this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
11 points (100.0% liked)

Fuck AI

4175 readers
851 users here now

"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"

A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
VerbFlow@lemmy.world
MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
TootSweet@lemmy.world
BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world
cynar@lemmy.world
drmeanfeel@lemmy.world
pavnilschanda@lemmy.world
CriticalMedicine@lemmy.world
WonderfulWanderer@lemmy.world
Communist@lemmy.ml
eatCasserole@lemmy.world
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
NutWrench@lemmy.world
Soup@lemmy.cafe
iAvicenna@lemmy.world
Tinks@lemmy.world
wizblizz@lemmy.world
corus_kt@lemmy.world
TrickDacy@lemmy.world
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
MeDuViNoX@sh.itjust.works
33550336@lemmy.world
Nougat@fedia.io
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
Quill7513@slrpnk.net
glowing_hans@sopuli.xyz
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
ThefuzzyFurryComrade@pawb.social
11
Doctorow chimes in on the impending shit show (pluralistic.net)
submitted 1 day ago by baggachipz@sh.itjust.works to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 8 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Man, I feel for that kid who wants a better answer to the question of "what do we do about the bubble?". The only answer is "get it to pop as soon as possible". To call it deeply unsatisfying is to paper over the very real human pain it's going to cause when it happens. There just isn't a better answer. The data centers exist. They are pulling electricity and giving that money to power companies. If they stop doing what they're doing, a whole lot of things collapse. This is all baked in right now; you can't unscramble that egg. Unless you can organize a real socialist revolution in the next few months, getting it to collapse sooner rather than later is all we got.

Next time, don't let techbros out of their cage. They will take your money and set it on fire as part of a ritual to summon the Singularity.

[–] Olap@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If we know it is coming, can we short it ourselves and get rich I wonder?

[–] ashenone@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

Timing is everything and when your trying to short the market being early is just as bad as being wrong

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Classic phrase is "the market can be irrational for longer than you can remain solvent".

Shorting is based on debt, but in a roundabout way. Let's say you want to short 100 shares of Nvidia. Your broker would be holding existing shares, and when asked, they sell those shares at current market value, hand you the money for it, and say you now owe them 100 shares of Nvidia.

Like any debt, they don't let you just hold it for nothing. They will have "calls" that serve a similar function to interest rates. The longer you hold it, the more that little pile of cash they gave you will be sapped away. At some point, you have to buy 100 shares of Nvidia and hand them back to your broker. If that little pile of cash still has money in it at the end, then that's yours to keep.

However, those calls can sap it away over time. Nvidia's bubble would have to pop while you still have money in that pile. If you wait too long, then the stock could be pennies per share and you'd still lose money.

I'm not confident that the bubble will pop soon enough to keep this strategy solvent.

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

While your broker will likely buy a call (a contract opposite a put that is the right to buy a security/stock at a certain price, it's more insurance for them should the play not work out as you hope.Calls are just the flip side to puts; calls are a bet the price of a stock(or anything) will go up to $x and puts are a bet the price will go down to $x by date.

The "sap away" mechanic of an option (whether you buy call or put, butting a stock goes up or down) is due to "theta decay". An option contract, by nature, is time bound. X stock(price goes up, down and by how much) by y date at end of trading. That deadline is what drives the value of the option contract, and also what drives the exponential swings in prices for some options. You can buy contracts for the end of any week for most stocks in the US. You can buy it for two weeks out, or up to a few years depending on the contract. Let's pretend I say Disney is going to $150 a share by 1/1/2027. The "sap away" is that every week Disney doesn't get to $150 the value of my contract goes down a little bit as there is less time for the stock to make enough of a move to get to $150. Longer contracts have more time to move and are therefore "less volatile" but every options contract has theta decay. This oversimplifies the complex world of options but the point is that "calls" don't have anything to do with theta decay.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I appreciate this article and Cory Doctorow.

But I will disagree that the AI bubble is structured enough like a traditional bubble to "pop" like how y'all expect. It's not like any bubble that has ever existed.

You know all those huge figures about investments you hear? That's not just debt and low interest lending. That's real cash investments in many cases. So unlike the Dot Com bubble, we currently don't have a third of the stock market over leveraged on pretend money. We don't have people building data centers on spec, like railroads to nowhere, they're booked out before the ground is broken. Data centers and power generation are IRL investments that are needed whether it's for AI use or not.

Also, there aren't a smaller set of goods everyone is after, like paying $1 million for toys.com, a URL never worth anything close to the hype. It's a wide open field of AI use cases, and while enterprise pilots are struggling to provide immediate results (no, the 97% of pilots fail figure is not technically accurate), agentic workflows are what consulting firms like KPMG are pushing hard. The rate of use case development is changing as fast as all the rest of it is, so nothing had reached close to a plateau yet. So banking on the 1:1 job replacement theory really ignores the insider view of how large corporate structures are already pushing adoption.

It's like 5 (or maybe 15) sets of overlapping concentric circles that are themselves bubbles, and 2 of them are solid right now, and so far 2 are not anything like a bubble ready to pop. The other 4 will keep the 5th propped up long enough to not feel the effects across the entire economy. Or that 12 of the 15 will prevent immediate issues as 3 of them founder.

All bubble popping will get you is consolidation anyway to MS and Google.

[–] baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's different this time.

... says every bubble, ever.

Having lived through the dot-com bubble in real time as a professional, allow me to draw the following comparisons:

You know all those huge figures about investments you hear? That’s not debt and low interest blending. That’s real cash investment.

This couldn't be farther from the truth. Here's a great read, but the long and short of it is that this is entirely based on debt and smoke-and-mirrors.

they’re booked out before the ground is broken

On the premise that they will be needed, and that the companies ordering them will be solvent when they're completed. These big AI companies have limited runway, and the data centers they need won't be available until after the runway is gone.

Data centers and power generation are IRL investments that are needed whether it’s for AI use or not

Power generation, maybe. That's like all the fiber that MCI laid before they went tits-up in an accounting scandal of their own making, due entirely to creating a thing that nobody needed yet. Yeah, it's useful now (several decades later) but it was speculatively created without a way to pay for it. These ai-specific data centers cannot be repurposed for regular servers, short of gutting the whole thing. Add to this that the chips used for LLMs cannot be repurposed for anything else, and are practically obsolete by the time they're installed.

Also, there aren’t a smaller set of goods everyone is after, like paying $1 million for toys.com, a URL never worth anything close to the hype.

There are dozens (probably way more) of new "AI" companies being created every day in the hopes of being scooped up by the big players. This is exactly the same as the dot-com boom. Create a cool-sounding company with an idea and a shell of a copycat idea, sell to rube investors, rinse and repeat. This is just as bad, if not worse than it was before.

2 of them are solid and so far 2 are not anything like a bubble ready to pop.

Which 2 of them are solid? Even if that were the case, one leg will come out from the stool (or 2 or 3) and the whole thing will topple. They're all dependent on each other with fake money and promises, and it's a matter of time. I'm saying sooner rather than later, but who knows.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 1 points 12 hours ago

I'm on mobile, so I'm not able to respond as fully as I would like.

Similarities or not to previous bubbles - it's not ALL built on debt, building on spec, and a hope and a prayer. The MCI fiber bust was very similar to the railroad build out bust, similar to the dot com URL buyup bust. Bubbles have a similar basic structure, that's why we categorize them similarly and they work similarly. Don't get hung up on the minute details.

Not the same - Are you honestly telling me that is it wasn't for LLMs, humanity would have met all it's data storage needs until the end of time? We were always going to need data centers and power generation. The bubble on those fronts is as the runway runs out and prices for both hit a premium because of existing non-AI demand well remain anyway. Making data centers still needed but just not fulfilling AI needs, slowing the industry.

Every idiots' AI "company" and "game studio" is the first bubble to go, but what are these "companies" really funded by? It's all a 1-3 person show paying for Claude $200 a month in real money out credit card debt until it hits marginal success. So there's not that much debt and operating on spec other than peoples' time. When that demand falls off, then daily user stats for AI companies won't waiver enough to see a dent because of all the fools asking GPT how to tie their own shoes. There's no single metric that any of this will impact enough to cause an immediate market sell off freak out.

Data centers and power gen are solid. Enterprise agentic workflow hype garbage is the second bubble. Added productivity and replacing ancient code with modern code is solid for 5-10 years. Data analysis and processing is solid and good for huge contracts. Cottage industry is weak, thats the first bubble.