidia, Coreweave, Oracle, Microsoft).

        The bubble pop will hinge on whether there is value in this data center buildup beyond AI. Unless everyone starts paying fistfulls of cash for AI chat, these companies may be able to find another use for all that compute and avoid a total crash. That could be a target for all that investment you mention.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          The hardware is specialized for chatbots, it’s not just something they can plug-and-play for other use cases. That means using it for other computing tasks is even less efficient per kWh and per litre of water, which will make it hard to justify the resource requirements.

          Surely some of this hardware can find new life, but assets will be stranded.

        • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          The way to make a big dent in that is to tax unused housing, with peogressivwly increasing amounts as they continue unoccupied. And limit or outright deny ownership by companies and investment firms.

          We have more than enough housing for everyone, but a large portion of it sits unused. In many cases only because no one will/can pay what some of these companies are demanding monthly for them.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        I feel money itself is our new Dutch disease. We live and die according to the flux of money in the global economy/stock markets…

        Are there any theories like that out there? Because money start to no longer function correctly IMO.

    • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Nvidia are very smart in that regard, ethics aside. Very early on they decided that selling cards to gamers will not give them the infinite growth everyone so desperately desire, so they started looking for what does, and they were consistent at it ever since. Every tech bubble of the recent history is powered by Nvidia cards. How much they contributed to the hype (and damage) is not entirely clear, but that’s not zero for sure

      • mcv@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        They lucked into it. They made their cards for gamers, and various groups, AI researchers, bitcoin miners and others, discovered that they those gamer GPUs were really good for other tasks too. I think it took a while before Nvidia started making specialised cards for those purposes.

        I can’t really blame them for serving that market that they just lucked into. I can and will blame them for their terrible Linux support.

        • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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          Oh believe me, it wasn’t just luck. They have special labs full of people who’s whole job is to find another unexplored niches that can buy their cards. And they only make specific single purpose cards only when the market is mature enough to justify the spending, which is also smart.

    • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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      4 days ago

      They made gpus long before the gold rush and will not stop after. The usefulness of tensor cores will not dwindle with any market correction. Even before ai boom they were valued astronomically out of reality. Not a single stock is tied to actual selling or owning of anything anymore

      • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Just like shovels existed before the gold rush and will exist after humanity’s death. But we have a saying for a reason

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    This doesn’t really tell me anything, I’d have to compare it with other charts. E.g. what does the chart for agriculture look like? Airplane manufacturing? Internet in early 2000s?

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I know right? It’s not a bubble if there are transactions between the different companies in an industry. Nothing here shows that these investments are self-supporting circular, nor that all of this is propping up the economy.

      Circle != bubble

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 days ago

      All the economy is a big circle if you draw the circle big enough.

      Actually scratch that. There is an economy that is not just one big circle jerk, such as the development of new technologies or the terraforming of deserts into fertile land; as neither of these things ends the way it started; it brought lasting change, and that is true progress.

      Actually did you see my presentation that i made about this recently?

      The point is to convince the americans to invest in new technologies.

      To all those who say that human spaceflight is impossible:

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        There is no good economic reason to colonize other planets. We have plenty of space here on earth, with conditions already much more hospitable than that of mars - deserts, for example. The resources needed to turn these into habitable land is so much less than the resources required to make even a tiny part of Mars inhabitable (i.e. establish a colony that relies on life support systems) it’s insane to go for Mars first. The reason colonizing Mars is talked about at all is because a rich white dude wants to go to Mars, since deserts are too boring for his spoiled ass.

        I actually agree that it would be cool if we went to Mars, not to colonize it but just to be there. But comparing it to white pillaging of the Americas is just incorrect. Mars is not inhabitable by humans, the Americas very much were. The external resources needed to colonize America were zero, in fact pillaging local lands meant a lot of resources for the Empire. Mars is going to be a much more expensive and much less profitable endeavor.

        Actually I replied to you before, pointing out the very same fallacy: https://lemmy.ml/post/33824723/20134917

          • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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            4 days ago

            Only slightly better than mars, frankly speaking the ocean is about as hostile as you can get without going to space. Maintenance alone would be a fucking nightmare, look at cruise ships or oil rigs for example and you can get a pretty good idea. Unless you are talking about artificial islands since we’ve been doing that for millenia.

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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        Settling mars is a centuries long undertaking. You basically have to nurture a whole ecosystem from scratch… that would be a brutally difficult and lengthy process in the best of conditions. But of course, these aren’t the best conditions. We aren’t doing particularly well with the ecosystem we’ve already got.

        If you want a historical project, then look to balancing modern industry within the planet’s biosphere. It’s a prerequisite to anything happening on mars.

      • shane@feddit.nl
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        4 days ago

        Europeans caused massive death in the Americas. I do not think we should replicate that model.

        Also, the chance is small, but there might have been a separate biogenesis (beginning of life) on Mars. Sending humans with our dirty microbiome would almost certainly wipe any evidence of that, and possibly cause an extinction of an entirely separate form of life, which would be a crime even more horrible than the extinctions and genocides which we have caused so far.

        Let’s just leave Mars alone until we’ve studies it more and are certain there is no life. Colonizing the moon seems challenging enough for a couple centuries…

    • Djehngo@lemmy.world
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      I think it’s hard to definitely call something a bubble until it pops.

      The definition of a bubble goes something along the lines of market prices exceeding the intrinsic value of the investment they represent, which may be true here?

      If you want to read more about this the rough name for these companies was “the magnificent seven” a year or so ago when I last looked at this. A quick Google suggests represent about a third of the SNP 500’s value now and have a cape ratio (cyclicly adjusted price to earnings) of ~37 compared to 15-20 being normal.

      Edit: the above baseline is incorrect; see sugar_in_tea’s comment for a more accurate baseline and some interesting counterpoints

      I can’t find a good numerical source for the correlated risk within this group, and I suspect analyzing it is very difficult. Given they all used to be a lot more diversified in the past but now a large % of their valuation is predicated on AI historical correlation analysis probably fails. But the diagram linked here suggests it’s probably bad to put all your money in these companies. (Or even a 3rd if you are in an s&p 500 index tracker 😶)

      Like, none of this definitively says this is a bubble, since if it were possible to divine that the bubble would immediately pop, but it does suggest there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        ~37 compared to 15-20 being normal.

        15-20 was normal for the 100 years ending 40-50 years ago. But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don’t know how what “normal” looks like going forward. More people are buying stocks than ever before due to retirement plans and poor bond yields, which pushes up the PE.

        So whether ~40 is high for a PE going forward isn’t clear. The CAPE hit ~45 in the 2000 crash, and reverted to ~20 after the crash, yet the 2008 crash only hit ~26 and crashed down to ~14 and quickly bounced back to ~20. The 2008 had little to do with CAPE and more to do with corruption in the banking industry, whereas 2000 was almost purely oversized hype in the burgeoning tech market.

        So is the normal range 20-30? Idk. Maybe 20 is actually low going forward, it’s unclear. Either way, 40 isn’t as outlandish as it was in the 2000s, and that pushed up to 45 before crashing.

        there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.

        Agreed. But if you drop out of the market and invest in other stuff, you would miss whatever the rest of the runup will do before it bursts, which could leave you worse off than someone just investing in the entire market by market cap. Ot could continue to run for 10-20 years, or it could pop this year, it’s impossible to know since it relies heavily on investors continuing to believe the hype and companies continuing to have something to back up that hype.

        • Djehngo@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Valid, I got 15-20 from a Google search, but further research puts your numbers as more reasonable, I will edit the patent post.

            • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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              4 days ago

              CAPE is a weird measure in that it looks at last 10 years of earnings for PE ratio. It is not especially relevant in that a fair expectation for next year’s earnings is this year’s earnings. It is intriguing that there wasn’t significant earnings growth levels in the past, though, which because PE based on this year’s earnings would have high CAPE if high recent growth.

        • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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          But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don’t know how what “normal” looks like going forward.

          As you listed, crashes lead to sub 20 PEs. Mag7 PEs is not representative of Russel 2000 PEs. High PEs expect high growth for long period. Reality checks usually happen, but PE’s are not universally high. Just with the oligarchs with White House guest passes.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            4 days ago

            crashes lead to sub 20 PEs

            The 2000 crash didn’t though, it was just over 20 at the trough. Jan 2003 was 21. That was almost as high as the peak in the 60s, and higher than the moment before Black Monday. So the market reverted to a mean that would be considered a peak just 20-30 years prior. 15 used to be a good marker for “average,” and now that’s the marker for the Great Recession.

            Crashes used to lead to sub-10s, and now they crash to 15-20. The market has fundamentally changed with 401ks and IRAs.

  • llama@lemmy.zip
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    If Lemmy is supposed to be the place where the most tech savvy people in the interest congregate, and everyone in the comments is unsatisfied with AI then we really do have a problem. These companies have all reached a point where they no longer listen to their most informed customer base but instead take 100% of direction from investors who don’t even know what they want except a line going up.

    • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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      Eh. Lemmy has a lot of ignorance surrounding technology and science compared to other sites. Hacker News is what you’re looking for if you want somewhere that is full of the most tech savvy people on the Internet, and most of them are extremely pro AI (with some weird AI cultishness alongside). Myself I think AI is a bubble but there is a lot of promise in the underlying technology once you take away the hype, just like the .com bubble at the turn of the century.

      • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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        Too many people equate AI with LLMs only. LLMs are mostly bubbled bullshit, with a few limited use cases. But AI is a much broader topic. The really scary AI is the stuff we hear little to nothing about.

        People also forget how dramatically tech can advance over time. Spoiled impatient Americans in particular want a finished product or they quickly write it off as “garbage”. They forget every product we own and use was once “garbage”.

      • Bunbury@feddit.nl
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        I am not sure if you have discussed AI in a room full of hackers recently, lol. I have. Maybe 1/100 is pro-Generative AI in my estimation:

      • axx@slrpnk.net
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        4 days ago

        Lobste.rs is probably even more on the “engineers talking to engineers” side of things. I’ve not visited in a while and am not sure what people there think of (the current crop of gen)AI.

    • dick_fineman@discuss.onlineBanned
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      I thought it was the place for people who didn’t want their shitposting interrupted by random child porn. Am…am I in the wrong place???

      • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
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        Unfortunately Lemmy is rife with CSAM too, but the larger instances have done a pretty great job eliminating it.

        Smaller instances still get dumped on sometimes.

        Edit: actually it feels like it’s been a year or so since any CSAM spam events, so good job everyone

        • Zetta@mander.xyz
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          I disagree with main post and agree with edit. I’ve only seen abuse material on Lemmy once and it was on an instance that didn’t have an automated moderation tool for image uploads and they promptly added that mitigation step after it happened

          • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            Suddenly I’m extremely worried about using lemmy. What’s the right way to respond if something is seen. Call the police? FBI hotline or something? Certainly screenshotting anything to send to authorities is out of the question but as soon as an image is loaded a device downloads it to cache so it’s like a dirty bomb just sitting on your device at that point. I have been blissfully ignorant that anything I use in my day to day would ever share a space with such abhorrent behavior. Kind of not sure I should still use the service, like that has actually been an issue on here before?

            • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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              You’re fine, they go after the ones sharing it, of course if you want to tell authorities you can, just you’re not going to get in trouble for accidentally stumbling upon some asshat being a pedo. It does very much keep me from wanting to run my own instance though.

                • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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                  4 days ago

                  Yeah, unless you prevent image uploads it’s possible and easy for someone to put that shit on a drive you own which then means you’re technically distributing and harboring it.

                  Scary stuff

          • Emilie Easie@lemmynsfw.com
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            4 days ago

            Same, and additionally, no one so far has been randomly extremely misogynist toward me either. I can mostly say completely uncontroversial things like “women fought for their right to vote in the early 1900s” without getting 30 bad faith and whataboutisms in my replies. It’s sooo nice.

      • aceshigh@lemmy.world
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        It’s always interesting to read the experiences of others. The one and only time I stumbled on cp was in the late 90s. Haven’t seen it on reddit or lemmy. Our bubbles keep us isolated.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Lemmy is not the most tech savvy people on the internet nor the customer base for AI. Where did you get either of those ideas?

      • llama@lemmy.zip
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        Because you have to be tech savvy to understand what the fediverse is or how ActivityPub works so it sets the filter for a userbase that evangelizes emerging technology.

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
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          Yeah. Signing up for a social service doesn’t make you the most technical person in the world.

    • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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      If Lemmy is supposed to be the place where the most tech savvy people in the interest congregate

      Says who? Mostly feels more like sales than R&D here. Which kinda fits with these pitches.

      • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        I feel like someone working at the pointy end of R&D in AI isn’t necessarily well placed to predict the future of AI.

        • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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          Bubble is an econ term. Whether there is an AI bubble has a rather tenuous connection to the future of AI. Not much of a connection between the housing bubble and the future of housing either.

            • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Feels more like the brick layer is equivalent to someone paid to create training data. You absolutely would want to ask the architects and engineers researching no ways in housing and construction. Not that they know what avenues of research will work out, but they do know the avenues of research.

              No one expected the splash that LLMs or image diffusion models would make. Years later, the conversations on Lemmy are still dominated by people who still haven’t looked up how they work.

              GPTs completely nuked the whole field of natural language processing (NLP). People had dedicated years of their lives to solving tiny aspects of that. That got solved practically over night. Sentiment analysis? Just ask the chatbot. Some of the seemingly smart people who make seemingly informed criticisms of LLMs are NLP guys, who just can’t let go of their old ideas.

  • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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    4 days ago

    People need housing, no one needs this AI crap. Even in boring engineering jobs using tools that solved problems decades ago, we are getting AI shoveled in left and right in places no one needs or wants it. And calling old features “AI” is also another problem.

    And now these stupid “barking bears attacking fat sleeping people” videos are everywhere, and people seem to think they’re real.

    We should focus on natural intelligence first, that is to say each other, and education…

    Oh and the headline should read “Every day”, “everyday” is an adjective, like an everyday occurence.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    Looks more like the dot com bubble to me.

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

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      Yes! The problem is that we won’t accept the full correction that is actually required. We print money, we buy securities, we find ways to prop to reduce the pain but we end up shifting the weakness to other areas of the economy.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      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…

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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      Global economy has inflation since what, middle of the last century? Since slavery and colonies stopped being a thing?

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    I see “gold rush” the company selling shovels is making out like a bandit, everyone else is make a profit on the previous gen but requires a 10x cost increase for the next gen. And thus 10x more shovels… As soon as 10x more shovels stops giving 10x+ improvements this is the wrong investment.

    Hints are we already reached this point.

    Some AI companies will pivot and improve in other ways with more linear costs/results… The ones hoping the line continues to the moon… I think they overshot… I just don’t know when it will fall back…

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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      The GDP issue is not because of the AI bubble, it’s because of tariffs and the complete destruction of US soft power abroad

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        And I would almost bet the crash will be about the time the Dems take power, just so the Republicans can whine about the situation they created and blame the Democrats for it.

        • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
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          The problem with this theory is that it assumes Republicans will give up power to allow the Democrats to govern.

          The part of Republicans blaming Democrats is spot on.

        • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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          GOP without fail always wrecks the economy, in what gets forecasted as the last time they will ever be trusted with power again. Dems just get 51% of votes anyway.

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        Is “US soft power” a euphemism for sowing destruction and proxy wars everywhere? Or do you mean things like the awful show NCIS being barely disguised pro-Israel pro-war propaganda? Like that?

        • Saryn@lemmy.world
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          I won’t touch the entertainement / Hollywood reference to soft power as that deserves a discussion in its own right.

          But as someone who works with … or used to work with US diplomats abroad on a daily basis, I would urge you to educate yourself and people around you about the myriad of activities that US diplomats are engaged in. Contrary to conventional ‘wisdom’, US foreign policy consists of a lot more than bombing the Middle East and supporting Israel. Nobody talks or knows about all of the other things but I can tell you for a fact that American diplomats were (and in some cases still are) helping a lot of people in Eastern Europe. We were helping a lot of people. Shelters for the homeless, schools and museums for kids, whole new campuses for universities, orphanages, adn the list goes on, and on. There’s a reason why over 75% of state department employees working abroad are not republicans. They are not the people most think they are.

          We were doing good work with the Americans here. We were helping children, we were exposing corrupt oligarchs. We were in this fight together, not just in Eastern Europe but all over the world. Yes, even the US Marines stationed at Constanza and Novo Selo, ready to fight should the Russkies anything, deserve respect. As one marine told me recently “Don’t worry, come what may, we will stay and fight with you”.

          Then everything changed this year. My old American friends were replaced with incompetent political commissars sent by the new idiocratic regime in DC.

          The US marines are still here though, and they are still ready to die. I’m just not sure if its worth it anymore.

          TLDR: Educate yourself and resist the temptation to parrot oversimplified narratives. Just because you only know about the bad and don’t care to learn about the good, doesn’t mean the latter doesn’t exist.

          Edit: in an attempt to preempt incoming windmills: I detest Trump, Netanyahu and imperialism in general. But that does not mean anything American (or whatever nationality) should be presented as black and white. There are 340 million Americans. Each one of them here is proof that America is not black and white, and neither are its citizens.

          • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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            helping a lot of people in Eastern Europe

            to support Israel and war on Russia

            Soft power is always more effective than hard threats, because the corrupt CIA stooges pillaging their economies and contributing to destruction of humanity do so with the dignity that threats and bribes are secret and unobvious sycophancy to the US empire. Soft power means that your pawns are not explicitly exposed as your owned pawns.

            That your job makes the colonization mission more effective, all glory to hypno Trump, is a cheaper and more direct path to complete capitulation by the colonial “governor generals”.

            • Saryn@lemmy.world
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              I think you are just repeating the same old talking points and conspiracy theories that we’re all well-familiar with without actually adding anything of substance or factology to the conversation.

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                Just defining what soft power means. Soft extortion and bribery just as bad as extortion and bribery.

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            Let me guess though, Russia doing the same things is just pure evil or propaganda. Because guess what? Countries don’t do any of the things you mention out of Christian charity, they do it for power and control.

            GTFOH with your soft pedaling of this bullshit.

            • Saryn@lemmy.world
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              Russia does not do the same. In fact, it does the exact opposite. It would be fantastic if Russia actually supported human rights and the rule of law instead of bombing children’s hospitals like Israel does.

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              I’m in eastern europe and the last time Russia did anything around here was when my grandparents were starving

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      God damn it, if the US collapses who will supply weapons to all its peaceful democratic allies in the world? I’m super fucking pissed off about this.

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    But where is Palantir on this? Because they’re discernibly connected to several of these orgs, and that displays the character of what this is actually about.

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    If not for the banks investing hevily into it, i’d not be all that worried.

    Every company in that list could shrink by half and we’d all be at worst back to covid times. Sure unemployment would suck, but do we REALLY need microsoft and NVidia to be as huge as they are?

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    So how dangerous is that really? I assume one day we’ll finally see investors saying, “Nah, that’s a bubble. I’m not gonna see any returns from those companies - I’m selling.” Then stock prices will fall, and some investors will lose money by selling for less than they bought. After that, AI unicorns will start to lose funding and close their businesses, laying off people.

    But will I - a person who does not work in the AI industry and has not invested in AI companies - be affected by this?

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Yes, you absolutely will be effected.

      In a general way, the plebs always do the heavy lifting - a universal truth since the dawn of time.

      More specifically, your pension / 401k will lose a heap of money.

      As the economy contracts there will be lay offs.

      That means loan defaults, et cetera.

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        Pensions in the stock market are the hostage, and are being used as an excuse against regulations.

        Fuck all of that.

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      I don’t know the answer, but during 2008 onwards (seems like the economy didn’t fully recover until the end of Obama’s presidency), every industry slowed down. Was hard for me to get a fast food job or consistent minimum wage assembly line work through temp agencies. Things can go into vicious positive feedback loops during downturns (investors afraid to invest due to bad economic outlook -> factories and such don’t get built or expanded -> unemployment rises -> people spend less -> companies start laying off -> economic outlook worsens -> investors selling and moving to "safer’ assets -> …). The entire banking system pretty much imploded during 2008; I don’t know how much exposure banks have to AI (commercial real estate is another thing to worry about though). With any luck the AI crash would be more like the dot-com crash, which mostly just hurt one industry (but I remember my father talking about factory layoffs during that too).

      • Lucelu2@lemmy.zip
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        My family lost a great deal of invested wealth in that 2008 crash with the death of Mellon Bank. It does not seem like a lot today but … if it had been invested in say Chase or G-S… it would have probably been double what it was by now. I am sure my dad was twisting in his coffin when that happened. I am glad he did not suffer that when it happened (he died in 2005).

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      One reason it’s dangerous is that the rest of the economy sucks, so AI is masking bigger problems which will become evident and tumble out of control when the money has nowhere left to go.

    • Redex@lemmy.world
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      One thing people didn’t mention is that I’m pretty sure the top 10% of Americans by income make up 50% of consumption because of the heavily K shaped revovery that has happened. These Americans have a large percentage of their wealth in stocks, and if the stock market crashes, they will feel less wealthy and less willing to spend, decreasing their spending, tanking the US economy.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
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        Trump is a much bigger threat to tanking the US economy. He is working in that direction every day. Tariffs are horrible for the economy. Sure, he gets American factories built and jobs are created but things overall are going to be much more expensive for consumers.

        • Redex@lemmy.world
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          I agree, but that’s just another factor, and it will also cause the stock market to crash, among other things.

          Also, the worst thing is he won’t get American factories to be built. Maybe one or two, but no one in the right mind is going to relocate large amounts of manufacturing to the US when tariffs are coming in and out of effect all the time. Tariffs only work for increasing manufacturing if companies believe they will last a long time. If companies think a tariff will last a month or a year, there’s no point in making a factory that will take two, three years to build and then five years to become net profitable, because by the time the factories finished and the tariffs are gone, everyone that still has a factory outside of the US will just out compeat that factory with lower prices.

      • Lucelu2@lemmy.zip
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        I think the top 10% are author of more than 50% of the spending/consumership. That is about to become larger.

            • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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              No, actually when people stop buying things and companies close down, I’m pretty sure the employees of said companies lose their jobs.

              It sucks but that’s capitalism for you.

              • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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                But if AI pops then that doesn’t mean that people will stop buying things.

                Very few people are employed by the AI industry. Most people’s income won’t change. Most people’s consumption won’t change.

                • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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                  Poor people don’t have money to spend on much else than food and housing. Anyone with money is going to have stocks in these companies.

                  Also the AI industry is Microsoft, Meta, Google, Nvidia, AMD and a few others. They employ quite a few people.

        • Redex@lemmy.world
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          You do realise that if 50% of consumption disappears then a lot of people from that 90% will loose their jobs as well. I don’t care about the 10%, I also think the income inequality in the US is insane, but the fact is that if AI stocks tank right now, poor people will feel it as well (much more so than rich people, because they can’t survive without a job and don’t have wealth as a safety net)

            • Redex@lemmy.world
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              I don’t understand what your point is? I’m merely expanding on OP’s question and stating the fact that the way things are currently, when the AI bubble bursts poor people will feel it the most. Trickle down economics doesn’t work because if you give 100 bucks to a rich person, they’ll spend like 5 of it. If you give it to a poor person, they’ll spend all of it. But that has nothing to do with the fact that if the bubble bursts right now, poor people aren’t going to somehow get any of that money. They will loose their jobs, because the economy slowed down and nobody is buying anything and their jobs aren’t needed anymore. They will just suffer more and rich people will buy up their houses that they now have to sell at bargain prices.

              • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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                They will loose their jobs, because the economy slowed down and nobody is buying anything and their jobs aren’t needed anymore

                No.

                The AI debt creation and investment is not of any benefit to the working class (except for a few construction workers). These data centers don’t create 1000s of jobs. Windsurf has 250 employees. Cursor has 30.

                This AI bubble is not affecting general income, only assets. As it doesn’t hit income, it doesn’t hit consumption. Poor people earn and consume. They are asset poor.

                A pop in the AI bubble will damage the billionaires, but not the poor.

                • Redex@lemmy.world
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                  But I’m not saying the jobs lost by AI companies collapsing is gonna cause a recession, I’m saying the AI bubble collapsing, bringing down the stock market with it, will cause a recession and loss of jobs. 35% of the S&P is made up of stocks in the top 7 US tech firms. The stock market is extremely skewed towards these 7 firms, and a large part of their current evaulation is made up from speculation of potential AI returns. When the bubble bursts, everyone who is invested in these firms will feel it. As I said, the top 10% of Americans make up 50% of consumption, can’t find a confirmation but I think that’s the highest in modern history. If this 10% suddenly looses 30-40% of their wealth because a stock market crash, this consumption will be severely affected. They won’t buy as many fancy goods, won’t go on expensive vacations, in general will do much less. We can argue whether having a class of people like that benefits the economy or not, I’d say it doesn’t, but the fact of the matter is that if the stock market were to crash because of AI companies, everyone is affected, because of how much money the 10% spend.

    • teslasaur@lemmy.world
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      Your pension is tied to these companies stocks. I can pretty much guarantee that “your” pension fund owns quite a few of these stocks.

      But, and this is the important part, that isn’t your pension. It is the pension for those that are retired right now. There is no saved stack of money that you earned during your life thats waiting for you. Unless there is an equal amount of tax paying workers by the time you retire, you wont be getting that pension.

      • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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        pension

        I’m not sure how old you think most of us are, but I don’t think pensions are a common retirement vehicle anymore, and haven’t been for a while. 401k would probably be the modern equivalent, and it’s still running on the stock market for the majority of its life prior to beginning to withdraw.

        • teslasaur@lemmy.world
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          Pension is the correct English term. 401k doesn’t mean anything unless you’re american.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            Pension is the correct English term

            I don’t think it is.

            A pension implies benefits are distributed to the person in retirement, usually with some fixed amount per month. My understanding is that in the UK, defined contribution plans are required to be invested largely in annuities by retirement, which satisfies that, whereas in the US, 401ks don’t have such restrictions. So a 401k could be depleated well before death, or be passed on to children as inheritance, unlike an annuity. There are required minimum distributions, but they don’t kick in until your 70s.

            If 401ks switched to a defined benefit plan at retirement, I could see calling it a pension. But since they’re not, I think that’s misleading, and employer sponsored plan makes more sense.

            • julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works
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              Not true of UK defined contribution, you can do what you want just like a 401k, though it may be disadvantagous for tax purposes.

              It’s pretty normal in British English to use pension as a synonym for retirement account, though I can see why you don’t like that.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                Really? This is what I see with a simple search:

                When you’re able to take your pension, you can choose how and when you want the money. This usually includes the option of taking up to 25% as a tax-free lump sum and using the rest to get a guaranteed or variable income.

                Looking more into it, I guess it’s similar?

                The 401k typically doesn’t offer the guaranteed income, though I suppose some plans could offer annuities. You can choose to take fixed payments though, but there’s no guarantee how long that will last. I don’t know what the options are in the UK, but in the US, you can do whatever you like, as long as you withdraw the minimum (percentage of assets based on your age, starting at 73).

                I see a pension as having some kind of guaranteed benefit. A 401k doesn’t have that, so it doesn’t count.

                • julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works
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                  Yeah, again this is just semantics, a 401k in British English is 100% a pension. A UK defined contribution “workplace pension” is just a tax sheltered retirement account until it is annuitized, which is common and sensible but not necessary. The annuity is technically a totally different product, offered by life insurance companies (who interestingly with reference to above conversation would typically hold very little equity exposure backing it). Brits also call the equivalent to the social security retirement benefit the “state pension”. It’s a catch all for assets you use in retirement. Whether that’s used to fund an investment drawdown product or a life annuity or just taken out and splurged on a Ferrari makes no difference.

            • Lucelu2@lemmy.zip
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              I am in the US. In regard to employer based retirement, there are a few pension programs still available, mostly union based. In other corporate environments that do not offer union pensions (as they are non-union)- they offer the 401K if a for-profit or a 403B if non-profit. As you get closer to retirement, many 401K/403B recalibrate to a larger proportion of Bonds vs riskier stocks/futures. Although I also invest in some ETFs that are not pretax (only the earnings are taxable).

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                Right. OP’s point is that they call both defined benefit (i.e. what some union people get) and defined contribution (i.e. 401k and whatnot) a “pension.” My understanding is that a “pension” is a specific amount of money paid monthly in retirement (used to also just be the wage for certain jobs, not a retirement benefit).

                A quick search yielded “defined contribution pensions”, which seems to be a mix: your contributions are invested during employment, and then you get a fixed payment in retirement.

                With a 401k, there’s no fixed withdrawal in retirement unless you set one up, the only thing is a mandatory minimum withdrawal at a certain age (73?). My understanding is that wouldn’t be considered a pension since the withdrawal isn’t guaranteed or fixed, and you can withdraw everything if you so choose.

                Maybe I’m wrong and a pension is a looser term there, but my understanding is that a pension needs to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement.

    • cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml
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      Pension funds are to a large extent exposed to the stock indices. Since these companies grow and grow in valuation, a larger portion of pension funds are exposed to these companies. The so-called “magnificent seven” make up about 35% of the US stock market now. A lot of people will see a large portion of their pension savings affected by this. If you are not a US citizen, you sre still likely exposed to these companies.

    • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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      Were you affected by the dotcom bubble?

      Maybe the remaining tech companies, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, might raise prices of their products to cover the losses.