[HN Gopher] Is it a bubble?
___________________________________________________________________
Is it a bubble?
Author : saigrandhi
Score : 102 points
Date : 2025-12-10 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oaktreecapital.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oaktreecapital.com)
| mxschumacher wrote:
| Originally submitted here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212259
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Look for the quote "coding is at a world class level"...
| rvz wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| Yes.
| rvz wrote:
| Sorry to pop your bubble...
|
| ...it is a bubble and we all know it.
|
| (I know you have RSUs / shares / golden handcuffs waiting to be
| vested in the next 1 - 4 years which is why you want the bubble
| to continue to get bigger.)
|
| But one certainty is the crash will be spectacular.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Ai is currently a bubble. But that is just a short term
| phenomenon. Ultimately what AI currently is and what the trend-
| line indicates what AI will become will change the economy in
| ways that will dwarf the current bubble.
|
| But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely
| possibility given the last couple of years.
|
| I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and
| therefore AI is completely bullshit. Remember: The internet was a
| bubble. It ended up changing world.
| jbstack wrote:
| Yes, a bubble just means that it's over-valued and that at some
| point there will be a significant correction in stock values.
| It doesn't mean that the thing is inherently worthless.
| sosborn wrote:
| A great example is the DotCom bubble. Wiped out a lot of
| capital but it really did transform the world.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| But also, a lot of the dot com companies that people
| invested in in 1999 went bust, meaning those specific
| investments went to zero even if the web as a whole was a
| huge success financially.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Sure...that's why it's important to diversify
| investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a
| Google in your portfolio.
|
| Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500
| fund.
| lizknope wrote:
| I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com
| bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify
| away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at
| Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to
| under $20.
|
| Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax)
| worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell,
| but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They
| had tax bills of over $1 million but even if they sold it
| all they couldn't pay the bill. This dragged on for
| years.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Google said the dotcom bubble is roughly from 1995 to 2001.
| That's about 6 years. ChatGPT was released in 2022. Claude AI
| was released in 2023. DeepSeek was released in 2023.
|
| Let's just say the AI bubble started in 2023. We still have
| about 3 years, more or less, until the AI bubble pops.
|
| I do believe we are in the build out phase of the AI bubble,
| much like the dotcom bubble, where Cisco routers, Sun
| Microsystems servers... etc. sold like hotcakes to build up the
| foundation of the dotcom bubble
| rvz wrote:
| > Let's just say the AI bubble started in 2023. We still have
| about 3 years, more or less, until the AI bubble pops.
|
| Minimum 3 years and at a hard maximum of 6 years from now.
|
| We'll see lots of so called AI companies fold and there will
| be a select few winners that stay on.
|
| So I'd give my crash timelines at around 2029 to 2031 for a
| significant correction turned crash.
| catigula wrote:
| >I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying. I am
| enormously concerned about what will happen to the people whose
| jobs AI renders unnecessary, or who can't find jobs because of
| it. The optimists argue that "new jobs have always materialized
| after past technological advances." I hope that'll hold true in
| the case of AI, but hope isn't much to hang one's hat on, and I
| have trouble figuring out where those jobs will come from. Of
| course, I'm not much of a futurist or a financial optimist, and
| that's why it's a good thing I shifted from equities to bonds in
| 1978.
|
| It's no wonder that the "AI optimists", unless very tendentious,
| try to focus more on "not needing to work because you'll get free
| stuff" rather than "you'll be able to exchange your labor for
| goods".
| puchatek wrote:
| And i am so buying the vision of Elon using AI to give me free
| stuff. He just gives off this enormous altruistic energy.
| sp4cec0wb0y wrote:
| > In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the
| code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the
| code for them.
|
| What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this
| information?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Probably their googly-eyed vibe coder friend told them this and
| they just parroted it.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Right. The author is non-technical and said so up front.
| interstice wrote:
| If true I'd like to know who is doing this so I can have
| exactly nothing to do with them.
| rprend wrote:
| AI writes most of the code for most new YC companies, as of
| this year.
| brazukadev wrote:
| That explains the low quality of all launch HN this year
| block_dagger wrote:
| Stats/figures to backup the low quality claim?
| esseph wrote:
| If you have them, post them.
| nickorlow wrote:
| I think this is is less significant b/c
|
| 1. Most of these companies are AI companies & would want to
| say that to promote whatever tool they're building
|
| 2. Selection b/c YC is looking to fund companies embracing AI
|
| 3. Building a greenfield project with AI to the quality of
| what you need to be a YC-backed company isn't particularly
| "world-class"
| rprend wrote:
| They're not lying when they say they have AI write their
| code, so it's not just promotion. They will thrive or die
| from this thesis. If present YC portfolio companies
| underperform the market in 5-10 years, that's a strong
| signal for AI skeptics. If they overperform, that's a
| strong signal that AI skeptics were wrong.
|
| 3. You are absolutely right. New startups have greenfield
| projects that are in-distribution for AI. This gives them
| faster iteration speed. This means new companies have a
| structural advantage over older companies, and I expect
| them to grow faster than tech startups that don't do this.
|
| Plenty of legacy codebases will stick around, for the same
| reasons they always do: once you've solved a problem, the
| worst thing you can do is rewrite your solution to a new
| architecture with a better devex. My prediction: if you
| want to keep the code writing and office culture of the
| 2010s, get a job internally at cloud computing companies
| (AWS, GCP, etc). High reliability systems have less to gain
| from iteration speed. That's why airlines and banks
| maintain their mainframes.
| tapoxi wrote:
| So they don't own the copyright to most of their code? What's
| the value then?
| esafak wrote:
| They do. Where did you get this? All the providers have
| clauses like this:
|
| "4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer's End Users may
| provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and
| OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law,
| Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and
| (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all
| OpenAI's right, title, and interest, if any, in and to
| Output."
|
| https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/
| shakna wrote:
| The outputs of AI are most likely in the public domain.
| As automated process output are public domain, and the
| companies claim fair use when scraping, making the input
| unencumbered, too.
|
| It wouldn't be OpenAI holding copyright - it would be no
| one holding copyright.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Courts have already leaned this way too, but who knows
| what'll happen when companies with large legal funds
| enter the arena.
| macrolime wrote:
| So you're saying machine code is public domain if it's
| compiled from C? If not, why would AI generated code be
| any different?
| tapoxi wrote:
| Monkey Selfie case, setting the stage for an automated
| process is not enough to declare copyright over a work.
| fhd2 wrote:
| That would be considered a derivative work of the C code,
| I believe.
|
| Can you replay all of your prompts exactly the way you
| wrote them and get the same behaviour out of the LLM
| generated code? In that case, the situation might be
| similar. If that's not the case, probably not.
|
| But significantly editing LLM generated code _should_
| make it your copyright again, I believe. Hard to say when
| this hasn't really been tested in the courts yet, to my
| knowledge.
| block_dagger wrote:
| I'm on a team like this currently. It's great when everyone
| knows how to use the tools and spot/kill slop and bad context.
| Generally speaking, good code gets merged and MUCH more quickly
| than in the past.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced."
|
| Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the
| complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof.
|
| Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Part of the issue is that I think you are underestimating the
| number of people not doing "advanced" programming. If it's
| around ~80-90%, then that's a lot of +1s for AI
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Why do you feel like I'm underestimating the # of people
| not doing advanced programming?
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Theoretically, if AI can do 80-90% of programming jobs
| (the ones not in the "advanced" group), that would be an
| unequivocal +1 for AI.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| I think you're crossing some threads here.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| "It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not
| "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these
| days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof.
|
| Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for
| them.
|
| " Is you, right?
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Yes. You can see my name on the post.
| sethammons wrote:
| At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up
| minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple
| handlers. It does pretty well.
|
| Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a
| concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it
| wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole
| thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I
| would have written it faster by hand, no doubt. I think I know
| more now and the calculus may be shifting on my AI usage.
| However, the following day, my colleague needed a nearly
| identical temporary tool. A 45 minute session with Claude of
| "copy this thing but do this other stuff" easily saved them 6-8
| hours of work. And again, that was just talking with Claude.
|
| I am doing a hybrid approach really. I write much of my
| scaffolding, I write example code, I modify quick things the ai
| made to be more like I want, I set up guard rails and some
| tests then have the ai go to town. Results are mixed but
| trending up still.
|
| FWIW, our CEO has declared us to be AI-first, so we are to
| leverage AI in everything we do which I think is misguided. But
| you can bet they will be reviewing AI usage metrics and lower
| wont be better at $WORK.
| chickensong wrote:
| > it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the
| whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully
| killed
|
| First pass on a greenfield project is often like that, for
| humans too I suppose. Once the MVP is up, refactor with Opus
| ultrathink to look for areas of weakness and improvement
| usually tightens things up.
|
| Then as you pointed out, once you have solid scaffolding,
| examples, etc, things keep improving. I feel like Claude has
| a pretty strong bias for following existing patterns in the
| project.
| johnfn wrote:
| I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some
| reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to
| tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to
| lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of
| experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and
| we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI
| writes, and often go through multiple iterations, so it's a bit
| of a more complex picture, but if you were to simply say "a
| developer is not writing the code", it would be an accurate
| statement.
|
| Though I do think "advanced software team" is kind of an absurd
| phrase, and I don't think there is any correlation with how
| "advanced" the software you build is and how much you need AI.
| In fact, there's probably an anti-correlation: I think that I
| get such great use out of AI primarily because we don't need to
| write particularly difficult code, but we do need to write a
| _lot_ of it. I spend a lot of time in React, which AI is very
| well-suited to.
|
| EDIT: I'd love to hear from people who disagree with me or
| think I am off-base somehow about which particular part of my
| comment (or follow-up comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222640) seems wrong. I'm
| particularly curious why when I say I use Rust and code faster
| everyone is fine with that, but saying that I use AI and code
| faster is an extremely contentious statement.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less.
|
| >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often
| go through multiple iterations
|
| Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the
| code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok
| code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the
| biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a)
| chunking the task into increments that are both small enough
| for me to easily grok the AI-generated code and also aligned
| enough to the AI's training data for its output to be ~100%
| correct, b) correctly predicting ahead of time whether
| reviewing/correcting the output for each increment will take
| longer than just doing it myself, and c) ensuring that the
| overhead of a) and b) doesn't exceed just doing it myself.
|
| [0] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-
| it
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
| should-...
|
| [2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/
|
| [3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-
| har...
| johnfn wrote:
| Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I'm
| likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly
| what I'm working on. Most of the issues that you cite can
| be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming
| part of your brain to work with this new paradigm.
|
| To be honest, I don't really have a problem with chunking
| my tasks. The reason I don't is because I don't really
| think about it that way. I care a lot more about chunks and
| AI could reasonably _validate_. Instead of thinking "what's
| the biggest chunk I could reasonably ask AI to solve" I
| think "what's the biggest piece I could ask an AI to do
| that I can write a script to easily validate once it's
| done?" Allowing the AI to validate its own work means you
| never have to worry about chunking again. (OK, that 's a
| slight hyperbole, but the validation is most of my concern,
| and a secondary concern is that I try not to let it go for
| more than 1000 lines.)
|
| For instance, take the example of an AI rewriting an API
| call to support a new db library you are migrating to. In
| this case, it's easy to write a test case for the AI. Just
| run a bunch of cURLs on the existing endpoint that exercise
| the existing behavior (surely you already have these
| because you're working in a code base that's well tested,
| right? right?!?), and then make a script that verifies that
| the result of those cURLs has not changed. Now, instruct
| the AI to ensure it runs that script and doesn't stop until
| the results are character for character identical. That
| will almost always get you something working.
|
| Obviously the tactics change based on what you are working
| on. In frontend code, for example, I use a lot of
| Playwright. You get the idea.
|
| As for code legibility, I tend to solve that by telling the
| AI to focus particularly on clean _interfaces_ , and being
| OK with the internals of those interfaces be vibecoded and
| a little messy, so long as the external interface is crisp
| and well-tested. This is another very long discussion, and
| for the non-vibe-code-pilled (sorry), it probably sounds
| insane, and I feel it's easy to lose one's audience on such
| a polarizing topic, so I'll keep it brief. In short, one
| real key thing to understand about AI is that it makes the
| cost of writing unit tests and e2e tests drop
| significantly, and I find this (along with remaining
| disciplined and having crisp interfaces) to be an excellent
| tool in the fight against the increased code complexity
| that AI tools bring. So, in short, I deal with legibility
| by having a few really really clean interfaces/APIs that
| are extremely readable, and then testing them like crazy.
|
| EDIT
|
| There is a dead comment that I can't respond to that claims
| that I am not a reliable narrator because I have no A/B
| test. Behold, though: I am the AI-hater's nightmare,
| because I do have a good A/B test! I have a website that
| sees a decent amount of traffic (https://chipscompo.com/).
| Over the last few years, I have tried a few times to
| modernize and redesign the website, but these attempts have
| always failed because the website is pretty big (~50k loc)
| and I haven't been able to fit it in a single week of PTO.
|
| This Thanksgiving, I took another crack at it with Claude
| Code, and not only did I finish an entire redesign
| (basically touched every line of frontend code), but I also
| got in a bunch of other new features, too, like a forgot
| password feature, and a suite of moderation tools. I then
| IaC'd the whole thing with Terraform, something I only
| dreamed about doing before AI! Then I bumped React a few
| majors versions, bumped TS about 10 years, etc, all with
| the help of AI. The new site is live and everyone seems to
| like it (well, they haven't left yet...).
|
| If anything, this is actually an unfair comparison, because
| it was _more_ work for the AI than it was for me when I
| tried a few years ago, because because my dependencies
| became more and more out of date as the years went on! This
| was actually a pain for AI, but I eventually managed to
| solve it.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I'm
| likely 5-10x more productive
|
| The METR paper demonstrated that you are not a reliable
| narrator for this. Have you participated in a study where
| this was measured, or are you just going off intuition?
| Because METR demonstrated beyond doubt that your
| intuition is a liar in this case.
|
| If you're not taking measurements it is more likely that
| you are falling victim to a number of psychological
| effects (sunk cost, Gell-Manns, slot machine effect) than
| it is that your productivity has really improved.
|
| Have you received a 5-10x pay increase? If your
| productivity is now 10x mine (I don't use these tools at
| work because they are a waste of time in my experience)
| then why aren't you compensated as such and if it's
| because of pointy haired bosses, you should be able to
| start a new company with your 10x productivity to shut
| him and me up.
|
| Provide links to your evidence in the replies
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Did you do 5-10 years of work in the year after you
| adopted AI? If you started after AI came in to existence
| 3 years ago (/s) you should have achieved 30 years of
| work output - a whole career of work.
| johnfn wrote:
| I think AI only "got good" around the release of Claude
| Code + Opus 4.0, which was around March of this year. And
| it's not like I sit down and code 8 hours a day 5 days a
| week. I put on my pants one leg at a time -- there's a
| lot of other inefficiencies in the process, like
| meetings, alignment, etc, etc.
|
| But yes, I do think that the efficiency gain, purely in
| the domain of coding, is around 5x, which is why I was
| able to entirely redesign my website in a week. When
| working on personal projects I don't need to worry about
| stakeholders at all.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| a) is exactly what AI is good at. b) is a waste of time:
| why would you waste your precious time trying to predict a
| result when you can just get the result and see.
|
| You are stuck in a very low local maximum.
|
| You are me six months ago. You don't know how it works, so
| you cannot yet reason about it. Unlike me, you've decided
| "all these other people who say it's effective are making
| it up". Instead ask, how _does_ it work? What am _I_
| missing.
| 3rodents wrote:
| I regularly try to use various AI tools and I can imagine it
| is very easy for it to produce 95% of your code. I can also
| imagine you have 90% more code than you would have had you
| written it yourself. That's not necessarily a bad thing, code
| is a means to an end, and if your business is happy with the
| outcomes, great, but I'm not sure percentages of code are
| particularly meaningful.
|
| Every time I try to use AI it produces endless code that I
| would never have written. I've tried updating my instructions
| to use established dependencies when possible but it seems
| completely averse.
|
| An argument could be made that a million lines isn't a
| problem now that these machines can consume and keep all the
| context in memory -- maybe machines producing concise code is
| asking for faster horses.
| kscarlet wrote:
| The line right after this is much worse:
|
| > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something
| that wasn't so just a year ago.
|
| Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.
| mcv wrote:
| World class? Then what am I? I frequently work with Copilot
| and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to
| write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea.
| I am impressed by its ability to generate and analyse code,
| but its code almost never works the first time, unless it's
| trivial boilerplate stuff, and its analysis is wrong half the
| time.
|
| It's very useful if you have the knowledge and experience to
| tell when it's wrong. That is the absolutely vital skill to
| work with these systems. In the right circumstances, they can
| work miracles in a very short time. But if they're wrong,
| they can easily waste hours or more following the wrong
| track.
|
| It's fast, it's very well-read, and it's sometimes correct.
| That's my analysis of it.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Copilot is easily the worst (and probably slowest) coding
| agent. SOTA and Copilot don't even inhabit similar planes
| of existence.
| malfist wrote:
| Is this why AI is telling us our every idea is brilliant
| and great? Because their code doesn't stand up to what we
| can do?
| selectodude wrote:
| They don't. I've gone from rickety and slow excel sheets and
| maybe some python functions to automate small things that I
| can figure out to building out entire data pipelines. It's
| incredible how much more efficient we've gotten.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Ask ChatGPT "is AI programming world class?"
| brulard wrote:
| I'm on a team like that and I see it happening in more and more
| companies around. Maybe "many" does a heavy lifting in the
| quoted text, but it is definitely happening.
| qsort wrote:
| Everyone is doing this extreme pearl clutching around the
| specific wording. Yeah, it's not 100% accurate for many
| reasons, but the broader point was about employment effects, it
| doesn't need to completely replace every single developer to
| have a sizable impact. Sure, it's not there yet and it's not
| particularly close, but can you be certain that it will _never_
| be there?
|
| Error bars, folks, use them.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| source: me
|
| I wrote 4000 lines of Rust code with Codex - a high throughput
| websocket data collector.
|
| Spoiler: I do not know Rust at all. I discussed possible
| architectures with GPT/Gemini/Grok (sync/async, data flow,
| storage options, ...), refined a design and then it was all
| implemented with agents.
|
| Works perfectly, no bugs.
| sefrost wrote:
| I would be interested in a web series (podcast or video)
| where people who do not know a language create something with
| AI. Then somebody with experience building in that technology
| reviews the code and gives feedback on it.
|
| I am personally progressing to a point where I wonder if it
| even matters what the code looks like if it passes functional
| and unit tests. Do patterns matter if humans are not going to
| write and edit the code? Maybe sometimes. Maybe not other
| times.
| 20after4 wrote:
| I've had claude code compose complex AWS infrastructure (using
| pulumi IAC) that mostly works from a one-shot prompt.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Of course it's a bubble. Valuations are propped up by speculative
| spending and AI seems unable to make enough profit to make back
| the continued spending.
|
| Now, that's not to say AI isn't useful and we won't have AGI in
| the future. But this feels alot like the AI winter. Valuations
| will crash, a bunch of players will disappear, but we'll keep
| using the tech for boring things and eventually we'll have
| another breakthrough.
| b3ing wrote:
| Everyday someone says/asks this statement/question. The "(Is) AI
| (is) a bubble" statement/question is now a bubble.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| "Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level". Once I hit
| that line, I stopped reading. This tells me this person didn't do
| proper research on this matter.
| calebm wrote:
| I recently had ChatGPT refactor an entire mathematical graph
| rendering logic that I wrote in vanilla js, and had it rewrite
| it as GLSL. It took about an hour overall (required a few
| prompts). That is world-class level in my opinion.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| If I tell people that I can write programming code at world-
| class level and in some of my reviews I make junior mistakes,
| I make out functions or dependencies that do not exist or I
| am unable to learn from my mistakes, I would be put on PIP
| immediately. And after a while, fired. This is the standard
| LLMs should be held up against when you use the word "world
| class".
| mcv wrote:
| I'm currently trying to get Claude Sonnet 4.5 to produce a
| graph rendering algorithm, and while it's producing results,
| they're not the right results. I should probably do this
| myself and let the AI handle just the boilerplate code.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| The problem is that people conflate the current wave of
| transformer based ANNs with AI (as a whole). AI certainly has the
| potential to disrupt employment of humans. Transformers as they
| exist today not so much.
|
| AI's potential isn't defined by the potential of the current crop
| of transformers. However, many people seem to think otherwise and
| this will be incredibly damaging for AI as a whole once
| transformer tech investment all but dries out.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| It's a recurring phenomena, c.f. "AI winter" and the cycle
| before and after.
|
| We're too easily fooled by our mistaken models of the problem,
| it's difficulty, and what constitutes progress, so are
| perpetually fooled by the latest, greatest "ladder to the moon"
| effort.
| artur44 wrote:
| A lot of the debate here swings between extremes. Claims like "AI
| writes most of the code now" are obviously exaggerated especially
| coming from a nontechnical author but acting like any use of AI
| is a red flag is just as unrealistic. Early stage teams do lean
| on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard
| engineering work is still human. Is there a bubble? Sure,
| valuations look frothy. But like the dotcom era, a correction
| doesn't invalidate the underlying shift it just clears out the
| noise. The hype is inflated, the technology is real.
| dpe82 wrote:
| A take I saw recently is: if people are still asking "are we in a
| bubble" then we are not yet in a bubble.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I think it'd be truer to say that you can't be sure it's a
| bubble until after it pops.
| rvz wrote:
| That is like telling others who experience natural disasters
| to wait until it happens and then ask themselves "How much
| damage will it bring" and then someone else tells them that
| it costed them everything.
|
| Anyone who has lived through the dotcom bubble knows that
| this AI mania is a obvious bubble and the whole point is you
| have to prepare before it eventually pops, not after someone
| tells you that it is too late when it pops.
| Retr0id wrote:
| You don't prepare by making predictions about when it will
| pop, you prepare by hedging etc.
|
| Just as those who live in earthquake-prone areas build
| earthquake-resistant buildings.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This is one of the few times I think Betteridge's law is wrong.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Yep. But be careful, somebody doesn't like when you say that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46136301
| Sprotch wrote:
| He thinks "AI" "may be capable of taking over cognition", which
| shows he doesn't understand how LLM work...
| ozten wrote:
| Why is AI limited to just a raw LLM. Scaffolding, RL, multi-
| modal... so many techniques which can be applied. METR has
| shown AI's time horizon for staying on task is doubling every 7
| months or less.
|
| https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-14-how-does-time-horizon-vary-...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Because all the money has been going into LLMs and "inference
| machines" (what a non-descriptive name). So when an investor
| says "AI", that's what they mean.
| f154hfds wrote:
| The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time
| in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out
| right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing
| place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with
| exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only
| exciting for management stressed about payroll.
|
| It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent
| information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about)
| but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the
| promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial
| creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
| stack_framer wrote:
| > It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been
| actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on
| its promise.
|
| Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I
| thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I
| will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of
| course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all
| comes together. Sometimes I can't even believe I get to do it!
|
| I've spent over a decade learning an elegant language that
| allows me to instruct a computer--and the computer does
| _exactly_ what I tell it. It 's a miracle! I don't want to
| abandon this language. I don't want to describe things to the
| computer in English, then stare at a spinner for three minutes
| while the computer tries to churn out code.
|
| I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field
| who _don 't want to write code_.
|
| I want to write code.
| zparky wrote:
| It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and
| seeing _so many_ comments from programmers that are _excited_
| to not have to write code. It 's depressing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'm quite ok with only writing code in my personal time. In
| fact, if I could solve the problems there faster, I'd be
| delighted.
|
| Instead, I've reacted to the article from the opposite
| direction. All those grand claims about stuff this tech
| doesn't do and can't do. All that trying to validate the
| investment as rational when it's absolutely obvious it's at
| least 2 orders of magnitude larger than any arguably rational
| value.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I also love to code, though it's not what people pay to do
| anymore.
|
| You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its
| promise. Sooner or later it usually does. The question is,
| does it happen in two years or a hundred years? My motto:
| don't predict, prepare.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| So write code.
|
| Maybe post renaissance many artists no longer had patrons,
| but nothing was stopping them from painting.
|
| If your industry truely is going in the direction where
| there's no paid work for you to code (which is unlikely in my
| opinion), nobody is stopping you. It's easier than ever, you
| have decades of personal computing at your fingertips.
|
| Most people with a thing they love do it as a hobby, not a
| job. Maybe you've had it good for a long time?
| tjr wrote:
| From the GNU Manifesto:
|
| _I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer.
| Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on
| the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result,
| condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making
| faces, and starving. We do something else._
|
| https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html
| doug_durham wrote:
| Writing code is my passion, and like you I'm amazed I get
| paid to do it. That said in any new project there is a large
| swath of code that needs to be written that I've written many
| times before. I'm happy to let the LLM write the low value
| code so I can work on the interesting parts. Examples of this
| type of code are argument parsers and interfacing with REST
| interfaces. I add no value there.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| LLM slop doesn't have aspirations at all, its just click bait
| nonsense.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0
|
| Drives people insane:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU
|
| And LLM are economically and technologically unsustainable:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
|
| These have already proven it will be unconstrained if AGI ever
| emerges.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM
|
| The LLM bubble will pass, as it is already losing money with
| every new user. =3
| rglover wrote:
| I've enjoyed Howard Marks writing/thinking in the past, but this
| is clearly a person who _thinks_ they understand the topic but
| doesn 't have the slightest clue. Someone trying to be
| relevant/engaged before really thinking on what is fact vs.
| fiction.
| andxor wrote:
| As usual I don't take financial advice from Hacker News comments
| and do well.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Why is so much invested in AI but not in fusion power?
| chemotaxis wrote:
| Probably because AI appears to work, more or less, and now it's
| just a race to make it better and to monetize it.
|
| Before ChatGPT, I'd guess that the amounts of money poured in
| both of these things were about the same.
| mandevil wrote:
| There are a lot of areas that could use more investment but
| aren't getting it. The way this works is complicated. The best
| explanation comes from really understanding Moore's Law. The
| main effect of the law was really about investment, about
| securing investment into semiconductor fabs rather than
| anywhere else.
|
| See, every fab costs double what the previous generation did
| (current ones run roughly 20 gigadollars per factory). And you
| need to build a new fab every couple of years. But, if you can
| keep your order book full, you can make a profit on that fab-
| you can get good ROI on the investment and pay the money people
| back nicely. But you need to go to the markets to raise money
| for that next generation fab because it costs twice what your
| previous generation did and you didn't get that much free cash
| from your previous generation. And the money men wouldn't want
| to give it to you, of course. But thanks to Moore's Law you can
| pitch it as inevitable, if you don't borrow the money to build
| the new fab, then your competitors will. And so they would give
| you the money for the new fab because it says right on this
| paper that in another two years the transistors will double.
|
| Right now, that "it's inevitable, our competitors will get
| there if we don't" argument works on VCs if you are pitching
| LLM's or LLM based things. And it doesn't work as well if you
| are pitching battery technology, fusion power, or other areas.
| And that's why the investments are going to AI.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There is probably not any large market for fusion power as we
| conceive of it today.
|
| You will get a different result if you revolutionize some
| related area (like making an extremely capably superconductor),
| or if you open up some market that can't use the cheapest
| alternatives (like deep space asteroid mining). But neither of
| those options can go together with "oh, and we will achieve
| energy positive fusion" in a startup business plan.
| empath75 wrote:
| Because wind, solar and battery tech have given us most of the
| benefits of fusion power and it actually works today.
| cal_dent wrote:
| I think this gives an excellent framework for how to think of
| this. Is it a bubble? Who knows is a perfectly valid answer.
|
| I do think there's something quite ironic that one of the
| frequent criticisms of LLMs are that they can't really say "I
| don't know". Yet if someone says that they get criticised. No
| surprises that our tools are the same.
| jesuslop wrote:
| I pasted the essay on gpt and asked opinion and it agreed with
| you:
|
| > He avoids the common mistake of saying "this is a bubble" and
| instead says: "I don't know -- and neither does anyone else."
| That epistemic humility is real sophistication. Most people
| fake certainty here; he doesn't.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Impressive that you have have that many assets under management
| and still not show a clear understanding of an industry you're
| prognosticating on. The author doesn't talk at all about the
| hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short
| lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck
| pace. The recommendation that you take a moderate investment
| position and not overdo it could be shared without as much
| needless thinking out loud, and doesn't bring anything new to the
| conversation. Kind of like every other AI offering out there, if
| you think about it -- participating in something you don't
| understand because of FOMO.
| derf_ wrote:
| _> The author doesn 't talk at all about the hardware aspect of
| this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs
| that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace._
|
| There is literally a section that begins, "What will be the
| useful life of AI assets?" In bold.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Sure, but an informed opinion would mention that not only do
| these chips become obsolete quickly, but the ones that will
| survive long enough to become obsolete are likely to have a
| very fast and high failure rate.
| empath75 wrote:
| > The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of
| this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs
| that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace.
|
| I am not sure why that is interesting. Nobody thinks of these
| chips as long term assets that they are investing in. Cloud
| providers have always amortized their computers over ~5 years.
| It would be very surprising if AI companies were doing much
| different -- maybe even a shorter time line.
| jimlawruk wrote:
| If you look at the chart at the bottom comparing Dec 99 to
| today....
|
| > during the internet bubble of 1998-2000, the p/e ratios were
| much higher
|
| That is true, the current players are more profitable, but the
| weight in SPX percentages looks to be much higher today.
| reeeli wrote:
| Is it "work"?
|
| Off--topic: how many get overpaid for absolute bullshit?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| This thread is just full of people discussing why industrial
| looms are bad. The factory owners don't think looms are bad. You
| can either learn how to be useful in the new factory or you can
| start throwing shoes.
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