[HN Gopher] A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble
___________________________________________________________________
A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble
Author : dreamfactored
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-07-31 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fluxus.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (fluxus.io)
| fullstick wrote:
| We're building AI workflows at my company. Yes chatbots, but also
| more interesting/complex workflows that I won't get into. Let's
| just say we have the data, expertise, and industry structure to
| leverage AI in valuable and useful ways.
|
| As an engineer, development still comes down to requirements
| gathering, solid engineering principles, and the tools we already
| have at our disposal - network calls, rendering the UI,
| orchestrating containers and job, etc.
|
| All that is to say that I thought AI was going to be sexy, like
| Westworld, and not so boring...
| brokencode wrote:
| Boring is where the money is. Always has been.
|
| Westworld robots are still a long way off, but think about how
| far we've come so quickly.
|
| It's pretty incredible that natural language computing is now
| seen as boring when it barely even existed 5 years ago.
| bayesic wrote:
| > Sam Altman knew exactly which buttons to push. Congressional
| testimony about the need for regulation (from the company
| furthest ahead). Warnings about AI risk. OpenAI's playbook: Build
| in public, warn about dangers, present yourself as the
| responsible actor who needs resources to "do it safely."
|
| And this is why Matt Levine calls Sam Altman the greatest
| business negger of all time
| lnkl wrote:
| >Article praising LLMs.
|
| >Look inside.
|
| >Written by someone having a stake in LLM business.
|
| Every time.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Hey, at least this one is willing to admit that they aren't
| building Machine Jesus. That's a start.
| upghost wrote:
| "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..."
|
| A rhetorical technique as old as dirt, but apparently still
| effective.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| "Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what
| course thou wilt!"
|
| But seriously, it isn't on me to justify my skepticism of
| the extreme claim, "We are in a race to build machine
| super-intelligence" because that skepticism is the rational
| default. Instead it's the burden of people who claim that
| we are in fact in that race, just like "self driving next
| year" was a claim for others to prove, just like "Crypto is
| the future of money" is a statement requiring a high degree
| of support.
|
| We've seen this all before, and in the end the argument in
| favor seems to boil down to, "Look at how much money we're
| moving around with this hype" and "Trust us, the best is
| yet to come."
|
| Maybe this time it will.
| claw-el wrote:
| Alternatively, would someone not having a stake in LLM business
| have an incentive to disparage LLMs?
| esafak wrote:
| At least pick a Douglas Adams book cover!
| aeon_ai wrote:
| The author misses the deeper game: if you genuinely believe AGI
| is imminent, then current economic metrics become meaningless.
| Why optimize for revenue when the entire concept of scarcity-
| based economics dissolves?
|
| The $560B for those who believe in AGI isn't about ROI using
| today's money-in/money-out formula; it's about power positioning
| for a post-capitalist transition.
|
| Every major player knows that whoever controls the infrastructure
| once the threshold is crossed might control what comes after.
|
| The "bubble" narrative assumes these actors are optimizing for
| quarterly returns rather than civilizational leverage.
| chromanoid wrote:
| I think the author addresses this, but dismisses it as fantasy,
| which constitues the bubble.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| The problem with this is that it's entirely evidence free.
|
| I could also say, if you truly believe nuclear fusion is
| imminent we will have infinite free energy and all current
| economic metrics are meaningless. But there is no nuclear
| fusion bubble. Why not? Because people don't believe nuclear
| fusion is imminent. But for some reason they do believe AGI is
| imminent - despite there being no actual evidence of that.
| There is probably less understanding of what is needed to close
| the gap to true AGI than there is to close the gap to make
| nuclear fusion possible.
|
| The only distinction here is what people are willing to
| "believe" based on pure conjecture - which is why I class it as
| a true bubble.
| asdev wrote:
| The biggest issue with AI isn't AI itself, but the fact that it
| seemingly "saved" an overinflated economy. Economy needs a deep
| reset with high rates for longer and the AI narrative is just
| kicking the can down the road
| chromanoid wrote:
| Great article! I share the experience mentioned in the article,
| LLMs facilitate a head-on interaction with any topic. It is
| similar to instructional YouTube videos (that imo were already
| transformative) but with the ability to ask detailed questions.
| And this is what becomes better with each iteration. When
| creative communities finally settle down on generative AI there
| will be not just a plethora of AI slop, but so much highly
| creative never seen before content. It might lead to a new golden
| age of indie low budget movie productions.
| exasperaited wrote:
| There's already a new golden age of indie low budget movies.
| Those guys will not use AI to generate significant parts of
| their content, because it defeats the point of making an indie
| movie at all.
|
| I never cease to be shocked at how little tech people think of
| what creative people do and why they do it.
| handbanana_ wrote:
| >While established developers debate whether AI will replace
| them, these kids are shipping. Developers who learned their craft
| in the age of pull requests and sprint planning sneer at their
| security failures, not realizing that 'best practices' are about
| to flip again. The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're
| deploying to production.
|
| Shipping where? What production? What kids? I've yet to see this.
| I see the tools everywhere, but not anything built with them.
| You'd think it would be getting yelled about from the
| mountaintops, but I'm still waiting.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| What would qualify as proof? If somebody builds a good product
| and ships it it will just look like a good product. People will
| call it vibe coded slop when it fails spectacularly.
| gargalatas wrote:
| I totaly agree with the author. Not even the smartphone or the
| iphone brought such a sudden change to so many people and in many
| cases, for free. I know we want to oppose this huge thing just
| because it doesn't make sense moraly but when you learn using
| this tool there is no way back. Just imagine what is coming in
| the next 5-10 years. Even if the tools remain at the same level
| as today, people have learned to use it so well that ever sector
| every industry will speed up tremendously. We will see great new
| products and ideas emerging. Just can't wait for the revolution.
| upghost wrote:
| > Within weeks I built a serverless system processing 5 million
| social media posts daily, tracking topic clusters and emerging
| narratives in real-time. Then brand monitoring dashboards. Then a
| "robojournalist" that could deep-dive any trending story. Then
| hardware and firmware specs for a coffee machine. Then my first
| mobile app.
|
| I call bullshit. Let's see some repos.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| 5 million social media posts is like <1% of all the posts out
| there. Its just a weekend project
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I think a key point from this article that I agree strongly with
| is the simple point that it is crucial that everyone recognise
| _we are currently in an AI bubble_.
|
| I often find people contest this with the non-sequitur of "No,
| it's not a bubble, there is real value there. We are building
| things with it". The fact there is real value in the technology
| does not contradict in any way that we are in a bubble. It may
| even be supporting evidence for it. Compare with the dot com
| bubble : nobody would tell you there was no value in the
| internet. But it was still a bubble. A massive hyper inflated
| bubble. And when it popped, it left large swathes of the industry
| devastated even while a residual set of companies were left to
| carry on and build the "real" eventual internet based reworking
| of the entire economy which took 10 - 15 years.
|
| People would be well advised to have a look at this point in time
| at who survived the dot com bubble and why.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Once there's a consensus around a bubble the bubble has already
| burst?
| asdev wrote:
| everyone does NOT recognize it, just go on Twitter if you don't
| think so
| entropsilk wrote:
| The fact everyone thinks we are in an AI bubble is practically
| proof we are not in an AI bubble.
|
| The crowd is always wrong on these things. Just like everyone
| "knew" we were going into a deep recession sometime in late
| 2022, early 2023. The crowd has an incredibly short memory too.
|
| What it means is that people are really cautious about AI. That
| is not a self reinforcing, fear of missing out, explosive
| process bubble. That is a classic bull market climbing a wall
| of worry.
| layer8 wrote:
| But it's not true that everyone thinks we are in an AI
| bubble.
| time0ut wrote:
| The article resonates. AI coding assistants are cool and fun to
| use, but they just help solve a solved problem faster. The really
| exciting thing is exploring the new problems we can solve with
| this tool. It has really reignited my passion for building.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Businesses realizing a lot of their problems are already solved
| will be of great help to developers.
|
| Extremely tired of bespoke solutions when OTS or already-known
| would work just fine.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-31 23:00 UTC)