Ah - near the bottom where he is disclosing his own bias. Got it.
So do you disagree that AI companies are in very large amounts of debt? And do you also disagree that debt will have real consequences (and one of those consequences might be either the lights going out or a buyout or merger)?
Not at all. And to be honest, I don't hear the original author asserting that all AI will go away.
But if you have a ChatGPT plan and OpenAI is bought by another company (because they are insolvent) ... do you honestly think you will be able to continue using your service without a significant price increase?
I suppose that would be up to the new owner? How would I know what happens to their services? You shouldn't conflate AI-the-technology with OpenAI-the-company. I'm super bullish about the tech, couldn't care less about a specific company. I mean, I hate Oracle like any other sane person, but that doesn't mean I hate databases.
I'm very confident that AI will continue to be available no matter what happens, at reasonable prices. We don't have to guess - we know what the open source models take to run, the hardware, the electricity, everything. They are served at a profit today - no-one is subsidizing them. Anyone can run GLM5.2 or (soon) K3 etc - you have capex and opex, you can serve X tokens per second, you sell them at Y price, it's just maths.
AI is a technology, not a company or group of companies.
I had the same reaction. It is the same kind of argument people use to claim that computer science is useless because, “What would you do if the electricity went out?”
Zitron has been predicting an imminent bubble pop since 2023 (although in less and less falsifiable terms), as OpenAI and Anthropic revenues have steadily grown 3-10x per year, but people keep listening. Zitron has done a lot to misinform the public but at some point you have to conclude it's demand-driven, and people won't re-evaluate his credibility because he tells them what they want to hear.
Right, I didn't mention anything about profit or debt.
The question is whether this is a bubble that's going away - whether "AI will just be turned off". A revenue trajectory indicating a vast increase in actual consumer/enterprise usage every year indicates otherwise. This is true regardless of whether or not forward-looking investment becomes too much at some point. If CSPs or AI labs have bought more compute than they can sell at current prices, maybe they'll go bust, but at that point supply and demand mean compute and therefore AI inference becomes much cheaper, which is unlikely to make it go away.
I've been seeing a lot of this in online discourse where people are like "the bubble's gonna pop and then this will all be over!"
it's a combination of wishlful thinking and straightup delusion to think that AI will just poof and disappear (maybe the specific LLM approach eventually, but not the general idea of AI/the industry/product as a whole)
So do you disagree that AI companies are in very large amounts of debt? And do you also disagree that debt will have real consequences (and one of those consequences might be either the lights going out or a buyout or merger)?