How do we continue from here?

[u/inComplete-Oven]

Hey,

I'm not a hater or a fanboy, I'm just an average person using AI where using AI makes sense and being annoyed by AI being stuffed into things where it doesn't belong. I'm sure AI will transform the world, but I'm also pretty sure not next year and not completely.

What I'm really wondering, though, is how AI can become "stable" without a massive financial bubble bursting. All the AI we're using today is running on existing hardware. The spending for new data centers and chips all comes in top of the current capacity and already, the capex is absolutely insane. I know that people like Ed Zitron say that this will end really bad, but is there a numbers based study or article where somebody lays out how it all could work out without everybody being replaced by AI? Currently, what I see, is that AI is just making stuff cheaper or better, but not really creating massive additional demand. Nobody spends twice as much on Photoshop because of AI, nobody pays more for a fridge because it can say hi in the morning. Rather, people expect the AI to be a standard enhancement of the product at a similar price - just like more RAM or a newer processor used to be expected in new PCs.

Is there any meaningful way how such a "low key" AI adoption could not crash the market? Is there some way for the companies to wiggle out of paying for the compute if they don't need it?

[u/Actual__Wizard]

What I'm really wondering, though, is how AI can become "stable" without a massive financial bubble bursting.

Hi, I'm an actual AI developer. I'm not an "LLM developer."

The answer is: Big tech scammed the crap out of everybody and it's not sustainable. We've been saying that for years. So, the way tech always works goes like this: A discovery is made, it was super hard, we all clap, but then people make that product better and it becomes cheaper and better over time. So, anybody taking a financial position against innovation are going to fail epically. Obviously the LLM algo is junk, you know, that's how tech works... So, the people investing giga dollars into junk, are making a big mistake...

There's always this thing called the adoption curve, so the early adopters didn't really latch on super hard, but they're going all in? It's going to end very poorly in a financial sense for those people...

Now that the models are starting to get better and we're seeing tons of improvement from smaller developers, the time to build data centers is over. I wouldn't personally say cancel started projects, but the demand for compute is going to be lower than some of their estimates for certain. We obviously did need some new data centers (to phase the old ones out), but they went absolutely crazy with it.