The company I work does pretty basic analysis. Its certainly an “every day” application. It’s been two or three years they’ve been Investing large amounts of money into this, and it can’t do shit. We have been “training” it for faaaaaar longer than it would take to train a human to do these things. Plus, they’ve torn it apart and completely restarted the process at least twice, to my knowledge. Zero efficiencies, very little practical capability. I hear that it’s great at coding and math, I’ve seen it do word processing pretty good, but these assholes oversold it’s capabilities to the managerial class, and they fucking took it. Hook, line, and sinker.
I believe the implosion of the AI bubble will essentially torpedo the only thing still supporting the US economy?
After the initial dot com boom and bust (remenber pets.com?) I remember being told laptops and desktops were dead and we’d all be using tablets. Metaverse, google glass, self driving vehicles real soon, theranos will transform health care, NFTs, crypto. And now AI. Its all just a repeating toilet bowl swirl of empty speculation, exactly like a casino. And not a single one of those things came to much. I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes. Maybe this time itll be different?
The funniest part is that the dot com crash didn’t kill the internet. It killed a lot of terrible business plans. AI may follow the same script: useful tools survive, investors discover that a chatbot isn’t worth infinite money, and taxpayers get stuck with the data center power bill. The technology can be real while the valuation is pure casino. - PS: You didn’t mention the smartphone. And that’s exactly what people mainly use these days.
Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst - I think it didn’t take more than a couple of years after that Crash for the “Web 2.0” to start being paraded around like some kind of new gold rush that everybody should jump into and, as clearly visible in the list of hype techs you wrote, they just kept doubling down on the hype and the fraud ever since.
I actually was in Tech in the 90s and during the Crash, and then came back to that industry and into startups almost 2 decades later, and my feeling is that the point when the entire sector turned into nothing more than a giant grift was either a bit after the crash or, at best, just when the boom before it was peaking - I remember very clearly that in the 90s startups mostly started with somebody having a cool idea for tech, whilst in the 00s and onwards they mostly started with somebody having a business idea which was generally about setting oneself up as an intermediary in a kind of business transaction already done for decades, using the Internet and/or Smartphones to come up with a new twist for it and some way of becoming an aggregator/middle-man between both sides of the transaction.
AI IS a useful tool for some things, just not everything. So it ain’t going away. Just as the “cloud” is still with us. Or email. Anyone remember when every ISP had their own email?
Every new idea goes through the process of catching on, stupid rapid growth, and then the weeding out of 90+ % of them, and finally the stabilizing the market for those that actually need and use it. Whether is cars, TVs, Cell phones, or AI, every hot new idea goes through this process.
remember pets.com
I think pets.com is probably the best analogy to what will happen with this first round of AI companies. In hindsight pets.com’s business model was fine and modern companies like chewy are doing the same thing successfully.
The problem was timing, internet adoption was low and most people didn’t understand how to use the Internet or trust it. Combine that with a flood of speculative dollars that mostly gets funneled into marketing with no adoption to justify it and the business falls apart.
I think we’ll see the same thing happen with some of these AI applications, the use case may be valid, but people, and the devs, won’t know how to use AI and the people won’t trust it so adoption will be low even with high marketing and the company will go bust. Then 10 years from now we’ll make fun of that AI party planning app that went under while we all plan our parties through some new AI app.
I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes.
I think it will, it’s the one bit of AI optimism I actually have. I have a theory the big AI firms love for example Yudkowsky’s doomsday cult so much because it’s easier for them to imagine the end of humanity than it is to imagine them not getting an extractive oligopoly over an emerging technology.
The tech itself is actually decent as tech, it’s not what the boosters claim it is but even if development stopped advancing today there’s loads of niches it’d be changing for a long time; computer vision in medical settings for example. Useful things like TTS will be much better going forward than they ever were, and for better and worse things like computer vision in general (ie in public) will never be the same. LLMs are basically magic NLP boxes too, they’re useful for classification as much as generating slop.
Yeah, just like, after the Segway bubble burst, we’re all riding them now.
Netbooks and thin computing too.
Nope, all hype and fizzle.
Turns out people want to own their personal hardware/software tools and data, without some perverts reading and observing their family interactions.
The tablet one eventually came true. Desktops and laptops aren’t anywhere near as popular for personal use by non-technical people.
This is the first major real sign of the bubble popping. An actual verified report from the Financial Times regarding massive drop in revenue expectations, rather than just people hoping it pops.
Teeter harder, I need to upgrade my graphics card.
I just want some RAM, man. :(
I don’t actually need more RAM but I’m going to buy more anyways just in celebration.
And I wanna build a gaming PC!
slow down, there’s going to be enough for everyone once the AI hype dies and they’re scaling back (probably)
That’s not how it works. The ram chips soldered onto the AI accelerator cards, you cannot just take them out and use them in a PC :(
Something big is coming. The number of startups that investors have poured billions into that do random in-the-middle bullshit to try and scrape pennies from companies’ budgets is incredible. These products aren’t real. All the investment went into carving money off… the investment. It’s self eating.
Since I haven’t seen it yet in this conversation, I think I need to bring some better context to what this article is claiming.
No, OpenAI did not assume they were making $70 billion. They’ve always known their existing number. In fact, that number IS what was reported to investors.
The $70 billion number is coming from a specific investor that wanted to adjust the definition of revenue to get a more “apples to apples” comparison to Anthropic’s numbers.
When these companies license their models to hypervisors (AWS, Azure, etc), those hypervisors take a cut. OpenAI does not report that cut as revenue. This investor wanted to add it back in to get a “total demand for AI tokens” number.
They are 2 completely different metrics coming from 2 completely different groups.
Nothing an injection of taxpayers money can’t fix!
Could they not have asked their top-tier LLM for advice on how to avoid this massive loss? No? Oh.
I desire the collapse so much.
I own nothing of value, I lose nothing.
Good piece of financial advice. You’re assets can’t lose value if you have none ;)
As a person with assets, I will gladly watch them burn together with AI. Can we be done with this tomfoolery already please.
Shenanigans, poppycockery, cockamamie, and a basic lack of respect for the institutions god damn it, I ain’t having it!
Just invest in the things that we actually need. Renewables for example.
I want it to go away too. But there is so much of everything tied up in this boom to think you won’t be affected is naive.
For a taste of what to expect watch this: https://youtu.be/T9d6lrvzM9o?is=XvTpsKub8SB48lgt
All I need is food and shelter.
I work in critical infrastructure (power distribution/generation) with a job that requires a pretty hefty certification and a bunch of legal requirements.
I’m safe as long as people still need electricity for things.
So you selfishly want others to fail and yourself to thrive. That’s an honest position, but perhaps not very ethical. Incidentally almost exactly the same position the billionaires take.
It’s not about me vs. others, I just want the people investing in harmful tech to fail. Not for personal reasons, just so there will be less harmful tech in the future. But those investors might learn something, and that would be welcome.
They started it.
I am with you the whole way, friend. I love seeing the stock market crash. Brings them all down closer to our daily level.
cant happen soon enough
The fundamentals get worse and worse the closer you look.
Like for example, so much of their opex is filed under capex. Graphic cards & related assets degrade over time but are often listed as one time purchases, compute time is often evaluated as one time expenses but the models need to be retrained to improve over time, etc.
Basically, the AI lab told backers to expect revenues approaching $50 billion — far shorter than the explosive $70 billion number reported previously.
Though that $70 billion figure was also based on leaked investor memos, OpenAI wasn’t in any hurry to deny it, digging itself into a $20 billion hole.
So they told investors they’d make $70b and now they’re bringing down the forecast to $50b . $50b is still insane, that’s more revenue then any other software company except Microsoft (and probably anthropic), next closest is Salesforce with $41b, and Salesforce built that revenue over decades. Open AI finished 2025 with $13b in revenue, that’s nearly 4x growth in a year on more then 10 billion in revenue, that has never been done before.
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as explosive as they initially said. It is still very much explosive, but more a fission bomb then an h bomb. It seems the market agrees, Nvidia is down ~1% on this news, but still up 5% on this month and 20% yoy.
Quite a lot of that ARR is based on Ouroboros-like investment loops.
50B is annualized revenue, accrued revenue will be almost certainly be quite a bit lower this year.
Tech companies love reporting ARR because it is always bigger than GAAP revenue (if the business is growing at all).
It’s not annualized in the traditional sense. They take their highest revenue day and multiply it by 365.
That… Doesn’t make sense does it? Like apart from fraud what’s the point of doing it like that?
They need to pull a big number from where the sun don’t shine.
Oh, it’s absolutely a fraud meant to deceive investors.
Just not legally speaking.
But the $70b number was published by an investor, and OpenAIs crime was to not disagree publicly. Makes me wonder who is frauding whom.
I won’t pretend to understand this news.
We don’t even know their calculation. It’s just a number they present without context.
“revenue” that’s propped up by the government and ignores other factors, such as overall expenses, competing open source models, and non-realized assets.
The difference between Microsoft and OpenAI or Anthropic is that Microsoft has a profit model.
There’s absolutely no way that the big LLM companies can make enough profit to overcome their expenses in the next decade even, especially since the technology on the open front only continues to improve. That’s why the LLM bros keep hyping it up via fear mongering and criminal activities like hacking - to keep selling the illusion that it’s AI.
yeah $20 imaginary dollerydoos were shaved off the $70 anticipated imaginary dollerydoos, it’s all so idiotic
The bubble part is the extremely high losses, even before hiding training expenses as assets that become worthless the next month after a new version release. Also monumental promises that they will require massive new fundraising for, that fewer people understand remain possibly sustainable.
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as crazy as they initially said.
That’s because you’re thinking about the situation rationally, which isn’t something the market is known for.
Good point. It is important to keep things in perspective.
its basically elizabeth holmes, but with AI, and with the same freaky facial expression.
Sounds like it’s almost bailout time again.
I favor incarceration with no bail.
I favour incineration
