With everybody investing on index funds, directly or indirectly through their 401k, does economics ever have a time to catch up? Being out of the market during the crazy hype means losing out on "easy" gains, so basically it keeps going up and up, these companies get even more hyped, and I wonder what's the end game.
I keep hearing that retail investors are just small fry and have no power to affect any stock's valuation, but certainly the hype spreads to big money as well.
Even if I'm way off the mark, I would love to read about what happens to the economy in the mathematically plausible case that people keep buying and no one ever sells enough to mitigate the hype.
That's my real fear, that I have massive indirect AI bubble exposure while having zero direct exposure. Similar to how relatively few Americans had liar loans, but we all got burned by the subprime crisis. And then there were those bad actors that made the crisis work for them, and we got burned again during the uneven recovery.
Usually when talking about bubbles bursting its about a stock market bubble. P/E ratios now are approaching/passing the P/E ratios during the dot com boom/bust. Another reference point with high P/E ratios was around 1929-1930 (there are others too).
The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc.
An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output.
I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.
I've been enjoying the industrial revolution parallels. Have the economics of bespoke products changed? Not really. But is it now easier to get a crude, but functional, approximation of an idea? Yes. The main issue appears to be users conflating B for A (and not realising their AI creation is fundamentally a mess).
The “reverse centaur” is a natural product of capitalism wanting workers to be as replaceable as possible in order to drive down wages. An ordinary “centaur” is counter to companies’ goals, they don’t want workers empowered.
I don't think CEO class want better, more effective companies. They have nothing to gain by that. They want monopoly situation for themselves, locked customers and helpless dependent employees.
As a business owner I assure you I am not overly obsessed with labor costs. I obsess on all costs, and all revenues. VC funded and public companies may or may not take a similarly holistic view.
"If that’s the case, AI will let them wire the toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain. So you can have an amazing idea as a corporate visionary, and you don’t have to have any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things, who tell you you’re actually an idiot"
It's not, though. The banking system holds onto everyone's money in a fractional reserve system, if you let a run on the banks happen everyone's money is gone. That's "too big to fail".
If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.
> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things
That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI.
I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of your work to a machine they own or rent. But perhaps someone here can find some tangible improvement.
1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars.
2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market.
3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully.
4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition.
5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.
- better speech to text,
- better auto translation,
- better image to text.
Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.
The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers, which is ironic because all it has really achieved is a deluge of slop.
Social media has also gone utterly crazy. The last time I saw a gaslighting operation on this scale and volume (including accounts who "hate" AI "because its so scary good") was during the start of the Gaza war.
These accounts becoming easier to distinguish too, because whether they boost AI or feign criticism they all categorically refuse to use the s word.
I guess there is a few trillion riding on perpetuating this mass psychosis so it makes sense they'd try to use every trick to keep it going as long as possible.
Internet bubble was nothing like this. The scale is greater, the promises are more insane and the pop is going to be much more devastating.
People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years". You know what Codex/Cowork/etc can do really stunningly good these days? Take the files you provide, listen to what you want from them, ask clarifying questions as necessary, then write a script that programmatically does exactly what you ask for, checks its own work and then gives you the result.
We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed.
There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble.
Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.
>There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years
IME it's usually an hour to build and about 3-5 weeks to handle bureaucracy, data cleaning and detective work to account for the lack of docs.
Just wait for the economics to catch up and eat the marketing. No effort required.
With everybody investing on index funds, directly or indirectly through their 401k, does economics ever have a time to catch up? Being out of the market during the crazy hype means losing out on "easy" gains, so basically it keeps going up and up, these companies get even more hyped, and I wonder what's the end game.
I keep hearing that retail investors are just small fry and have no power to affect any stock's valuation, but certainly the hype spreads to big money as well.
Even if I'm way off the mark, I would love to read about what happens to the economy in the mathematically plausible case that people keep buying and no one ever sells enough to mitigate the hype.
Though, the larger the bubble becomes the more damaging the pop will be
That's my real fear, that I have massive indirect AI bubble exposure while having zero direct exposure. Similar to how relatively few Americans had liar loans, but we all got burned by the subprime crisis. And then there were those bad actors that made the crisis work for them, and we got burned again during the uneven recovery.
Usually when talking about bubbles bursting its about a stock market bubble. P/E ratios now are approaching/passing the P/E ratios during the dot com boom/bust. Another reference point with high P/E ratios was around 1929-1930 (there are others too).
The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc.
An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output.
I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.
I've been enjoying the industrial revolution parallels. Have the economics of bespoke products changed? Not really. But is it now easier to get a crude, but functional, approximation of an idea? Yes. The main issue appears to be users conflating B for A (and not realising their AI creation is fundamentally a mess).
AI spending is all what keeping american economy afloat or else a big recession
The “reverse centaur” is a natural product of capitalism wanting workers to be as replaceable as possible in order to drive down wages. An ordinary “centaur” is counter to companies’ goals, they don’t want workers empowered.
If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.
But they also create workers that can hop off the ship. If they're on a sinking one, they have no choice but to work hard to get back to shore.
> But they also create workers that can hop off the ship.
Sounds to me like a win for the workers, a win for the employer(in that they get better companies) and a win for society at large.
I don't think CEO class want better, more effective companies. They have nothing to gain by that. They want monopoly situation for themselves, locked customers and helpless dependent employees.
It depends but obviously they want both, both control and value.
Enough control will create value for them anyway, it just might be at the expense of everyone else.
As a business owner I assure you I am not overly obsessed with labor costs. I obsess on all costs, and all revenues. VC funded and public companies may or may not take a similarly holistic view.
"If that’s the case, AI will let them wire the toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain. So you can have an amazing idea as a corporate visionary, and you don’t have to have any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things, who tell you you’re actually an idiot"
Just beautiful.
It's kinda too big to fail in US now. If it bursts, US will decline quickly.
It's not, though. The banking system holds onto everyone's money in a fractional reserve system, if you let a run on the banks happen everyone's money is gone. That's "too big to fail".
If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.
So you’re going to be shorting AI stocks?
> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things
That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI.
I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of your work to a machine they own or rent. But perhaps someone here can find some tangible improvement.
Interesting challenge.
1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars.
2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market.
3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully.
4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition.
5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.
I can name three:
- better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text.
Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.
The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers, which is ironic because all it has really achieved is a deluge of slop.
Social media has also gone utterly crazy. The last time I saw a gaslighting operation on this scale and volume (including accounts who "hate" AI "because its so scary good") was during the start of the Gaza war.
These accounts becoming easier to distinguish too, because whether they boost AI or feign criticism they all categorically refuse to use the s word.
I guess there is a few trillion riding on perpetuating this mass psychosis so it makes sense they'd try to use every trick to keep it going as long as possible.
Internet bubble was nothing like this. The scale is greater, the promises are more insane and the pop is going to be much more devastating.
> The bubble is weirdly being kept alive by the promise it can replace software developers
And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...
People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years". You know what Codex/Cowork/etc can do really stunningly good these days? Take the files you provide, listen to what you want from them, ask clarifying questions as necessary, then write a script that programmatically does exactly what you ask for, checks its own work and then gives you the result.
We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed.
There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble.
Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.
>There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years
IME it's usually an hour to build and about 3-5 weeks to handle bureaucracy, data cleaning and detective work to account for the lack of docs.
> refuse to use the s word
strike?
Maybe slop?
slop
Bubbles do not have roots.
I agree the mixed metaphor and grammar are a bit awkward, but "its" refers to AI, innit?