Please just let it pop already
I wish for the status to no longer be quo. I long for the AI bubble to collapse and take 40% or more of the US market share with it. And I know the consequences would truly be devastating. But this is a hellish, Kafkaesque reality we find ourselves in, an agonizing waking nightmare with no good way out and the systemic reset being the least bad option.
The alternative is to continue until the collapse is bigger and harder than anyone ever envisioned. AI demand cannot grow exponentially to justify the buildout. Private credit is already cracking under the weight of the debts. We’re constantly being told that the amazing tool that was supposed to change the world for the better is instead supposed to replace us and take our connection to each other and the real world away, and we’re just supposed to like and want it.
And yet the public consensus is that we don’t want it. That nobody asked for this “future” we now find ourselves living in. Wealth disparity is now at all time highs and only worsening. The market is decoupled from reality and fully fueled by narrative and algorithms at this point, propped up like a zombie not allowed to collapse. Literal trillionaires are hailed as “geniuses” despite folly after folly, and promising UBI and to fix the world, only to never deliver on those promises.
It’s all just so tiring. It’s not even cynical, it’s just the reality at this point.
Edit; so many people here seem lost. Okay, to try to address the numerous point here, some good, some bad, I'll try to hit as many as I can in one fell swoop. SO, I never said AI was going to go away. AI is here to stay. I said the AI bubble should pop. Those don't mean the same things. It means that the over leveraged, debt-fueled corporate AI economy won't be able to scale to the levels that these companies are telling us. It means that the datacenter overbuild will (and is already starting to) crumble under the weight of the debt and hardware delays. Open source and open weight (not necessarily just local, but yes, also local) will take over. AI is not going away. I hate the corporate, forced, misused, irresponsible version of AI that has been forced upon us. I hate the fact that Google can sit there and tell us to our faces that there will be unlimited demand when that's literally not possible and they're handing hundreds of millions of users free AI that costs them money and runs them into the negatives on cash flow every day.
I hate the fact that so many of you supposedly have brains and yet you'll refuse to look at the actual market data and understand what it means. That you'll ignore that Apollo, Blackrock, Blackstone, and Blue Owl have all already implemented caps and freezes on withdrawals and the private credit sector is already starting its freefall. That Oracle has been downgraded to BBB- (one level above junk) and not only do none of you care, but you don't even know what that means.
Many of you work in the industry? Good for you! Surprise surprise, so do I. I can tell you which optimizer out of AdamW (the classic), Adafactor, Lion, and Muon is best to use for which architecture and why. I can build you an AI model if you like, in PyTorch, JAX, or a custom Rust model using bitwise functions like XNOR popcount. None of that means crap about the overleveraged AI bubble not popping.
These companies have gotten themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place here, doing forced integrations that the MAJORITY of the public never asked for, despite our little pro-AI echo chambers we build on here to tell us otherwise. They're taking all the free usage and forced integrations together with paid and presenting them as aggregated metrics and saying "Look, unlimited demand!". Meanwhile over 90% of these users aren't paying a cent for the paid plans and services, and surprise surprise, Google/Alphabet now has negative free cash flow in the billions. Remember a few weeks ago when Google for no reason tried to integrate Nanobanana into Google Earth, and then immediately had to pull it because, predictably, everyone started generating visual misinformation. It lasted 24 hours, and it was a desperate attempt by Google to shoehorn AI into something else just like they have been with Chrome and Google Search and every other one of their products. And all of this free usage uses their compute. None of you understand that or care. If you understood what it actually meant you just, wouldn't, defend it.
These market bubbles don't pop and deflate overnight. The dot com bubble lasted from about 1995 to 2002, for those who are unaware. It took place over the span of multiple YEARS. It didn't pop and go disaster mode overnight, and that's not what will happen if the AI bubble pops.
But, it is actually possible this bubble won't pop, at least not any time soon. Know why that is? Okay, so, many people don't seem to realize that the market isn't actually a bunch of dudes standing at the Wall Street Exchange shouting sell and buy orders and raising their hands. The market at this point is actually MOSTLY algorithmic, something like 80% algorithmically traded. Mostly by HFT (high frequency trading) algorithms run by large financial institutions. And I mean LAAARGE financial institutions. The kind of institutions that could literally buy your home state. These institutions, roughly about 17 of them, pretty much run the market with these HFT algorithms. And you know what they can do with that? They can use these HFT algorithms and bots to offset selling pressure en masse. Literally just counter market AI panic with, well, AI. So even if the bubble were trying to pop, they would just offset that with their massive resources and algorithmic trading, and keep the market going like a zombie that just can't die.
And this should terrify everyone, anti or pro AI. Because this leads to only two paths. Either the market eventually does collapse and the collapse is bigger and harder than anyone ever expected, and contagion spreads through private credit, crypto, traditional finance, the bond market, and so on and so forth knocking down the entire house of cards we've built over the last couple decades. OR, it continues on and just becomes entirely decoupled from reality, fueled only by narrative and algorithms, run mostly by bots under the guise of actual human investors running the show.
Anyway, I could keep on going, and going, but these are many of the core problems, most of the rebuttals for the asinine denial filling the comment section here. So insane to me that even on r/AIBubble there are so many AI bros. My God. You'd think that if it actually worked like most of you claimed then you wouldn't have to come here and defend anything, or your 12 dashboards you made would have made their first $100 by now. This is sad on so many levels. Wake tf up.