PieFedA tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley
Lady Butterfly she/herwww.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz69qy760weo
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Whoever could have predicted this
Certainly not every single person outside of the AI industry.
ZDLI’m going to take a shot in the dark here and guess that the people inside the AI industry aren’t surprised either. They’re just playing a game of fiscal hot potato hoping they’re not the ones left holding it when the music stops.
I think there are plenty that are high on their supply. Lots of them truly believe AI will save the world.
I’m a bit more cynical than that. I’m pretty sure that the “AI is the future!"/"AI will destroy humanity, we must tame it!” crowds are just a well-orchestrated horse and pony show.
Nah. Even a prolific person like Peter Theil is doing it because he has a warped sense of reality and thinks he’s stopping the antichrist by pushing technology forward.
He’s not really in the industry though. He’s an investor in it. By “in the industry” I mean the people running the LLM companies or working on the LLMs. I just can’t see someone who actually works with those things thinking that there’s real intellect coming forth from them when even a tech ignoramus like me can spot the obvious signs that these things are fake.
Maybe they should not have created the bubble in the first place.
It’s one thing to create a bubble. It’s another when everybody continues to throw their money in when it’s obvious it’s a bubble.
SundrayQuick, what’s something else that uses thousands of GPUs, electricity and fresh water that we can sell to VCs?
VR.comBig DataVRCrypto CurrencyVRGen AI- ???
(ETA to add a couple of bubbles to the list.)
wander1236AR glasses that require a server for all their functionality?
Oh that’s good, I forgot about VR/AR!
SludgehammerA triple A game that’s so bloated and un-optimized it requires two, no… three video cards in parallel to properly run.
Seti
Can we convince VCs that SETI will eventually pay out, though?
When you connect aliens with people so they can talk with each other. Multiply telecommunication market capital by 2.
So hot right now!
ETA? I assume you don’t mean estimated time of arrival?
LOL, I’m afraid I did a “PIN Number” bit of redundancy. “Edited to Add to add.” Oops!
You can add VR/Metaverse next for the ???. They keep (as you noted there) trying that one on for size over and over again.
jlow (he / him)There have many articles about this (I’m kinda getting tired of it) but I know they will act super surprised anyway when it finally happens.
Yeah, they will try and squeeze the last potential drop of water from a stone right uo untill it explodes in their faceses
Captain AggravatedQuick, how do you bet against AI?
Just like the .Com bubble, the technology will stay, but many “yeah, we are doing AI now” companies will go.
Damn it. I think maybe this time it is. Dunno for real, but charts might be going for it.
EDIT: Narrator: It wasn’t.
RayquetzalcoatlOh guys, don’t be silly. Just ask the chatbot, it knows what to do!
Then our weirdo creep peeking-tom pervert overlords in Silicon Valley will have their infinite magic money pit and they’ll finally get real buff and get cool hairstyles and they’ll be popular and all the girls will think they’re really cool!
Gosh, I’m so excited for little Mark Zuckerberg to get his first kiss. Maybe then he can fuck off to space forever.
Seattle baseball is doing well this year, and there are so many ChatGPT ads. There’s one where a guy is doing pull-ups. The text shows him asking ChatGPT for help doing pull ups. The response, as printed on the ad, generously typed by me for your convenience:
8-Week Pull-up Progression plan
Weekly Schedule
* Day 1 - Strength focus
* Day 2 - Rest or light activity
* Day 3 - Volume focus.
* Day 4 - Core and mobility.
* Day 5- Full-body strength (optional).
Core exercises
- Negative pull-ups - 3x5 (5-10 seconds).
- Assisted pull-ups (bands or a machine) - 3x6-10.
- Inverted rows (under a bar) - 3x8-12.
- Lat pull-downs (if gym access) - 3x10-12.
- Dead hangs - 3x30 seconds
Supporting Work
- Core - Hanging leg raises, planks, and hollow holds.
- Biceps - Hammer curls and chin-ups
- Grip - Farmer’s carries and towel hangs
- Mobility - Scapular shrugs and shoulder abduction.
Tips for Faster Progress
- Do pull-ups when fresh.
- Track your reps weekly.
- Protein and calories matter
Wow, great advice. If I knew what a hammer curl was, I probably wouldn’t need your advice that “calories matter.” Also what does 3x6-10 mean? Reps, sets, and ….?
Day 1, “strength focus” what the hell does that mean? You don’t say what strength focus is. You only provided core exercises. How come hanging leg raises and planks from supporting work aren’t listed in the core exercises? If day 2 is a rest day, then what are days 6 and 7?
Like what is the plan? Do they hope you don’t even read the text? Is that why it scrolls so fast?
I might be wrong here but:
1. The “protein and calories matter” is in the “tips” section. Might be a bit asinine, but it’s not the worst reminder on Earth.
2. I think that’s rest interval length, in seconds. It’s the gap you take in between sets to give yourself a breather and some time to recover.
3. It’s vague, I agree. Taken in conjunction with “Volume focus” on day 3, I’d suggest that what that means is day 1 is the day to try bigger weights, for shorter sets, focusing on brute strength. Day 3 would be the day to drop your weights a little, and work longer to build endurance and conditioning. It is vague, though! And that doesn’t help with a lot of the exercises listed.
4. I think there are two meanings of “core” in play here. The “core exercises” section I think is supposed to be something like “foundational exercises to train yourself to be good at pull-ups”, and the “core” bit of the “supporting exercises” bit is literally talking about your core muscles.
5. I have no idea, chatbots are shit
6. Marketers are sheisty scumbags whom I largely think are to blame for a lot of the ways the internet is dying and art is being commodified. You’re right, that’s why they scroll it past so fast; they have nothing worth showing, so just give you the impression of something.
Fuck ChatGPT, fuck LLMs, fuck marketers.
3x6-10 isn’t a rest interval. It reads as “3 sets of 6-10 reps” of the exercise. So between 18-30 total reps, generally done in sets to let the body rest between reps to build up ATP so you have energy to do the repeats. Rest time should almost always be up to 3 min between sets for maximum energy in that muscle group, but no less than 90 seconds.
If you do sets of workouts in sequence with other sets of excersizes, that is a circuit. Organizing sets by muscle group and alternating them on a circuit is a great way to let you get that 3 minutes of rest for those muscles while still being efficient. Push ups to lunges to ab wheel rollout would be a basic example of a circuit that goes “upper body – lower body – core”
Also fuck Chatbots, fuck LLMs, fuck Marketers. Seriously, fuck all of them.
Ahh I see, thanks for clarifying! I’ve only just started taking exercising seriously so I’m definitely new to some of the concepts. I’ll keep that in mind 💪
No problem at all. It always a learning process. Some light generic tips:
Form is more more important than anything else. Lifting 15 lbs right is better than 50lbs wrong. Do the excersizes with good form, and the gains will come much faster.
You need 48hrs of rest between workouts. It seems excessive, but working out literally tears muscles. Your body needs time to repair them. If you want to work out everyday, alternate muscle groups. This is where the “leg day, arm day, core day” terms come from. The excersizes can overlap a bit, but focus them. Personally, I just alterate Mon - Wed - Friday with whole body workouts.
Water, protein and sleep all matter as much as the weight or intensity. Again, you’re tearing your body down during the workout. If you don’t give it what it needs to heal up, it will only do what it can, which means the workout is partly wasted. Do what you can here, real world concerns are a bitch, but you need these to get stronger.
If you don’t have weights, you can always do body weight fitness. There are routines out there of pushups/lunges/squats/handstands/planks/etc that will work your body just like weightlifting, and you don’t need to own anything. Reddit had something called “the recommended routine” that was a great starting place for BWF.
This sentience strikes me because it’s a tacit admission that AI as it stands is way less valuable than people like Altman promised it would be. But trust me bro.
It also jumped out at me too cause it was literally the opposite of the most true thing about AI.
Sure, you can argue that it helps and that improves productivity in some niche use cases, but by definition, there isn’t anything real there. It’s an empty husk that has been contorted to echo user prompts based on past Q&A.
It’s literally like calling a foot print something real cause you can reconstruct some of the foot.
Reddits search function was so bad it spawned an entire industry.
I believe the same thing was said about the Internet in the ’90s: “It speeds up communication, but how would anyone earn money from it?”
Although I don’t think we’re anywhere close to AGI or anything like that, current AI development fundamentally changes a few things in our lives: how we find and process information (information retrieval works very well), how we interact with computers (using natural language instead of clicking through interfaces), and how productive we are.
Video generation models are going to bring entertainment to a whole new level. A single person can now create an entire movie without even buying a camera. Entire game development studios can build worlds larger than ever before. Text generation makes disinformation and propaganda insanely cheap and effective. Surveillance will be much easier now, as owning a communication platform not only allows you to search for messages by phrase but also by meaning. Ads will be far more personalized, as AI chat platforms now know us much better than Google — the current leader in this field.
So:
I really don’t think so.
Installing internet and talking to my customer who was a day trader. Told him Google was about to launch their IPO and that I’d go all in if I had any money.
“Their search is the best, but I just don’t see how they’ll ever make any money.”
These AI investors are banking on not being that guy.
And here I am in 2025, saying, “Just don’t see how they’ll make any money.”
The costs are staggering. When the dust settles, who the hell is going to pay those staggering costs to the bubble survivors? At the consumer level, can’t see it. OTOH, people pay for stupid shit like weather apps. 🤷🏻♂️
I foresee AI looking toxic to business pretty quickly. It will be a subscription that’s limited to employees and departments that can demonstrate a need. I don’t fault CEOs for their FOMO, but they’ll quickly wise up.
So far as I can tell they’ve stolen everyone’s content and use it to pretend AI “knows” everything, or anything.
If that’s never addressed, and they will make it almost impossible to do that, AI will survive in several forms.
One outcome will be a sea-level-rise in superfluous text that’s all coming from the same point-of-view and is pretty bland.
You know how people don’t like to read now? Imagine every report, every article, every pullquote being three times longer than it needs to be and basically saying the same thing over and over.
Searching the Internet for a banana bread recipe allows us to experience this full distopia, today.
The web used to be full of recipes. Now most of the web is copies of the same mediocre recipe wrapped in meaningless filler text and ads.
It feels like the village at the end of “A wrinkle in time”.
dont you mean a tangled web of lies, that were sold to hype up other ceos, and csuites, and to continue the grift of vc money.
It’s a bubble all right. Except it bursting will be the result as expected. What we should do is try to first deflate it carefully, and then try to prevent it from just going boom.
Bubbles are not some unexpected crisis, they are basically a system created by people with a lot of power to suck the power others possess to themselves, to have even more power.
One can even call the British empire becoming less official and other colonial ventures drying up as a sequence of bubbles. Notably the European monarchs were not at a loss from it all.
The dotcom bubble sucked this way a lot of money in unclear directions (hedge funds are a thing, to launder such events), then somehow Facebook and Google and Amazon happen, all not very sophisticated things, but with a lot of convenient financing and publicity.
By the way, it’s interesting that early concepts of NLS and Xanadu as things similar to the Web all didn’t have the ditches requiring a bridge with tolls, speaking metaphorically, that the Web requires, and these big companies occurred as bridges over these ditches exactly. Like - when you have two-sided links, you don’t need them. Not only many small places link to one popular place, but also the one popular place links to many small places. This, of course, also requires the system to be message-oriented, not connection-oriented. Otherwise why wouldn’t the big place censor out reverse links. Like Usenet.
This would, of course, require globally identifiable objects and versioning, with a tree of versions, so that there could be plenty of versions of the same webpage. (I’ve always felt Torvalds is sincere when he says Git is his main contribution to humanity as a programmer.)
And links would have to be version-dependent. And links would have to be not part of objects, but associated objects themselves. This way you can have object directories, or fan-in objects (objects A, B and C combine into the object D, or maybe D follows from A, B, and C as a logical statement), or fan-out objects (there’s object A, for which there are comments or subscripts B, C and D at some corresponding marks in the A structured text). Or, well, normal links referring to two objects (the exact location, again, of what part of a document is a link is contained in the link object).
This is a bit similar to voting systems, where ranked choice and ability to give a negative vote can change a lot. And this also encourages wide participation.
I just have that feeling that we as a humanity are led on a path of prepared bubbles enriching very specific people creating them and firmly knowing when and how they burst. When these people collect enough power, they might start changing the world in a direction we won’t like at all.
OK, dreaming again.