[CoastalCoder]

As a software developer, I'm anxious about the AI gold rush being a bubble that's about to pop.

I've been unemployed ever since the Great 15% Layoffs, about 14 months ago. I finally landed a job (well, once the paperwork is done) related to bringing up a new processor. But it's a DL accelerator.

I really hope there's not another employment bloodbath if/when the AI bubble bursts, since my savings are pretty much depleted.

[mbreese]

If you’re worried about the bursting of the AI bubble, then whatever you do, don’t look up “AI winter”.

This has all happened before and will happen again.

[surfingdino]

VR winter and AI winter are two regular seasons in IT. Waste of money, nothing to show for it and a lot of devs surprised it did not work out this time.

[ethbr1]

That said, companies that deliver measurable value (literally, revenue/cost-impacting) to customers and have healthy free cash flow are going to weather winters.

[xxs]

“AI winter”... is long overdue.

[shrimp_emoji]

We're still in it, IMO.

No big breakthroughs; what we're seeing now is spare GPU power and memory (since those the only things still advancing significantly from year to year) brute forcing black box neural nets that nobody understands or can get to work right. If that's "AI", then me using ChatGPT to write my essay is "doing my English homework".

[hn_throwaway_99]

This type of unbridled pessimism baffles me. If you think what had happened over the past, say, 24 months is "AI Winter", I can't imagine what your bar for AI Summer is.

[candiodari]

Do you know when the robot apocalypse is scheduled?

[rsynnott]

Every 10 years since about 1950.

[pera]

Honestly if you can I would try to find something outside "AI" for now: even if you are doing real deep learning stuff the reality is that 99% of the people investing in AI at the moment can't differentiate obvious bs from real R&D at all, they are here just because of the hype and are throwing millions to anything with an AI tag on it, so when this bubble pops it will be ugly for everybody, indiscriminately. This is another dot com.

[renegade-otter]

Unless they find another hype, at least the money will go into doing actual work, so I don't think it will be all bad.

[packetlost]

I'm not unemployed, but I too am worried about this. Practically everything besides big tech has been in a recessionary state for awhile now but the S&P looks great because nvidia's stock went to the moon and a few other tech companies are doing very well... for now. I'm not sure how much longer this can be sustained.

[thinkharderdev]

This is not even remotely true. Corporate earnings are growing strongly across almost all sectors (https://www.usbank.com/investing/financial-perspectives/mark....)

[Guthur]

That link doesn't say anything like that, what are you taking about. It even mentions that sizable number of companies have negative guidance.

[thinkharderdev]

Directly from the linked article: "On average, first quarter 2024 earnings results were solid. Four sectors — Communication Services, Utilities, Consumer Discretionary and Information Technology — generated the strongest earnings growth for the quarter"

But that was just a link I came across quickly. You can look at almost any economic statistics you want and see that the economy (at least in the US, you mentioned the S&P 500 so I assume you are US-based) is quite strong right now.

[jpc0]

Average != Median and that is what the commenter above mentioned.

The S&P500 and others don't remove the outliers going to the moon which is good for investors but as a data metric would make for a pretty large deviation.

[skeeter2020]

S&P must mean something different where you're from, because when I looked as recently as this morning this is not true. I'm worried for the exact opposite reason: everything is up, across sectors most not technology and definitely not AI. Everyone's waiting for inflation to decrease and trigger corresponding interest rate declines so they can resume the consumption frenzy. We learned nothing; that's what I think is scary.

[arez]

I don't think so. People already start to realize that AI won't solve everything in the near future and will hire soon also more engineers again, when the bubble bursts engineers will be valued better again and more jobs should open

[moralestapia]

I think (and hope!) you'll be fine. Hardware is doing quite well in this wave.

You should worry if you were working on a GPT-frontend, lol.

[alephnerd]

If the DL Accelerator has a decent Fed Sales muscle and/or you are working on features that are truly critical for the business (as in $$$ making features) you will be fine.

A lot of the 15% bloodbath was also because of severe overhiring during Covid's 0% interest rate times, so AOPs needed to be reworked for a high interest rate period.