AI investment has helped keep markets and economic growth ticking along, but the IMF fears the boom could quickly turn to bust if the promised profits fail to materialize. With tech giants borrowing billions and investors piling into the same handful of companies, a selloff could leave more than just Silicon Valley nursing a hangover.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 6 points 13 hours ago

Burn it all down!

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

    good

    if an oppressive corrupt regime is purposely hampering social progress for billions of people, not only should it fail, it should fail globally on a scale that resets global economies by centuries.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -3 points 12 hours ago* (1 child)

    Yea, good. Billions of people should starve so a couple of wealthy people lose a bit of money but not enough to need to sell their yachts. Let's blow up the global economy!

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago

    ah, a centrist!

    tell me. how many people will die from malnutrition and neglect when the human race is enslaved by a ruling class that only cares about increasing profits over social programs?

    how many people will die when the environment crumbles and it's impossible to grow crops or support livestock without the power held by a ruling class?

    tell me. how many people are you willing to sacrifice to ensure economic stability continues?

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago

    I hope AI dies with a wheeze and a babble of nonsensical output that leaves the pseudoscientific and influencer crowd poring over it looking for meaning in it for decades.

  • source
  • [–] 31 points 20 hours ago (7 children)

    The whole AI bubble is just one big bet: "AGI is around the corner and will replace all white collar jobs"

    Now, LLMs get slowly better but aren't AGI and it's unclear if our current approach is even capable of reaching AGI.

    Sadly the US went 'all-in' on the bet and everyone except the ultra rich will feel the pain.

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 17 points 20 hours ago

    The lack of progress is one thing.

    The value for money is another: AI companies are still burning through vast sums of capital, while users are indeed using the products more and more... but still nowhere near at a price that would even cover the companies’ costs, let alone be profitable. If each token costs a few dollars, demand is likely to shrink significantly again... because as long as the systems operate stochastically and, logically, produce erroneous results, it may take a very large number of tokens to obtain a result that’s actually usable (this is especially true when using AI to replace workers whose tasks and skills you actually have no clue about).

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

    AGI will never happen with LLMs, but if you think in terms of a human brain out can be effective language and output and image recognition module. But there's no there there. Something else entirely is needed for true thought and sentience. But llm ai is already sufficient to translate machine thought into language sentences. You just need the spark of life that can actually think for itself.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

    You just need the spark of life that can actually think for itself.

    I know it's probably not intentional but you make it sound as if "just putting a spark of life" into the machine is easy

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 16 points 18 hours ago
    [–] 2 points 12 hours ago

    Okay just wake me up when UBI starts.

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 15 hours ago
    [–] 5 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    The impossible mission force?! What are they doing making public statements?

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 13 hours ago

    They've been comprised. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to infiltrate the IMF and remove compromised agents by any means necessary. If you are captured or killed the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck. This message will self-destruct in 5....

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 17 hours ago

    The new pseudoscience taking out the incumbent pseudoscience is the net zero we need.

  • source
  • [–] 6 points 19 hours ago*

    If they were at all serious about AGI there would be less focus on ever-improving the dead end of LLMs on that. They just want employers to think they can pay robots less than their workers, full stop.

  • source
  • [–] 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Yeah the "business" tycoons do that every decade or so. Some busts are bigger than others. Not much any of us can do about it unless we tax the hell out of corps and wealthy so that they can't build enough self serving shit to then dump the economy once they've scraped as much money as they can in the current cycle.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 3 points 19 hours ago*

    Don't worry, they'll use your taxes to make it profitable. Then, when AI can do your job by being trained by your data, they'll fire you and throw you to the curb and suddenly start talking about sustainability and the issue of overpopulation.

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 20 hours ago

    No shit, Sherlock!

  • source
  • [–] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    So, if it takes the global economy away then you could still eat an apple but there would be no price tag attached. Money has always been a middle-man of questionable and ever-changing value.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago

    It's not taking the global economy away in that sense.

    It'll blow up the global economy in that a lot of people will be unemployed and everyone's retirement funds will crash (which is fair, because AI is what made them go up so fast in the first place). A few rich people will also lose a bunch of money, but the clever ones will actually profit off it.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 32 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    if the promised profits fail to materialize.

    What profits? Nobody has money to spend and llm companies lose money on $200/mo subscriptions.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago

    They lose money on those $200 a month subscriptions, but e.g Anthropic won't let you use the sub outside of Claude Code, so for anything that would use their API, $200 gets you less usage than one 5-hour session of that subscription.

    Which doesn't stop them from losing a bunch of money to training though

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    thats rich coming from the IMF.

  • source
  • [–] 116 points 1 day ago (10 children)

    If so, the technobros did this. The technobros should receive most of the consequences. There should be dire consequences but we all know who will receive most of that. The system is broken.

  • source
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 20 hours ago

    That's why the techbros made sure to buy the politicians.

    This will be like 208-2012 but this time around it's the techbros businesses which will be deemed "Too big to fail" and get saved with public money and the central bank printing money to buy their bonds, whilst everybody else pays for it with Austerity.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 16 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Sorry. The techbros will get bailouts. Its the pensioners that will starve.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 0 points 12 hours ago

    It's the pensioners who made most of the money from NVDA and MU price graphs going vertical anyway. Friendly reminder that people over 55 own 73% of the US, much of it via index fund based retirement funds and such. Isolating just the boomers, they own 8x more wealth than billionaires (though there's a fair bit of overlap of course, with a lot of billionaires themselves being boomers). Total over 50% of the US (including everything from cash to real estate to stocks) is owned JUST by the boomer generation.

    Which is not to say the techbros aren't the problem, but in absolute dollar amounts, they're not actually the biggest beneficiaries - only per person did they make more money off this. Not as a class.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (5 replies)
    [–] 5 points 1 day ago*

    DUH. The Great Depression of 1929, and it took the world economy, and it fomented into World War.

  • source
  • [–] 22 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

    Buffett Index: total stock valuation vs. GDP

    1928: 130%

    2007: 130%

    2025: 220%

    Now guess where most of that stock growth and GDP came from? I'll give ya three guesses, but you're only going to need one.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 60 points 1 day ago

    "Greedy shitbag tech bros pushed it. Greedy shitbag investors threw every penny at it. So whoops, the whole world is held hostage. Sorry fuckos, you, John and Jane public, are going to pay to save the global economy. Greedy fucksticks aren't allowed to lose."

    ...can't wait.

  • source
  • [–] 29 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Burn it all down!!! Shits not sustainable nor stable for 90% of the world population!!! Burn it all down, tech dweebs!

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    COVID took the global economy with it.

    Losing AI would be like... I don't even know, insignificantly small compared to that.

    If AI up and disappeared tomorrow when I clocked into work, it might actually make my job easier. I could be even more productive without having the slop floodgates open every day.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 20 hours ago*

    The problem is not the "losing of AI", it's the loss of human and physical resources that went into AI and will ultimatelly yield little or no Economic value when they could have been gone into productive Economic activities.

    The human part is similar to COVID - people's time that could have been used in Economically productive activities was lost and will never come back - however the AI bubble differs in that actual physical resources have been wasted (mainly building and equiping datacenters) whilst during COVID fewer physical resources were used (mainly in vaccines and PPE).

    Also the AI bubble is mostly concentrated in the US, whilst COVID was global, which means that the damage of it blowing up will probably be worse in the US, whilst that of COVID was much more diffused.

    But the really big things is not even the AI bubble blowing up per-se - it's that there are other bubbles which are ready to blow (such as realestate Worldwide and auto-loans in the US) plus a worldwide Oil crisis caused by America's war against Iran, so the Economic shock of the AI bubble blowing will be amplified by the latter and will likely make the former blow up, almost certainly adding up to even more damage that the 2000 and 2008 Crashes (possibly as much as both put together).

    COVID was a slowdown of Economic productivity, this shit will probably be the Find Out stages all on top of each other of years of Fuck Around misallocating resources in multiple Economic domains.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    Then we riot.

  • source
  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago (1 child)
    load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 12 points 1 day ago
    load more comments
    view more: next ›