These days, I find it hard to predict the future. Things feel too complex, and the times seem different.
People say the AI bubble will burst, and I also think it will. But I want to think about how it might differ from other bubbles.
One positive factor is that during the internet startup era, there was almost no revenue. But now, big tech companies are generating profits and can absorb AI-scale losses.
The dot-com bubble burst, but the internet ended up being far more valuable than the bubble itself. I think the value was priced in early, and AI will be similar.
The core issue is always the same: there's a bubble and there are warnings, but you never know when it will collapse. And the people who act first on the warnings have to give up on the upside. The only winners are those who sell everything just before the crash. The problem is knowing when that moment is.
One difference from the dot-com bubble is that after it burst, a second wave of entrepreneurs leveraged the cheap telecom infrastructure that was left behind. So after the AI bubble bursts, will OpenAI and Anthropic fall and new companies emerge? I'm skeptical about that. Something feels different this time.
My biggest concern, though, is that if I suddenly couldn't use AI anymore, I'm worried about how long it would take to recover the coding skills I've lost after nearly a year of barely hand-coding. AI has become too deeply embedded in my life
Previous bubbles were characterised by "mass participation in the relevant markets"
This hasn't happened yet for AI, and there's a good chance it won't happen. Ie neither OpenAI nor Anthropic go public, or if they go public, the reception is "meh"
Nevertheless, independent of wider market sentiment, imho there is still a bubble in "closed models". One could, eg, pay attention to OpenAI/Anthropic/Copilot/Google's monthly new consumer subscriptions (Oversubscribed but in a hyperhyperreal sense lol. It seems that there are too many people queuing for this new restaurant, and those that have tasted the food all think it's ok but not healthy enough ("productivity mirage"). but people on the street can't see it because the bookings are all online. It may be that Gemini pro's subscriptions may be the last one to fall off the cliff. When that happens even the "open cloud models" bubble may pop (after everyone sees Google sunsetting Gemini, or making it exclusive to Apple lol)
People say the AI bubble will burst, and I also think it will. But I want to think about how it might differ from other bubbles.
One positive factor is that during the internet startup era, there was almost no revenue. But now, big tech companies are generating profits and can absorb AI-scale losses.
The dot-com bubble burst, but the internet ended up being far more valuable than the bubble itself. I think the value was priced in early, and AI will be similar.
The core issue is always the same: there's a bubble and there are warnings, but you never know when it will collapse. And the people who act first on the warnings have to give up on the upside. The only winners are those who sell everything just before the crash. The problem is knowing when that moment is.
One difference from the dot-com bubble is that after it burst, a second wave of entrepreneurs leveraged the cheap telecom infrastructure that was left behind. So after the AI bubble bursts, will OpenAI and Anthropic fall and new companies emerge? I'm skeptical about that. Something feels different this time.
My biggest concern, though, is that if I suddenly couldn't use AI anymore, I'm worried about how long it would take to recover the coding skills I've lost after nearly a year of barely hand-coding. AI has become too deeply embedded in my life