this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
13 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
42829 readers
412 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Apples to oranges fallacy.
Railroad infrastructure and dark fiber brought long-term post-bubble value. Rapidly deprecating GPUs are not.
That difference doesn't matter to my point.
They were still transformative technologies that started as bubbles.
It matters a great deal if you want to argue AI is more than a bubble by actually saying anything concrete, anything more than implications.
You can't just say "look at these other bubbles, ignore the glaring differences, and assume this will be the same" without having a damn good reason why. Let alone implying something is transformative (or to be concrete: transformative in a way that remotely justifies money wasted so far).
AI companies like NVIDIA look more like Enron than the Web writ large.
But implications are all I need.
It's either transformative or a fad.
It's already transformed media, education, advertising, politics, and more.
Do you think once the bubble pops, AI will just disappear like Pogs?
Even when the datacenters go dark, the tech will still be here, still be used. Eventually it will find its natural place in a new world.
I'm not saying it's not a bubble. It absolutely is. Everything you're saying is true. It will fall, and hard. I've put 10s of thousands of dollars on it being soon. But after the dust clears AI will still be used, and has already changed the world. How much more it'll change is the only question.
You appear to have missed the part where I asked you to be concrete and justify whether it's worth the investment.
Vague talk of "change" and "transformation" mean nothing. Sure, it "changed" the level of poison in the atmosphere over communities in Tennessee.
It's not worth this level of investment. That's what a bubble is. We agree on that.
But long after the bubble pops. 20 years from now. Will AI disappear? Will it be a joke people tell? Or will it be as important to the world as the internet is today?
I'm saying it's both a bubble, and an important lasting technology. It's not a binary choice.
I see you saying it's important, but you haven't provided one reason why.
Well I use AI every day in Photoshop and Lightroom. AI tools are common and extremely useful in all sorts of media production already.
Science is using it on modeling of protein folding, and large dataset analysis. I personally know one person using AI tools to analyze fMRI data in a study.
News media uses it in formulaic articles in finance and sports. They've been doing that with specialized software for a decade or more already.
Those are just a few places where it is a useful productive tool. I'm sure there are many more. Is that what you're asking for?