[pron]

Stock market collapses and technological success are two very different things. The internet led to a market collapse just as it started showing real promise. One of the problems is that you can't invest in a technology, only in companies, and oftentimes the companies that turn a technology into financial success are not the ones that exist when the technology is in its infancy. It's not unlikely that LLM will be a huge success while Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic collapse.

[jurgenburgen]

When people are talking about an AI bubble, they are explicitly talking about the stock market. It’s not at all about the question if LLMs are useful or not.

[pron]

Of course, but I was responding to a comment that contrasted "believing in AI" with the stock market. People believed in the internet, it still led to a bubble and a market crash, and that didn't mean those people were wrong. Part of the cause for a bubble, then and now, is that you can't invest in a technology, only in companies. Investors want to invest in AI, but they can't, so they invest in OpenAI, which may well go bankrupt. Those early internet pioneers didn't deliver on the inflated financial expectations from them even while the internet as a whole eventually did.

What's interesting to me is how quickly the big AI labs are losing their competitive edge even before becoming profitable. Models that are less than one year behind the leading ones are effectively commoditised already. If OpenAI and Anthropic disappear tomorrow, it will be no more than a brief inconvenience to LLM users. They're spending a lot of money for an almost negligible advantage.