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It Appears That the AI Bubble Has Just Burst in China (futurism.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago*

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    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.

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