[asveikau]

Not sure where I heard this, but I'm reminded of a story about someone predicting the dotcom crash early, circa 1998. For 2 years they were demonstrably crazy, and missed out on massive stock market gains. Then they were right. (And yes, tech slowly bounced back after that.)

Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult. I don't think being wrong about timing 2 years ago means there won't be a correction.

[nostrademons]

I'm also reminded of all the HN posts from 2007-2009 that predicted that the adoption of social networking would be a terrible thing for privacy, that it would destroy society, that people would lose their jobs over crazy shit they said on the Internet, that it would lead to the decline of trust and in-person interactions, that people would forget how to socialize, etc.

They were right about all of that but it took 15-20 years and the companies involved grew 100x in that timefold, eventually reaching trillion-dollar valuations that would've seemed insane in 2007.

There is a tremendous amount of money to be made in destroying society.

[mike_hearn]

Eh, you can find HN posts predicting that literally everything will destroy privacy/society/trust/etc. Predicting doom is a popular pasttime.

What I remember from that time period is people predicting that we were in a tech bubble driven by social media, that obviously Facebook and LinkedIn were overvalued because social media was a trivial fad, and so on. Example article pulled at random:

https://theconversation.com/linkedin-is-floating-on-air-or-i...

And yet there was no bubble, these companies did fine and Meta became a financial Godzilla.

[nostrademons]

They weren't wrong. We were in a tech bubble driven by social media. Digg, StumbleUpon, Kongregate, MySpace, Orkut, Slide, Meebo, Mahalo, Bebo, Justin.TV, etc. aren't exactly around anymore. Facebook and YouTube are the winners.

Anyone remember this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

How many of the logos that scroll by there still exist?

[asveikau]

I was definitely around when that video was current, but I don't remember it. It's pretty amusing.

Ironically I feel like it captures the spirit of the then-coming 2010s boom more than the climate in 2007, though some of the language it's using is decidedly pre-mobile and more "web 2.0"-ish.

[mike_hearn]

The fact that some companies fail isn't evidence there was a bubble. Companies are always failing.

[abaymado]

Not related to AI but, I recently rewatched "The Big Short" and your comment reminded me of it. I can't testify the accuracy of the movie, but for over year, Michael Burry was viewed as in the same manner for shorting the market, while the economy was was in a hype cycle.

[deaton]

Burry of course has famously predicted 40 of the last 5 crashes, so maybe not the best example.

[loeg]

And lost his shirt doing it. (Or, well, his investors' money. I'm sure he's fine.) https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...

[asveikau]

This is like the old quote, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

[red75prime]

> Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult.

So, it stands to reason that it wasn't a prediction, but a lucky guess (unless the alleged predictor has a history of correct predictions).

[FromTheFirstIn]

That actually doesn’t stand to reason at all!

[padjo]

If I just continually predict that it will rain tomorrow I'll be right eventually. That doesn't mean that I know anything about the weather.

[zachthewf]

I'm open-minded to arguments about AI being a financial bubble and a bad business.

I'm not open-minded to arguments about utility, given that I personally witnessed LLMs evolve from interesting but useless toys to insanely helpful tools I use every day.

[asveikau]

I guess one of Zitron's arguments is that the utility you see today is based on subsidized costs, that if you had to pay more it might not be worth the tradeoff to you.

So the claim is the cost isn't coming down enough to make it make sense for a lot of uses in the long term. When I hear that next to the most wild claims, some by influential people, that the entire white collar workforce is going to be replaced very shortly, it's a bit of a useful reality check.

[degamad]

Exactly. The question is not "are people using it to do stuff?" because we know right now they are. Given free or heavily-subsidised access to powerful tools, people will use them.

If I had someone giving me free access to cranes and excavators, I'd be raving about how easy it was to build houses now. But tomorrow when I have to pay full price for them, I'm going to be making very different calculations about return on investment.

The question we need to be asking is "what is the likely full-price cost we'll have to pay for these tools, and is that cost likely to be worth paying?"

What Ed's pointing to is that the full-price cost will have to cover the capital expenditures that have been invested, or the companies which risked that capital will go bust. That gives us a floor for what the full price cost will be, and that floor seems higher than the value being offered by the tools.

[zuzululu]

you cant operate setup cranes or excavators alone

[Aerolfos]

What does that have to do with anything?

Is reading comprehension really this bad nowadays?

[zuzululu]

it was an analogy