Depending on when the bubble bursts, It would effectively be. AI needs this continuous terminal upwards velocity of investment with no profit to show for it in order to keep improving despite the diminishing returns we’ve been seeing. It’s viability as a long term technology is uniquely dependent on it reaching a state of efficiency or otherwise capability that doesn’t yet exist.
I really wonder why it is that the pro-ai fanatics are so sure it will stick around just as it is today without anyway to actually pay for it.
I mean, if every “AI” company went belly-up tomorrow, if development of any new model was banned globally, no exceptions… it would still not go away.
Deepseek 4.1-tier models would be useful for decades, and cheap to run. Heck, I think the scaffolding around them still needs years of development to not be so half-baked.
They, anthropic, others, are constantly pushing and over-extending, but theyve already long since by passed models that are useful for various tasks. Certainly not everything, but if the big players died tomorrow you could run a local model on a gaming GPU that would still do decent amounts of work if you were the kind of person who had a use for it.
Not everyone is, and thats ok.
I find chatgpt very useful for work, but id be cool with them failing and having to downgrade. Models already did what I needed well enough a year ago, maybe a bit more.
The companies operating frontier models and AI as a viable technology on the scale it exists today are inseparable. If the big players died tomorrow you’d still have that vastly inferior local model that would be good enough for light work for awhile, but without all the eye-popping amounts of money to continue training and scraping data on unprecedented scale, its usefulness would fade over time. Most companies today would not feasibly be able to host and train their own models to be used in the ways they use frontier models today.
LLMs would still exist as a niche solution for some things but what AI fundamentally is, and how it could be used would be entirely different in very short order.
Why would it fade, even if they never changed somehow their capabilities would be frozen, not degrade.
The open source community also works wonders, people who care about stuff like this will collectively spend millions of hours working on it.
Finally, those older but still highly capable models have become explosively more efficient in the past several years, I saw a figure that models from 2 years back are now 280x more efficient (cheaper to run) than they were when released, there’s no reason a company couldn’t field one of these, work on it slower and more conservatively, and profit from it.
Why do you feel it would be entirely different in any of those scenarios, what did you have in mind there? Some specific use cases it would lose perhaps?
They were back then. Only the ones that got so big they could negotiate their bandwidth costs or even buy out ISPs made it out alive. Everyone else was sunk by the exponential bandwidth costs.
It was expensive, sure. But not entirely nonviable across the board like we see today with AI. It’s not even close.
Those “Big companies that could afford to negotiate Bandwidth prices” don’t even exist in the AI context of today. They’re still speculative. If the bubble pops before that speculative future comes to fruition, the development of the technology towards that end stops.
The chatbots don’t have those because they don’t have anything worth paying for. Ebay, Google and the like all had something people really wanted so they were able to weather the bandwidth costs until they didn’t have to anymore.
My message is aimed at the anti AI crowd. Yes, there is a bit of a bubble right now, but AI progress will continue and it will become part of our daily lives just like the internet transformed how we live.
No shit it’s here to stay. How it’s executed is straight fucking trash and fucking our planet worse than it already is! With all the renewables like wind, solar, hydro, and add nuclear, we could be independent of oil and gas and then build out AI more when it’s matured and more efficient.
AI isn’t a bubble. It’s here to stay. Get used to it.
The dot com bubble didn’t mean the world wide web wasn’t here to stay. There is an AI bubble.
You must admit, a lot of people think the bubble bursting will be the end of the technology. I see that sentiment a lot on here.
It will be an end to trying to force chatbots to do literally everything. It will not be an end to the chatbots.
You aren’t wrong. That sentiment is everywhere in the comments below, and highly voted.
Depending on when the bubble bursts, It would effectively be. AI needs this continuous terminal upwards velocity of investment with no profit to show for it in order to keep improving despite the diminishing returns we’ve been seeing. It’s viability as a long term technology is uniquely dependent on it reaching a state of efficiency or otherwise capability that doesn’t yet exist.
I really wonder why it is that the pro-ai fanatics are so sure it will stick around just as it is today without anyway to actually pay for it.
I mean, if every “AI” company went belly-up tomorrow, if development of any new model was banned globally, no exceptions… it would still not go away.
Deepseek 4.1-tier models would be useful for decades, and cheap to run. Heck, I think the scaffolding around them still needs years of development to not be so half-baked.
You’re confusing AI with OpenAI.
They, anthropic, others, are constantly pushing and over-extending, but theyve already long since by passed models that are useful for various tasks. Certainly not everything, but if the big players died tomorrow you could run a local model on a gaming GPU that would still do decent amounts of work if you were the kind of person who had a use for it.
Not everyone is, and thats ok.
I find chatgpt very useful for work, but id be cool with them failing and having to downgrade. Models already did what I needed well enough a year ago, maybe a bit more.
The companies operating frontier models and AI as a viable technology on the scale it exists today are inseparable. If the big players died tomorrow you’d still have that vastly inferior local model that would be good enough for light work for awhile, but without all the eye-popping amounts of money to continue training and scraping data on unprecedented scale, its usefulness would fade over time. Most companies today would not feasibly be able to host and train their own models to be used in the ways they use frontier models today.
LLMs would still exist as a niche solution for some things but what AI fundamentally is, and how it could be used would be entirely different in very short order.
Three main counterpoint to this.
Why would it fade, even if they never changed somehow their capabilities would be frozen, not degrade.
The open source community also works wonders, people who care about stuff like this will collectively spend millions of hours working on it.
Finally, those older but still highly capable models have become explosively more efficient in the past several years, I saw a figure that models from 2 years back are now 280x more efficient (cheaper to run) than they were when released, there’s no reason a company couldn’t field one of these, work on it slower and more conservatively, and profit from it.
Why do you feel it would be entirely different in any of those scenarios, what did you have in mind there? Some specific use cases it would lose perhaps?
Websites aren’t also incredibly resource heavy money holes with no proven path to viable profitability.
They were back then. Only the ones that got so big they could negotiate their bandwidth costs or even buy out ISPs made it out alive. Everyone else was sunk by the exponential bandwidth costs.
It was expensive, sure. But not entirely nonviable across the board like we see today with AI. It’s not even close.
Those “Big companies that could afford to negotiate Bandwidth prices” don’t even exist in the AI context of today. They’re still speculative. If the bubble pops before that speculative future comes to fruition, the development of the technology towards that end stops.
The chatbots don’t have those because they don’t have anything worth paying for. Ebay, Google and the like all had something people really wanted so they were able to weather the bandwidth costs until they didn’t have to anymore.
My message is aimed at the anti AI crowd. Yes, there is a bit of a bubble right now, but AI progress will continue and it will become part of our daily lives just like the internet transformed how we live.
“Bubble” refers specifically to overvalued assets.
No shit it’s here to stay. How it’s executed is straight fucking trash and fucking our planet worse than it already is! With all the renewables like wind, solar, hydro, and add nuclear, we could be independent of oil and gas and then build out AI more when it’s matured and more efficient.
Lol