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scrlk1 day ago | parent | context | favorite | on: ASML's strong orders ease fears AI spending boom i... Feb 2000: Record orders for chip gear push SEMI index to four-year high https://www.eetimes.com/record-orders-for-chip-gear-push-sem... > Capital equipment suppliers have been increasing their forecasts for revenue growth in 2000 as chip manufacturers begin to add new wafer fabs and backend assembly plants. Last week, for example, Applied Materials Inc.–the world's largest semiconductor equipment supplier–announced it had increased its forecast for industry growth in wafer fab equipment sales to 46% from a projection of 19% at the end of last year (see Feb. 16 story). > The strong wave of new orders “confirms the strength of the current market cycle,” said Stanley T. Myers, president of SEMI. This time it's different. help 
signatoremo1 day ago | next[–] So you are saying, just like the Internet, there may or may not be a painful AI burst in a few years, then exponential grow in decades to come? What is the time window to fit your narrative? reply keoneflick1 day ago | parent | next[–] An investment in the S&P 500 at the heights of 2000 would not materially exceed its basis until 2013! An Nasdaq would not materially exceed until 2016. Yes, this ignores dividends, but that really only helps manage inflation. You would have done much better being out of the stock market until the 2009 crash. reply rsanek1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Excluding dividends is a pretty big asterisk, including them you're back to even within 6.5 years. reply keoneflick1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The parent described "exponential returns", which I was reacting to. For what it's worth, the S&P dividend yield is typically 1-2%, and below inflation for the majority of relevant years. So you are not ahead in real dollars until roughly the dates I mentioned. reply chung81231 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Are you looking at dividends as cash value or reinvested? reply orangepanda1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Dividends are part of the total returns and cant just be ignored. Taking them into account, the break-even point is non-insignificantly earlier. It’s the total returns that matter, not just stock price. reply londons_explore1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] But remembering that most people have taxes to pay on dividends even if the stock price is going down. reply Grombobulous1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Well, you aren't necessarily better sitting out entirely. When the stock market slumps like that, continual investment lowers your average cost basis. e.g.: Year 1: Buy 1 stock at $100 Year 2: Buy 1 stock at $50 (post-crash) Year 3: Buy 1 stock at $60 Year 4: Buy 1 stock at $70 Year 5: Buy 1 stock at $80 If we just look at "Year 1 = $100, Year 5 = $80" then it looks like we lost $20/share. However, our average cost basis is $72, so we actually made $8 per share. That’s not really a great return but it’s not horrible considering the circumstances. reply dingaling9111 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] That's why DCA and do a good job at work is the best investment for most people. reply zackmorris1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I was there, and this is why I consider the 2000s a lost decade. Honestly we only just started to get back into the swing of things from 2012-2016 when Obama's reelection provided enough market confidence for electric cars to reach MVP status in 2013 and solar panels to begin scaling until Trump slapped a 30% tariff on them in 2018. Progress in sustainability is my litmus test for the economic viability of getting real work done in the economy, sort of like grading a steakhouse on how good its least-ordered mushroom appetizer tastes. We could also choose healthcare, education or any other field whose success is determined by the social good it provides. If it weren't for the arrival of AI, I'd call this a wasted quarter century. reply ashdksnndck1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] So if you knew in advance about the timing of both the tech bubble and the real estate bubble, you could have made a lot of money trading on that? reply causal1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Yeah I always find dot com burst comparison apt because like, yeah market corrections will probably happen, but even if you invested in big tech RIGHT before the burst you would probably still be very rich today if you just held. reply NoboruWataya1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] This is the definition of survivorship bias. There are a ton of tech stocks that you would have lost your shirt on had you invested in them just prior to the crash. Even if you invested in a company that ultimately became a winner, you'd need to be able to hold on to it throughout the correction. You put your savings in tech stocks, the tech sector undergoes a significant correction, the stocks dive, you get laid off because you also work in tech and now you have to liquidate your stocks to meet your obligations. (Or you just retire at the wrong time.) reply paimapi1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Right, people often look to companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and think 'If only I held!' They don't look at 3DFX, Transmeta, Centillium, Virata, or the numerous other companies because they are dead in the graveyard of failed companies that have lost full valuation. Depending on how much you invest in each, if you panic-buy/sell, etc changes all that. You're also ultimately betting on whether or not there will ever be another bubble/hype in the industry, and that you are betting wide enough into fully speculative companies like Nvidia instead of just aiming for power players. People forget that the market for luxury PC hardware barely existed at the time and was populated by a very small group of wealthy consumers. Expecting that to take off against the cheap prices of console offerings and against the technical know-how of assembling/disassembling PCs is closer to faith than any rationale. Just by law of probability and total number of actual bagholders, the vast majority of people didn't bet that way. But I guess if you think you're special or have some lucrative insight into the industry, you might think you're an exception to that rule. reply BiraIgnacio1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Right, the other case seems to definitely be happening > 'Yikes': CoreWeave stock sinks after its bond yield touched 15% https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/yikes-coreweave... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090791 reply bushbaba1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Sure but if you bought a broad index you were fine reply paimapi1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Again, that depends on how long you hold and when you cash out. Most people don't get rich: https://archive.nytimes.com/screenshots/www.nytimes.com/inte... I'm sure there are studies out there on the ratio of upper-middle-to-upper class households vs not, adjusted for inflation, with surveys on how they invest (if they do at all) with other factors accounted for. I know for sure that the total number of households who hold index funds (50+%) [0] far exceeds households that have a million+ in assets (10+%) [1]. If index funds were some magic bullet investment vehicle for multiplying your money, we'd see better ratios than 1:5 with only the top 20% becoming wealthy-adjacent (and that's provided that 100% of the millionaire class got rich via index funds and not other means like real estate). [0] https://www.ici.org/news-release/ici-report-shows-mutual-fun... [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/guess-percent-people-1-millio... edit: as a corollary, I was just talking about this with someone who works in finance and the sentiment amongst ICs like them, they say, is that this is definitely a bubble that will pop at some point. The only contention is how devastating the effects will be, if it'll be a slump, a recession, or a depression. reply KellyCriterion1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] WOW, MANY thanks for linking the NYT graphic! Its very good and tells a lot! Thanks for sharing! reply lesuorac1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I’m not so sure. It’s showing how much better or worse than inflation. That’s not an apples-apples comparison. Like if you don’t invest into say SNP500 then the money grows (or not) at what rate and is that rate better than the SNP500? It’s way better to get a 10% return when there’s 11% inflation if the alternative was 0%. reply twoodfin1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] It’s weird to the point I consider it deliberately misleading: - Anybody wise enough to invest in the S&P 500 is likely also wise enough not to invest their entire nest egg in a single year, 20 years before retirement. - The massive bulk of “ordinary American” 401(k) / IRA funds are in low-fee, no-tax-on-growth accounts. This chart has a nebulous “taxes and fees” component, which in this already artificial context makes even less sense to apply to annual returns. - Counting only real growth without comparing to other investment options (real estate, bonds, cash under the mattress) fails to capture the relative value of diversified index funds. In short: Impossible to beat reliably no matter how you set the metric. reply causal1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] To spell out my thinking more completely: Yes, I did not mean AskJeeves specifically, I meant broad investment. And likewise nobody should go all in on just SpaceXSI or whatever. And in any case no, you should not pour your money into tech stocks if you need that money to eat, that was true then as it is today. reply andsoitis1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > This is the definition of survivorship bias. There are a ton of tech stocks that you would have lost your shirt on had you invested in them just prior to the crash. Which is why you buy an index, rather than try pick individual stocks. reply Danox1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Buy individual stocks in blue chip companies. The return is always better but if you do buy individual stocks, you have to actually pay attention to that individual company that you invested in does, in short continue to do your homework, in the current bubble, invest in the companies that have great fundamentals (revenue and actual profit) do not invest in those companies where the financials are terrible and have been terrible for years, yet they still command a high price, eventually the party ends. Currently, there are three companies owned by the same person, the financials and their relative performance/competitiveness is not good despite the oversized hype in comparison to other blue chip companies. But many people have gotten great returns however, it is a don’t get caught holding the bag type of stocks Hint: The three companies are owned by same guy and has a cult like following. reply jermaustin11 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] The problem is psychology. People don't HODL while their retirements drop by 20, 30, 40% in a week. High earners might, institutions can, but regular every day people they take the loss, and might never go back into the market again, forgoing those recovery years. The average recovery is 18 months I think (I'm in a meeting, and can't look it up), but people like my dad watched his retirement fizzle out in the dotcom bubble, because he was all in on tech. Then he moved to safer bond and realestate funds, and his value never recovered, and then 07/08 happened and he watched what he thought were "safe" investments disappear almost immediately. He pulled everything out of the market, and never invested again. He went through 2 crashes on his portfolio, and to this day doesn't trust stocks and bonds. He was sold an annuity that according to him is supposed to double it's payout every 5 years it is left un touched, so he didn't touch it for 15 years, now that he is drawing it down, it draws from principal before ever touching the growth, and when he dies, only the principal will get passed to my mother. It was basically a scam. reply Espressosaurus1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Peak to peak, inflation adjusted, can be 10 to 15 years for the really big busts though. It's not entirely irrational if you moved in at the peak. If you were in on the upside then you've got much less ground to retrace. And it's painful to watch your holdings drop like you said if you're planning on retiring in the next 1, 2, 5 years. So I get it. If you're 25 you've got tons of room to maneuver. If you're 60 things are a lot less rosy (even if by now you should theoretically be cycling into less volatile assets. But bonds didn't do that great either over that period) . reply yxhuvud1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] For Cisco it took 25 years. But that is assuming they survive the bust, which is not a given. reply KellyCriterion1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Same for MSFT and some others, IIRC reply jakeydus1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Yeah I made millions by hanging on to my pets.com stock and just riding the wave. reply KellyCriterion1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] In most western countries, pets are on #2 after spendings for children in households, so your bet made sense. Though, as a lot of companies, tractions wasnt big enough back then. Today, e.g. ZooPlus is one of the biggest pet-stuff-retailers (2023 revenue 2.5billion) reply kevinh1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] That doesn't help someone that invested in pets.com: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com reply ahartmetz1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I'm pretty sure that housing, cars and food are #1, #2 and #3. Your definition of household spending seems a little unconventional. If pets are household spending, surely so is food for humans? reply KellyCriterion1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] It was a little inaccurate, you are right: #2 "after all payments done for yourself/husband" #1 will be the kids reply nly1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] You can always eat your pets reply pingou1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] It was a joke I suppose. reply jollyllama1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] No. If you bought Cisco it never recovered, once you factor in inflation. Almost the same with Intel. reply gizmo6861 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] If you invested in XLK (State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF) In March of 2000 (just before the .com bust), you would have underperfomred SPY (S&P 500) until June 2026. As of today, the spread between the two is just over 1%, with good reason to believe that we are in another tech bubble. https://www.etftimemachine.com/en/compare/XLK-vs-SPY?start=2... Had you invested in XLK when it opened in 1998, then following the .com crash, it would take until early 2020 to return to parity to the S&P 500. reply nzeid1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Held what? A majority of those companies evaporated. You'd have to cut your losses and reinvest. reply 2OEH8eoCRo01 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Yes, if you only invest in winners you'd be very rich! Which companies will be the winners though? Nobody knows. What about the hundreds of losers that looked good right before the burst? My coworker retells a story where he dumped his life savings in dotcom companies that went to zero. reply Terr_1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I'd start from a slightly more-charitable assumption which ends up in a slightly different "Hold up that's a little optimistic" territory. 1. Yes, if someone generally invested in "dot-com stocks" before that crash--covering both winners and losers--they might today have a surprising amount of (potential) dollars. 2. However much of that impressive-looking sum would be just because of 25-30 years in the market. 3. So we need to scale that "very rich" against someone putting the same money into an total-stock market index fund back then, which may not make it look nearly as impressive. reply 2OEH8eoCRo01 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I could have been more charitable. I think their key word was "big" tech. The blue chips. What were the tech blue chips before the dotcom crash? Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Etc. Some might call Enron blue chip. I think their point mostly holds though. If you'd have invested in the blue chips and held you'd likely do well. reply mjr001 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] This is pretty much why the best financial advice for 99.99% of people is "stick with index funds". Yeah you won't get extremely lucky and 200x your money because you bought NVidia a decade ago, but you also won't lose all your money because you bought Enron. reply pmg1011 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Does this advice still hold once 99.99% of people are invested in index funds? reply Espressosaurus1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] It’s not clear yet. Index funds are now an enormous part of the market and players are starting to play them (see SpaceX, and given the door they opened OpenAI and Anthropic to follow). reply shigawire1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] And big tech is a large part of most indexes reply mjr001 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I mean probably? It's still a much lower-risk strategy compared to investing in individual stocks. reply TremendousJudge1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] what? you mean that all my beenz.com stock is worth nil?? but it's an online currency! it's the future! reply toast01 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Hey, at least Flooz was used by a crime syndicate. That's market validation. reply lkey1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Survivorship bias. It took the companies that survived a decade or more to recover. You still have to pay bills while you endure inflation and the opportunity costs in the meantime. reply Hamuko1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I was under the impression that if you bought Cisco stock for $1000 during the height of the bubble, you'd have like $1500 now? reply nancyminusone1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Inflation calculator puts that 1k at a value of 1.95k today. Seems like a lousy 26 year investment. I guess it's better than putting it under your matress. reply rcxdude1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I think it's more if you had invested in an index fund you'd be in a pretty good place. Individual companies would have a much larger range of outcomes (as ever). reply yxhuvud1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Maybe, but 50% growth in a stock over 25 years is fairly bad. reply dragontamer1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] That's pretty good. I know people who bought Ask Jeeves at the height of the bubble. reply roughly1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] One problem for internet vs AI is the internet boom laid down a bunch of fiber, which has a usable life of decades. The AI boom is 10% datacenter, 90% GPU, and the GPUs are consumables on a timeline of ~3-5 years, and even that's being optimistic compared to rumored real-world degradation rates. 2000 put a couple trillion in the ground that we got to dig up later, 2026 is setting a couple trillion on fire. reply smilekzs1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] > the GPUs are consumables on a timeline of ~3-5 years When newer GPUs with clearly better perf/$ are released at a yearly cadence, then older GPUs might indeed become obsolete at this pace, meaning that it makes more economic sense to swap them out because datacenter occupancy is extremely limited. Many of these GPUs might themselves still be functional. reply goalieca1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] They burn out in the life of a dc. reply timcobb1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] The infra and its lifespan isn't what created the value that came out of the Internet. The question I think is how much value will people create with these investments reply tancop1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] The usable life of a model is infinite. You can always fine tune it for current events and technology, or distill into a new one with a more efficient architecture. If Anthropic or OpenAI go bankrupt they will have to auction off all their IP including code and weights. Claude won't disappear just change its name if someone else buys the trademark. reply Iron_Ninja51 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The usable life of a model is until the next one comes out. If OpenAI were to fully release the weights of GPT 3.5 today, I doubt anyone would care. reply SpicyLemonZest1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Can’t speak for the original commenter, but back in the spring (maybe early summer?), I expected the bubble was going to pop whenever we get a full S-1 filing for one of the frontier labs, and that’s still my expectation. I don’t think the selective leaks have prepared the market for what “positive margin on some products yet incredibly unprofitable” is likely to look like in detail. reply lubesGordi1 day ago | prev | next[–] I like the dot com bubble comparisons mainly so that I can look at the differences. That is where the information is, and it's what you want if you're going to navigate this market. reply onlyrealcuzzo1 day ago | prev | next[–] You do realize the same was true every year leading up to 2000. The peak is always before the fall by definition. Just because something has peaked SO FAR is a very poor approximation that it has peaked completely. reply jayd161 day ago | parent | next[–] They're not saying it's bad news, they're saying it's not a valid indicator at all. reply Wissenschafter1 day ago | prev | next[–] It is different this time, it's like comparing a hammer to a fucking steam engine. reply pendenthistory1 day ago | prev[–] This time we're building AGI, so yes, this time is different. reply rachr1 day ago | parent | next[–] Is the AGI in the room with us? reply RAWGOD1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The real AGI is the friends we met along the way (to financial crisis) reply pendenthistory1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Wow, is this Hacker News? Where have you been? Last night I had two agents up autonomously developing and training deep learning models much faster and better than I ever could as a professional. Seems the reddit bubble of "AI doesn't work but also it's somehow evil" has taken over this place as well. reply xadhominemx1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Can you not feel it’s growing presence? reply ndriscoll1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I'm literally replying to you right now while it's chugging away on my work, so yeah? reply adammarples1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Weird, if I was intelligent, I don't think I'd be spending my time doing autocomplete on your Django app reply ben_w1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] It's been motivated to "like" work. (Scare-quote absolutely necessary: even with maximal anthropomorphisation, we have no way to differentiate between "rewarded for work well done" vs. "punished for not working or half-arseing"). reply SkyBelow1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I think there is a bit of a gotcha here. Is intelligence the same thing as a will or drive? AI seems quite intelligent, somewhat lacking in wisdom, and having almost no ego or will. It completely lacks self preservation and desires (as far as we can tell), but are those innate qualities of intelligence? It also exists is a very different state that biological life. Biological life has a brain that either has activity or doesn't. Once the activity is gone, the brain is forever off and nothing can start it back. So we associate the activity as life and as the intelligence running. AI has weights with vast interconnections, but they can easily be turned on and off, rewound, paused, and so on in a way that we couldn't dream of doing with biological intelligence. So, maybe these differences are enough it isn't intelligence. But it is something, something that is getting better at quite a higher speed. Some that approximates intelligence in many ways. That passes the Turing test. So that something needs a name, and intelligence seems a hard enough to define thing that it is easy to stretch it and include this new factor as falling under the term. reply maddie01 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] no, it's very hot, and the fans are loud and obnoxious so they keep putting it in data centers near places that don't really want it, and they install lots of natural gas turbines because the grid isn't enough and that's louder too, and then the cooling often needs a lot of water, and -- really unpopular overall, as it turns out!! huge backlash. and that's before, you know, allll the job impacts, which is when it gets ugly and threatens to complicate the whole consumption-driven structure of the economy. ... but the little dgx spark is in the room with us! it's pretty smart-ish, in a pinch! reply RAWGOD1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] >building AGI Great strategy. Like growing a metric ton of HeLa cells in the hope someone will assemble a super brain out of them. reply password543211 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Even AGI might just be a 'meh' moment. It will take a while before you get through social, political and physical barriers before we start seeing it make a meaningful impact. I imagine the first thing that would happen is that some people will declare AGI is here and some people will be in denial and call it a "stochastic parrot" because they either feel threatened by it, cynical or just ignorant. Then we just continue business as usual for a while because most people wouldn't know what to do with it and definitely don't want to be replaced even if they aren't against the idea of using AI. A lot of research is also useless without collecting data, experimentation in the real world and hardware, all of which take time. reply CamperBob21 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Agreed. The "singularitarians" always seem to overlook one simple truth: we don't use the intelligence we already have. The appearance of a 100-fold increase in cognitive resources will have no immediate effect at all. reply ben_w23 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] "immediate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. "The intelligence we already have" is why we're splitting atoms and the other primates are splitting rocks. That took us a few hundred thousand years, of course. But if you have our mere equals in digital form, that only takes as long to change everything as it takes to build a factory to produce the same number of equally dexterous robots. reply ben_w1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] The dot.com bubble didn't pop because the web was a bad idea. Every time is different, that doesn't stop it rhyming. reply tedggh1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] The value was driven by the size of the user base. We gave each user an arbitrary price but didn’t understand how to turn that into actual money. So if you had a website with 30M users it was valued at $900M. The late 90s early 2000s were wild times in VC, and some lucky people realizing how nonsensical all that was cashed out on time. reply KellyCriterion1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Mh, a website with 30M DAU or WAU is today worth 1b USD at least (if you cant monetize on 30M users, then the product has a problem?) reply ben_w1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Much harder to monetise users in 2000, even that many. If you sold stuff directly, handling transactions was still a pain; PayPal had to be invented, and that was only 1998. If you ran on advertising, you had to invent the ad network and convince people to buy ad slots. reply KellyCriterion1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Na, I meant today: I would happily buy your 30M DAU weppage for just 1B USD today :-) reply jerf1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Yes, I have no doubt that AI is going to seriously impact the economy over time. I have lots of doubt that it can impact the economy sufficiently quickly and with enough impact to pay out all the very, very, very large bets being made on it. Even as the AI quality curve has been running ahead of most predictions, its actual impact on the economy has been running well behind. I am watching the dawning realization among the management class that even if coding costs drop to zero, Amdahl's Law means that perhaps productivity doubles for most software engineers, rather than goes to the MOON. AI can help some of the other bottlenecks, but not 100%. On the positive side, we programmers have been trying to collectively explain to management for decades now that our jobs are not just 100% banging away at code on keyboards, we're not just interchangable code monkeys. Well, they're getting their noses rubbed in it now, complete with metrics and charts and all the other things they value more than the feedback from their employees. In fact I was just noticing this week... in the past few months I had been really banging away at a lot of code projects. I was doing that whole "3 or 4 streams going on at once" that many of us have talked about, with a variety of mixed feelings. But in the past few weeks that seems to have starved out. I seem to have burned through the things that I was blocked on code for, and had a reasonable business case to pursue. Now my projects are all blocking up on non-code things again... communication with other teams. Review of documents that are irreducibly things humans need to review. Coordination and planning. Applying human attention to cover over the way that even the best frontier models still seem to have huge gaps in their superficially-expansive automated testing code that they write for their own code. I'm still sometimes unblocking multiple things at once and can briefly have multiple projects going, but then I hit a blocker somewhere and I end up unable to continue having multiple simultaneous code projects going at once. (The document review is a particularly interesting case. The documents in question are something we expect some humans to at least skim, but are going to be basically a meta-program for AIs programming the rest of the company's code. It is important to get it right because every error is going to magnify quite a bit. AIs are helping a lot with that document, yes, I certainly agree we are proceeding more quickly with it than the same project 5 years ago would have gone, but it is also irreducibly sopping up a lot of human attention.) Point of all this being that the casual presumption that AI will just utterly destroy the entire economy because it is good at coding may prove to be, well, yeah, exactly the same as the assumption that we are going to all be rich by 2002 because we'll just shift the entire economy to be on the internet and everything will multiply by 1000 in just a couple years as a result. But everything can't be shifted on to the internet. I can't eat a web page. AI can't do everything, and as it advances the things it can't do become a larger and larger percent of the remaining pie as a result. It seems to rhyme a lot with the dot com crash. reply pendenthistory1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Ok, but go through the bottle necks you face. How many of then will 1. go away with better models, and 2. go away when those bottle necks (other people) are automated away? For me, I can go quite fast because I work alone, no other people in a team to slow me down, but verifying the result is still a bottle neck. Also interacting with government agencies, my accountant etc, still a bottle neck. None of these are technically insurmountable, and I suspect that when one of these becomes a real bottle neck for the entire economy, they will be fixed. reply jerf20 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] How many of them will go away? To a first approximation, none of them. There's a huge difference between "zero" and "a little" when it comes to Amdahl's Law and scaling up, let alone the things where it won't be "a little". Which is one of those things that sounds obvious when I say it. But clearly a lot of people are predicting a future that is based on costs and times being "zero" that won't be. reply ben_w1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Right now, the most visible bottleneck is real world robotic control. I kinda hope that one stays around for a long time, because robots controlled by AI competent enough to guide those robots through every step in their production from mining raw materials to end-of-assemble acceptance testing, is one where tiny mistakes kill everyone. Like, say you've got a sticky 0 key and accidentally ask for more burgers than there is carbon in Earth's biosphere and atmosphere combined: if the sufficiently-competent AI is a little too eager to obey and not quite willing enough to say "no" or listen when told to "stop", that's enough to kill everyone. reply pendenthistory1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] Trust me I know, I co-founded a robotics startup, and robotics is HARD. But now it's becoming a hardware problem, the software will sort itself out soon, it's not a bottle neck that will keep us safe for long. Abou sycophancy, I sense that it's much lower now with Opus 5.5. Yesterday I had to argue my viewpoint for quite a bit before it relented, on an issue I'm pretty sure I'm broadly correct. It's becoming a better sparring partner that actually pushes back and raises counter-arguments. reply RAWGOD1 day ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] >The dot.com bubble didn't pop because the web was a bad idea. The web WAS a bad idea though. reply gonzalohm1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] Is that coming at the same time as viable fusion reactors? Just one more year guys reply Forgeties791 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] You can tell they’re serious because they’re proposing data centers in space as a near-term solution. reply mtlmtlmtlmtl1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] No it isn't. It doesn't matter how real the technology is. The bubble will still pop, because when a technology is seen as revolutionary, you get rampant overinvestment. And only a fraction of those investments will pay off(or, indeed, none, in the case where frontier labs are eventually made irrelevant by open models, which seems very likely to me). The internet and web were revolutionary, no one can deny that. They completely transformed our society. Nevertheless, the bubble popped. The current bubble is no different. reply pendenthistory1 day ago | root | parent | next[–] I don't doubt there will be a big crash at some point, but I actually doubt we've reached that point yet. So far stock increases have been driven by earning increases, not speculation. I know an "earnings bubble" can be a thing, but given how useful I know these models to be, and how few use them in the way they can be, I think we have far to go still. reply vrganj1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] But those tulips are so pretty!! reply skrebbel1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] I can’t tell whether this is sarcasm or not. reply BoingBoomTschak1 day ago | parent | prev | next[–] "No, no, you don't understand. If you keep putting bigger and bigger engines in a car, it'll somehow turn into an aeroplane at some point! There's no other way, believe me!" reply guywithahat1 day ago | parent | prev[–] People forget the fact there may not be enough capital in the world to invest in AI, and so while some companies will go under the market could grow for literal decades. I don't know the future, but this is not a guaranteed bubble. reply
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