AI is funded solely by sunk cost fallacy at this point. I wonder how long it will be before investments start getting pulled back because of a lack of ROI. I can already feel the sentiment towards AI and it getting pushed in everything turning negative amongst consumers recently.
I wouldn’t have a problem if they were actually investing the money in something useful like R&D
Nearly all the investment is in data centers. Their approach for the past 2 years seems to be just throwing more hardware at existing approaches, which is a really great way to burn an absurd amount of money for little to nothing in return
It’s very corporate, isn’t it? “Just keep scaling what we have.”
That being said, a lot of innovation is happening, but goes unused. It’s incredible how my promising papers come out, and get completely passed over by Big Tech AI, like nothing matters unless it’s developed in house.
The Chinese firms are picking up some research in bigger models, at least, but are kinda falling into local maxima too.
One of our biggest bookstores contracted with a local artist for some merch. That artist used AI with predictable results. Now everyone involved is getting raked over the coals for it.
No surprise, they just announced a 4th round of layoffs too. 😟
https://www.koin.com/news/portland/powells-layoffs-employees-10292025/
I wonder how long it will be before investments start getting pulled back because of a lack of ROI.
Just wait for the next hot thing to come out
Why do you think AI is pushed so hard?
Everyone is aware this has to be useful. Too much money.
Still the powers that be will do everything to avoid a hard crash, which would be so much earned.
When I lose $11 Billion dollars, I have to go to bed without supper.
If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.
The difference between 100 million and 11.5 billion is about 11 billion. If you own a bank 11 billion that’s not only that bank’s problem, it’s the economy’s problem.
So I wondered a bit how much it actually affects the economy.
“S&P 500” companies’ market cap is about 57 trillion dollars with a P/E ratio of about 30. So openai by itself is dragging down the total s&p 500 earnings by only about 0.5%. The bigger problem is that there are multiple companies like openAI, and a large chunk of the entire economy’s valuation is tied to the promise that all the AI companies will somehow become profitable sometime soon.
If OpenAI goes down then it will start a domino effect as people lose confidence in AI and AI companies. That’s how the bubble pops.
So it ALL depends on the definition of “soon”?
Probably
I was referring to the general concept behind the quote.
I originally want to post the OG (apocryphal?) variant:
Owe Your Banker £1,000 and You Are at His Mercy; Owe Him £1 Million and the Position Is Reversed
But it sounds rather quaint these days.
Partially, if OpenAI lose 11.5 billion, someone get 11.5 billion, the money is used to pay something it did not vanish in a cloud
I look forward to the AI bubble bursting, and billionaires looking shocked, ‘because there were no signs’
They won’t lose any money…
In contrast to the housing bubble, where a lot of the value was in overpriced houses sold to individuals, this overpricing is almost entirely in tech stocks, and tech stocks are almost entirely owned by by the wealthiest 10%, even 1%. The tech billionaires have limited ability to divest themselves of their own overpriced companies and absolutely will lose money.
None of them are going bankrupt, they’ll all be just fine when the market recovers in a few years, because that’s the nature of capitalism. A bunch of peons, who convinced themselves that the bubble-value of their 401k meant it was safe to retire, will suffer, will have to go back to work - if you’re not an oligarch, losing money is painful.
Yeah all the people praying for a crash are praying for nobody to have retirement funds.
You can easily tell who’s actually employed in this thread because anyone with a 401k is going to get dicked down while the 0.1% get a bailout.
They will be fine either way…
A lot of them are actively talking about how it could be a bubble and the implications. No one is going to be surprised. Billionaires are just really hoping they can make it work before the bubble pops
Yeah… I mean billionaires have at least as much information as a random person on Lemmy :D
So they “lost” $11.5B? Cool, I lost 20 bucks last week and still had to explain it to my accountant 🤭 Feels like the entire AI industry is built on “don’t worry, growth will save us”, but at some point someone has to pay the electricity bill…
Its a bubble
The whole “AI” thing is one big grift.
I agree, and essentially they used slightly reworked old neural network technologies, increasing their power with the help of data centers.
Wow. Glad they just converted to a for profit entity! Can’t wait for them to unleash all this success on to the the general financial market.
Who wants to give me a billion dollars to dig a hole and I’ll give you a billion to fill it back in and we’ll both say to investors we posted a billion dollars in revenue.
This reminds me of something that came up recently. Copilot started hallicinating quite a bit more than usual in Copilot reviews. That made me think about the cost of operarion. As they burn money like this, I won’t be surprised if they start decreasing inference quality to decrease cost per user. Which also means people relying on certain model behaviour for tasks could get nasty surprises. Especially within automation workflows where model outputs aren’t being reviewed.
Copilot and Gemini are trash. They are driving away future business.
Github Copilot is somewhat useful for programming (or it feels useful when it cranks out some boring and routine code to my specs - not sure it actually saves me time though because I always review it all), but of course Microsoft have given a range of products all the same name for maximum confusion, as they do. The Copilot in Windows may be rubbish for all I know. I haven’t ever felt the need to press the button.
Anyone using something with inconsistent output in their automation deserves what they get.
Finally, some good news.
they will somehow shift the cost on the consumer and continue on
Oh no!
Anyway…
Microsoft also lowered stake in OpenAI from 32.5% to 27%
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/the smaller the share, the smaller the quarterly losses. Other sources have included that MSFT now gets a 20% royalty on openAI revenue, but its not in that PR. It’s not clear why else MSFT share would have fallen.
apparently the bubble might not be as extreme as some people think because the major AI players are all being propped up by companies that actually produce revenues and profits
You know if you invest all your winnings into all the companies that buy your stuff so that they can buy more of your stuff, you are actually not generating any winnings.
Like Nividia which… Oh all based on AI revenue.
And even though NVIDIA is better place as they do produce something, but the something in play has little value out of the AI bubble.
NVIDIA could be left holding the bag on a super increased capacity to produce something that nobody wants anymore (or at least nowhere near at the levels we have now) so they are still very much exposed.
The problem is that the companies that actually produce revenues and profits are also in turn being propped up by AI.
such as?
deleted by creator
What? there was no such thing a “bubble” around the Metaverse… (at least not the economic slang term “bubble”)
From the first video of the Zuck presenting the idea, everyone just laugh it off… Meta did waste tons of money on it but they had the money to burn so there was no bubble at all in play here
If I am rich and stupid, I may think a pool in the roof of my house is a great idea. I can spend the value of the house having it built and then have the house collapse on me. Since I am rich, I can just buy another house or pay to rebuild it and that’s the end… no bubble.
However, if I am pitching plans for pools on roofs… and millions of people buy into it, many of whom can barely afford my terrible plans, when the houses start collapsing, too many people will be left with no house or means to procure another one… that’s a bubble
lol, what? “Bubble” doesn’t just mean something is expensive
But that’s what they wanted anyway, isn’t it?
Burning shitloads of money.
Waiting until they can later, finally, rule the world.
And that is probably only the beginning.
AI crash will be 11X bigger than subprime mortgage crash, also driven by mass stupidity.
The next movie will be titled: * The Big Shart*
This guys is jacked…jacked to the tits.
You too will soon be able to buy an abandoned datacenter for just $1,000.
