The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/big-short-michael-burry-1-billion-ai-bubbleOpen linkView original on pawb.social868
Comments243https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/big-short-michael-burry-1-billion-ai-bubbleOpen linkView original on pawb.social
If I had to make a guess, I say it probably will. The convenience of AI is probably here to stay, but the craze of replacing everything with AI will go out the door.
AI will become exactly what it should have been in the first place: an assistant. Not your friend, not your doctor, not your therapist, not a replacement for artists/authors/programmers, and not inside every piece of tech post 2025. It has a place. That place is over-embellished right now, not to mention unsustainable.
It will definitely burst, and might take out some fairly large companies with it. Potentially even one or two tech companies that have been around for decades depending on how large it gets before that burst. One or two companies will end up with the IP all of them are "building" and it will fizzle into the background of daily use just like the previous assistants like Alexa, Cortana, etc. have.
Please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft, please be Microsoft.
Itll be
nvidia andopenai primarily, id have to imagineIt wont be Nvidia unless they play things incredibly badly, they're the only ones making actual profit by selling shovels in the goldrush.
Yeah, but dont they also have the largest promisory debt? Havent they loaned the most most money that they dont actually have?
From a quick look they have ~40B USD in liabilities and make ~115B USD gross profit. Being able to pay off the entirety of their debt with 4 months of profit seems pretty healthy to me.
Cool, in a not super cool way. Nvidia is kinda scummy but the work they do is valuable. I appreciate you dropping the facts on me, but im not sure how to feel about them.
They "loaned" money to companies that immediately turned around and used that money to buy their products... So they got the money back and are only maximum out the production costs of those units if the loaner can't pay.
But if there is a bankruptcy, they'd be at the front of the line to collect
Pretty sure they meant “[have been] loaned” but you make an interesting point
Yeah, but can they handle the collapse of going back to the company before the AI boom? They've increased in market cap 5000%, attracted a lot of stakeholders that never would have bothered with nVidia if not for the LLM boom. If LLM pops, then will nVidia survive with their new set of stakeholders that didn't sign up for a 'mere graphics company'?
They've reshaped their entire product strategy to be LLM focused. Who knows what the demand is for their current products without the LLM bump. Discrete GPUs were becoming increasingly niche since 'good enough' integrated GPUs kind of were denting their market.
They could survive a pop, but they may not have the right backers to do so anymore...
Definitely a possibility! But dealing with "only being a normal profitable company" is a very different problem to "oops, we were selling $10 for $5 and VCs have stopped giving us money to burn, and people are using self hosted models too", which is the possible outcome for the big AI labs.
Microsoft already had a proven business model and established products and services before the AI boom. If a company goes under it would almost certainly be one focused almost entirely on AI such as Palantir.
Lol, Palantir isn't going anywhere.
And the AI bust will hit primarily generative AI, and Palantir does things a bit differently.
agreed palantir is on the government tit
if boeing fuckups can kill people palantir is not foing anywhere
Nah, they already converted all their business clients to recurring revenue and are, relatively, not very exposed to the LLM thing. Sure they will have overspent a bit on datacenters and nVidia gear, but they continue to basically have most of global business solidly giving them money continuously to keep Office and Azure.
In terms of longer term tech companies that could be under existential threat, I'd put Supermicro in there. They are a long term fixture in the market that was generally pretty modest and had a bit of a boost from the hyperscalers as 'cloud' took off, but frankly a lot of industry folks were not sure exactly how Supermicro was getting the business results they reported while doing the things they were doing. Then AI bubble pulled them up hard and was a double edged sword as the extra scrutiny seemingly revealed the answer was dubious accounting all along. The finding would have been enough to just destroy their company, except they were 'in' on AI enough to be buoyed above the catastrophe.
A longer stretch, but nVidia might have some struggles. The AI boom has driven their market cap about 5000%. They've largely redefined most of their company to be LLM centric, with other use cases left having to make the most of whatever they do for LLM. How will their stakeholders react to a huge drop from the most important company on earth to a respectable but modest vendor of stuff for graphics? How strong is the appetite for GPU when the visual results aren't really that much more striking than they were 3 generations of hardware back?
Agreed. Probably where it should have stayed in the first place. Not that its not interesting, just that the scope of AI has widened beyond what it should have.
Depends on when the bust happens. If its in the current admin? All those tech companies are getting bailed out.
I think that might actually send the US into a debt spiral that would require leaning into printing and inflation. Net interest for FY25 is $933 Billion putting servicing debt as the third largest federal expenditure. Any bailout will either be insignificantly small or will tank the dollar.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
So we can pretty much bank on it definitely happening, got it.
It’s a good thing trump isn’t dumb enough to think US debt is easily solved by printing more money, right?
Wouldn’t that be crazy?
(I really hope this isn’t something he can actually do. It shouldn’t be possible, but neither should a lot of things he’s done.)
the real danger is if it will cause another great depression when it pops...
I am having trouble seeing how OpenAI survives without investment cash. What exactly is their moat? I know they are hoping to power the AI behind everyone else’s tech but that is more and more untenable as the others develop AI models of their own.
Just a reminder that the term "AI" stands for a category of systems that contains a lot more than just LLMs.
Sir, this is the stock market.
People order with their feelings, not facts.
I don't know how this relates to what I said.
Once the ai bubble breaks for llms it will drag general machine learning down with it once panic sets in. People wil dump any stock that even faintly smells like ai.
Some actually valuable business may disappear, on the other hand those that survive and are undervalued may actually be a good investment opportunities.
This is not financial advice, to gamble your money is dumb.
Yeah, okay, but I still don't know how this relates to what I said.
Um.. You are aware you made your comment about ai being much more then just llm within context of a discussion on wether the ai bubble will burst or not?
Cause that’s what this post/thread is about.
The ai bubble will burst nonetheless. I was also playing on the “sir, this is a Wendy’s” meme. In a way joking that your comment is actually not relevant to the discussion.
I was commenting on what another user said, not on the article OP posted. Not every reply in the comment section is a direct response to the topic at hand. I was talking about the definition of terms, not the stock market.
True, true. In this context I mean the LLM craze. The GPU era of AI.
Main reason it can flourish as assistant in the first place is that Google search engine became shit
It's not that Google's algorithms got bad, but the entire Internet turned to shit and they can't compensate for it.
For anything not time-sensitive, try adding "before:2023" to your search. I'm betting the quality of your results will skyrocket.
ETA: fixed autocorrect
I'm paying for a search engine "kagi" just because Google search results have more advertising than time square. It kind of sucks since we got used to search for free but at least I can get relevant results rather than advertising when I search.
Dotcom groundhog day for the tech sector.
"convenience"? You mean CEOs being able to lay off workers with some magical technology that does nothing? Yeah, that's surely convenient for the 0.1% of people in the world that doesn't affect. Love that "convenience" for them.
Did it cup your balls during the last BJ or something? Fucking hell, what is it with randos on the web scaping for AI at every instance...
Friend saw 'convenience' and that was it. No more reading, only fists. I thought I was quite neutral. Yes, convenience. I have been known to use a local LLM based on recipes to give me ideas what I could make based on my pantry.
I have a lovely recipe for absolutely delicious chocolate-chip cookies that use pancake mix.
Are you trying to deny that AI is also convenient for regular people?
Uh, yes. AI cannot and does not have productive output as its goal, technologically speaking. Therefore, any "convenience" is imagined and projected upon an algorithm of statistically most likely text. It's just a statistician strapped in front of the 1 Million Monkeys thought experiment.
It's quintessentially useless, unless your ultimate goal is text resembling language en masse. But usually, Loren Ipsum is much more energy efficient.
But if it saves time on some simple tasks, how can you say it’s not convenient?
there is no task that is meaningful time saved by a kind of context-dependant lorem ipsum. The task is then not done, but simply rejected on its face.
I have no clue what you’re trying to say.
If I ask an AI to write an email and it does so both better and faster than I could, how can you say it’s inconvenient and doesn’t save time?
As an aside, you can tell how successful the rebranding of twitter as “x” has been, since even now more than 2 years after the rebranding news articles still have to add “formerly known as twitter” every time they mention it.
I still call it Twitter regularly.
To me, X is a windowing system.
Wayland, formerly known as Twitter
Weyland–Yutani
Xitter is the proper rebrand.
yeah i would be calling it twitter if not for xitter.
X reminds me of a porn site and the X itself kinda associated for me as X rated. Kinda dumb why they changed it from Twitter.
That's why though. He's incredibly immature.
muskrat loves his x-rated shit publicly visible to everyone
To me, X gon give it to ya
I call it “Exxx, the everything app” sarcastically like Liz from TrueAnon does. I never used Twitter but I just find it funny to call it that.
And x.com is a place people should only go late at night, when they are alone.
That dumbass throwing away the Twitter brand for a damn letter should be proof enough to anyone that he's a moron
It's been two years and it's still going, despite the name change, or, you know, the owner throwing a nazi salute on live television.
It doesn't seem like the branding was as important as everybody seems to think, or any negative impact was offset by it staying on the news, good or bad, constantly.
But I also still say Facebook and Google instead of Meta and alphabet
Those are changes in parent company names though while the services Facebook and Google still exist. The rebrand of Twitter to X continuing to not stick for people is a much bigger failure on their part than Meta and Alphabet not entering the general zeitgeist.
Even Grok AI follows up with that reminder when it mentions X.
Some guy spending a billion dollars on pretty much nothing makes me deeply annoyed. Tax billionaires.
He famously isn't rich. He manages the money of the rich, he himself is only well off. This isn't his money he's investing, it's the money of the people he works for. So there's obviously some market feeling that this is a good bet.
He's a multi millionaire, that's far more than just well off
Yeah, I read that he has somewhere around $300M. Not a billionaire, but not poor.
Also, the way short positions work is that the people who are most successful at shorting a stock are the ones who have a megaphone to announce they've shorted the stock. They go on as many podcasts, news shows, interviews, etc. as possible to say things are going to crash. Because, the more people who hear about it, the more hesitation there will be to invest, which means the more chances of their prediction coming through.
So, he's not just some guy who is betting on the bubble bursting, he's a guy who is now heavily incentivized to cause the bubble to burst so he can make his investors a lot of money.
You must be annoyed A LOT these days. It seems that spending a lot of money on nothing is the latest trend for these people.
But spending it on their own terms. They would spend $100,000 on lawyers and lobbying to avoid paying $20,000 of new taxes.
Because it sets a precedent. If the $20k taxes go through, why not some $120k ones in the future? At the very least, this is their logic.
Good thing Burry isn't a billionaire, he's a fund manager.
true, lucky he is only worth hundreds of millions...
Capital gains are taxed. Profits from this are capital gains.
We may have to wait for another three years.
I looked into the article to find out how long a timeframe he is betting. Unfortunately, it does not say.
You'd think the timing should reflect the typical terms of loans and loan volumes - so that sounds plausible. When the default rate of those loans begins to creep up and become notable to investors, then people will get edgy.
I just hope it comes before our much loved and overpaid layers of incompetent management have destroyed all their manual production processes and replaced them with snake oil. If not a general economic downturn might start well before the ai bubble bursts.
How the hell did he do a long term bet against the market? Aren't shorts short-term and they're forced to pay after a set period of time? Even the inverse indexes will steadily make your money simply vanish.
I never got into options investing, but I believe you keep re-upping them. Every time you do so you pay a small price. So, the game is: 'can you stay liquid long enough for the bubble to pop'.
The longest term seems to be about 2 years.
You can keep a short position for a long time, as long as you can maintain margin, which gets bigger if the stock price continues increasing, and pay margin interest - there is no set date when the short has to he closed, it's indefinite. Sometimes the lender who loaned you the stock can ask for it back, and if you can't locate any more shares to borrow to replace the returned shares, you might be forced to buy the shares back and close the short, but this is not common, at least during normal market conditions.
His company bought puts. They are less risky, because you don't need to maintain margin. What you pay to buy them is all you can lose.
Which is also a clue that he isn't short selling.
There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.
A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they're going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don't own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you're right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn't sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.
An option is much safer. There you're buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It's currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn't work out. You don't have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You're out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it's now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It's just the cost of the options.
Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn't going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they'd be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.
For the coming AI crash, I don't think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they'd try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there's going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They're the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance's political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he'll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they'll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there's just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.
It is interesting that stocks began going down though. Whether it continues, we should see.
A short is not only a bet on a direction but also a timing issue. You need to know roughly how long (time) to keep the option.
The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won't burst? Keeping it going will require in ever-increasing amounts of money to paper over the gaping chasms that keep cropping up, and eventually the amount of money necessary to keep it going will cease to be feasible. Then, after taking gullible investor for all of they've got, the whole thing will fall over in the world's most well deserved and predictable market crash.
The subprime mortgage collapse was inevitable only in hindsight, you had to have a good understanding of the market to see it in advance. To see the level of corruption and false promises that have to be made in order to make the mortgage bubble possible. But everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open, I'm not talking about the "how many Rs are in strawberry" questions either, I can sort of see why that's not really a fair question. I'm talking about the fact that every single business that has ever tried to replace its employees with AI, has always failed, and failed almost immediately. Even Amazon couldn't make it work.
I think the idea is that, whilst shorting, you get squeezed. The question is not 'if' but 'when' and if it takes too long and you're $1B deep you can lose your shirt
Yep. The market can stay irrational etc
The thing is though as long as it goes down that's usually all you need. You don't need a total collapse.
That's the thing though, options are generally relatively short in duration, with most being a few months. The longest options are around 1-2 years out.
Could AI stay keep its hype for 1-2 years? Probably. Will it? Who knows!
I assume he has enough funds to buffer and roll it forward if it takes longer than he thinks.
The question is, will he still see a profit if it takes 5-10 years? Will his investors stick with him even if he loses billions? They almost left in 2008, what if this takes longer than that?
If you're taking the contrarian stance in investing, you have to be right both about direction and timing, and timing the market is very hard if not impossible.
Yep, you can only do so much risk management and hedging, and only for so long. There comes a time when you have to cut it off but, you know, hubris
I think, AI quality aside, it's mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA's market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society's ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.
And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn't think we'd get this far - the 2008 crisis didn't do it, COVID somehow didn't do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don't deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that's where the trick is going to be.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Uh oh, I can stay solvent for quite longer
The thing that boggles my mind in all of this is the possibility that Trump installs some absolute toady tool bag in at the Fed and then just has the federal reserve bail out all of the bad investments. It'd mean probably hyperinflation, but who cares about normal shmucks trying to live a life? It's much more important to pay the genius, scammy billionaires so they can keep their mega yachts fully gassed and assed.
To me it is four things in particular:
In prior generations, any industry with such performance would be laughed clear out of the boardroom.
But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist.
After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
Ugh... Minor rant.
My aunt is into tech like me. She dived head first into the AI in the middle of the hype instead of during IoT era when machine learning (the foundation of GPT models) was part of a larger SDK for building smaller tasks. Now she won't stop pushing it onto my mom like a salesman by saying she should do this and that with ChatGPT or whatever, and it's so freakin' annoying.
Luckily, I've told my mom straight up to not buy into it.
Huh. Never noticed the MLM parallels of the current AI hype so much before. Literally levenschtein distance of one, should've spotted it.
Do you have references for these claims? I believe you, but I'd like to know more.
Investors have been happy to incentivise companies to hire idiot CEOs and managers who say the right buzzwords but reduce output by making bad decisions and only hiring people who don't think they're bad decisions, so an automated buzzword-dispensing idiot isn't necessarily going to seem to investors like a downgrade compared to what they think most workers are. They're just as likely to think AI lets them invest in companies where even the lowest tier employees are potential CEO material, and continue not noticing that the per-employee efficiency keeps going down. Data showing that layoffs nearly never pay for themselves doesn't stop stock prices soaring whenever one happens, so I wouldn't expect data showing AI makes companies less profitable to stop stock prices going up when a company announces a new dumb way they'll use it.
All this you listed is the reason why we are fucked if we keep depending more and more on "this" AI and don't get a revolution in the AI field to replace the current one with AGI. Because in ten years we risk losing a big chunk of expertise and if we don't have an AI that can really replace the current one with something that can actually replace experts then there will huge infrastructure problems across multiple industries.
I'm not so sure. I'm still friends with a guy who told me emphatically "you dont understand what we did, we destroyed the global economy" and then explained the whole subprime mortgage scam to me, back in like 2007. Lots of downstream businesses, new home builders, paint and drywall companies, building materials stores, started folding several months before the official crash as well. I wasn't nearly as aware of things then, I was a grown adult but not yet 30 and with little formal education, but there were definitely huge flashing signs. Only the media, based 100% on the words of the banks and insurance companies, thought that a crash was undetectable.
I'm not sure quite what it would look like yet, but I'm willing to bet if you look where these data centers are being built, when the cash runs out to keep the whole scam afloat, these big companies will stop paying their bills. The smaller companies providing services and supplies will run out of money before the huge mega corpos start showing signs, so that is one of the metrics I'm watching closely. I just happen to live in the shadow of these data centers so I'll be pretty close to it, that is if I'm right.
One of the first deals I did in real estate (~2006) was a sale at 115% loan-to-value, no money down, seller-paid closing costs. The buyers received $2500 at closing. Nobody batted an eye.
I remember the news reporting about record breaking amounts of mortgage defaults in like 2007 as well. The signs were all there, but people were too oblivious or high on their own supply of farts to see them.
Anytime people are like "we couldn't see this coming" I never understand why they are allowed to pass that obvious lie off in public.
The AI bubble signs are in plain view everywhere you look right now. If (or much more likely when) it bursts everyone will be talking about how they couldn't possibly see it coming again.
If people say they couldn't see this shit coming, maybe their myopic asses shouldn't be in charge of anything important ever again.
There was quite a lag between the variable-rate mortgage rates going up and everything noticeably exploding, so lots of people who were aware there was a real risk of things going tits up decided that it hadn't and therefore wasn't going to and had stopped looking for signs by the time they started to appear.
Rich dumbasses found a place to waste all their money instead of the government taxing them and using that money for important things. they let them waste it on some climate change accelerator
Nobody believes the AI investment/growth trajectory we have right now will continue for infinity. What nobody knows is: when the correction will occur.
This is the info/decisions you'd need as an average investor. What Burry is doing is the riskiest type of investments with shorting the market. If growth continue to occur he and his fund will have to pay for the growth to those whose shares he borrowed to short.
In summary, its not enough to know that a bubble exists, but to profit from it you have to figure out when it will burst and when the full burst is done.
Everyone can see it coming, but they believe the AI companies' hype that the AGI breakthrough will be here "soon". Which if actually true, might be worth the bet.
For my money they either hit AGI and then we all die, or there is a crash before that. Yay.
Its not a question of "if" but "when."
and whether he has enough liquidity to maintain his margin during absolutely insane market distortions by hedge funds, big banks, and the government.
And when it pops it will be a big bang in the entire global economy from what i heared and read.
I mean, the housing bubble burst and the government pulled 7 trillion out of its arse and handed it back to bankers, doubling the cost of current living from the knock-on inflation. Life went on, and not a single banker (except maybe some lackey in Iceland) was punished. The Rich got exceedingly wealthy after the crisis.
This time: the government will pull 50 trillion from its arse and hand it back to investors. Life will go on, no one will be punished, the cost of living will be a few times higher than what it is now, and the rich will get richer.
My interpretation: the big investors fully expect the bubble to burst and hope to win from the fallout/bailout. It's win-win for them.
I was wondering about the source for this figure. For the curious, it comes from a private report from an independent consulting firm in the UK called MacroStrategy Partnership. I found this article talking about it, dated 2025-10-3.
True Edit: which government are you talking about with "the government"?
Any. If it happened under Obama, it will most certainly happen under Trump
Thats quite the US centered perspective
I'm from the UK/Germany. The dollar is a worldwide currency with far reaching impact
Germany had the same financial crisis around that time with a 70 Mrd € bailout as I'm sure you remember
Nvidia down ~8% this week, Palantir down ~10%
Maybe the needle really is shifting.
Maybe, but he's also been super wrong a bunch of times on his skitzo twitter account so grains of salt and all that. Not saying the guy isn't smart, clearly called one of the biggest systemic crisis of our times, but he struck gold once and struck out a bunch more often.
Because it's more likely that he got lucky once and his short position was strong enough that he could keep paying the premiums than it is that he is some super genius who knew something noone else knew
I just phoned a business today that ended up with an "AI receptionist" when they didn't answer the phone.
They wanted to take my name down, asked who I was leaving a message for, and then recorded the message...
My god what a painful process that was. It was absolutely useless. Firstly it got my name wrong, and then the name of the person I was leaving the message for wrong. No "Janet" my name is not Don it's John, and no I'm not leaving a message for Kim Its for Kam. And then it needs to repeat your entire message back to you in order to make sure it didn't fuck it up which amazingly the message was probably 95% okay but it was a giant waste of my time when a FUCKIN VOICEMAIL WOULD HAVE SUFFICED
Had an issue with Comcast today. They forced me to use their Xfinity app, but what I needed to do wasn't an apparent option within the app. The only option I saw was a support chatbot. The chatbot listed a link to the option I was looking for. The link opened a webview within the Xfinity app, in which there was a link to download the Xfinity app.
Unnecessary Apps and chat bots. Two of my least favorite things referring me back and forth, forever, in an endless loop.
comcast is probably the worst cs, plus they always trying to pedal you shit.
Peddle but yes, they're monsters
Just like they intended.
an online store, for games used a fully AI agent as a CS, it was giving them the run around, till i kept asking about escalting it, finally it was able to either contact them shortly or through email.
I'm reading along and I'm im like, "yep that's dumb and that's dumb, and that's dumb. Yep that's dumb and that's dumb too."
Then I read the last 7 words and, "Oof.. yeah that is REALLY FUCKING DUMB"
Burry also lost money since 2008 making shorts like Tesla. The Big Shart.
Looks like very mixed returns. Which is what you'd expect from a strategy of betting on areas that are significantly overvalued.
The market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent
See Bill Ackerman and Herbalife.
Federal regulators should have shut that shit down ages ago, but the grifter party loves MLMs (look at how the DeVos family made their money…)
Oh god, I just saw another storefront in my local area that popped up. My coworker dragged me in there, and aside from the incredibly overpriced products, the countertops were loaded with pamphlets on doing the herbal life thing.
Ackerman and Valeant. He promised congress he was going to stop price gouging on drugs.
Nah.
Can investors remain irrational long enough for OpenAI to remain solvent?
They have been irrational longer than you've been an investor. They have become exceedingly efficient at it.
I mean, he is not wrong per se, he just had the wong timing.
With shorts timing is all that matters.
...what if he had the Jiang time?
I've got a problem with articles like this: "The guy who got it right once is betting a second time he's going to get it right". and then the article continues: "Even though he's got it wrong a bunch of times since, he got it right that one time... So this has gotta be his second time!!"
The odds of being right x times in a row must be really low, correct?
since his bet on the housing market he effectively lost money. all the public things he made can also be safety investments in case his secret hedgefund stuff he doesn't have to disclose fails.
i LOVE LOVE LOVE the thought of the AI Bubble popping... but i don't think this MF is the guy to trust
Yeah, my heart sank a little when I saw burry shorted, it was about the same time I opened a small short position. I am so screwed..
You sure about that?
This is in a category I'd like to call hopebait. People so badly wish things they feel are bad simply stopped themselves, that they'll upvote anything that appears to confirm this.
In this instance, there is nothing of substance in this article to suggest the end of anything is anywhere near in sight.
One guy, who makes bets constantly, made another bet.
Seriously the stock market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
People are idiots.
Is there a consensus there's an AI bubble? Sure?
Can anyone predict what will happen? LOfuckingL
Well yeah. Sam Altman just came out and basically said he needs a few trillion dollars and government backed loans. This shit is going to be BAD.
The simple fact that somebody was able even to bet a billion is insanity that should never be possible to begin with.
Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone have so much that you can just safely bet a billion dollars
Them he's betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we're okay with that shit.
All of this should be illegal as fuck, and this guy belongs in a jail cell
Why should someone not be able to short some stock? The AI bubble will burst anyway.
Also, he doesn't have one billion dollars, he manages an investment fund that people collectively put a billion dollars (or more) there.
Edit: Redacted a mistaken identity
I'm not sure you understand what this article is or how our markets work.
He doesn't have a billion dollars. He's a hedge fund manager that manages (at least) a billion dollars collectively of other people's investment money. Its that money he's betting.
No, he's not. He's betting against only two companies: Nvidia and Palantir. He has a relatively small bet against Nvidia ($187.6 million), and HUGE bet against Palantir ($912 million). I'm not sure I'd bet against Nvidia yet, but Palantir is co-founded by Peter Theil,
trump's deputy chief of staff which job has a large influence on White House policy. If you ever watched the TV show The West Wing, this would be the Josh Lyman character's job.We already know trump's favor swings widely and if politics are going against trump (as recent news show) then its not unbelievable that Theil might get the boot or at least trump would punish Theil by killing lucrative government contracts to buy Palantir services.
The point of shorting a stock exists so that the market can express a view that they believe a stock will fail. This is an important "canary in the coal mine" for the rest of the market. The other option is a policy that you can't criticize a company with any meaning and investors continue to put money into failing/risky companies without this important indication of the risk.
Frankly I don't like your idea of jailing someone that says "The emperor has no clothes".
I had to go check just to be sure, but you're confusing peter thiel, the boogeyman behind such lovely individuals as vance, with stephen miller, the boogeyman behind some of the worst of this administration's vile acts against anyone less white than banana pudding.
Yep, thanks for the fact check. Peter Theil is certainly a trump advisor helping shape policy but he doesn't hold an government office. I've corrected my post.
My money is on the American bubble popping. China would do just fine. As to Europe's? Probably not developed enough to seriously impact them, but probably able to fill America's void once the bubble action has died down. America is pretty fucked in general, so it isn't so much AI in particular, but rather a ghost economy.
Something based on imaginary stocks, grift, de-industrialization, ghost jobs and falsified labor statistics, likely mixed with a debased dollar, just doesn't bode well.
Most of the European digital infrastructure is caught in the web of Microsoft, and will be pulled down with it when Microsoft inevitably lose their bets on AI.
Europe should focus mlre on using mivrosoft, google and amazon (european) alternatives
Pulled down how? They will just keep using office or azure or whatever. No changes.
Seems to me that the Microsoft stock may drop 20% but otherwise, what consequences will it really have on European markets?
This is literally describes China, what are you even talking about?
It is a matter of degree. While China has issues, America's is much worse across the board.
You're an actual moron if you truly believe that.
Again, what are you even talking about? Literally everything you listed China is doing much worse in, not to mention other major issues like a demographic crises on top of everything else.
even if chinas AI doesnt work out, they probably do a slow deliberate fall, orchestrated by the ccp. much like they did with the evergrande ponzi scheme.
What a shitty take. Imagine betting on something with a poor human rights record and countless privacy violation. America may have it's faults, but it will get ironed out like it always does. I'm hoping for everybody's sake that China doesn't become the new global superpower. America has the soft power thing down to the t at least.
As for the other claims you made, source?
In my humble opinion Bush kind of fucked America up, but that is fixable.
Dude. I live in the US, and would like it to be a super-awesome place that genuinely leads the world in morality and prosperity.
Unfortunately, my nation has been going down the toilet. If you haven't noticed, things like ICE's raid on Hyundai, the undeclared war and crimes upon Venuzela, over 1,800 people disappeared from Alligator Alcatraz, Mike Johnson refusing to open congress, the SNAP denial, and other bouts of malicious stupidity are very bad signs for the future.
In any case, I don't like China, but it is likely to be a superpower for awhile until India or someone else takes the crown. The crown was America's to lose, and I am pretty sure we are losing it.
What does his height have to do with anything? Are we body shaming?
Huh. I understood that as "big player in shorting world"
You understood that part correctly, but misunderstood the joke
It's a movie title 'the big short' which tells the story about the housing market bubble crash
Yay, yet another once in a lifetime financial crisis.
Capitalism is the only way ;)
I may be wrong but i thought this guy was not at all a respected investor and only made 1 good trade. So his opinion is kinda worthless.
TBF, an investor could make a thousand good investments and I'd still regard their opinion as worthless (here's lookin' at you, Buffet.) Being "good" at figuring out which stocks and companies you can exploit the most from the actually productive economy doesn't make you smart or in anyway good.
I assume they meant opinions when it comes to investing not opinions in general.
A significant number of his best investments were based upon fuckery that the rest of us aren't really able to enact, so "spite buy entire companies" or whatever isn't really any sort of opinion I'd listen to, either.
My plan is to stay invested until dividends hit in December, and then I'm going to evaluate moving my investments into a money market or bonds. Amazon's numbers show that consumers are still buying, and my assumption is that consumer spending will hold off the pop for now.
I 100% expect a massive crash, and when it's just seven companies propping up an entire economy, the pop is going to be very bad. I'd rather lose a little value in the short term than have my portfolio drop to a calamitous degree and have to wait 5-10 years for it to recover.
*not a FA, just my personal plan
I stopped putting money into us equities and started to put them in purely international index funds. I havent sold anything though.
Yeah, this economy has given me the heebie-jeebies for the last quarter now.
Unless you're a billionaire or on a signal chat in Washington, I don't know how you can feel good about what's happening.
You think the US economy going totally tits up won't take the rest of the world with it to some degree?
I know, but i figure my lossrs will be more controlled and my recovery smoother
I'm waiting for my sweet 200 in tax returns and rolling it into scratch tickets.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
Mid-Cap index funds should be fairly insulated from the damage as well, given they would exclude companies as large as nVidia.
Either way, biggest thing people is when the bubble pops, that is the time to buy in more, not the time to sell. The buy high-sell low strategy is easy to fall into emotionally.
1000000%
That's the other side of my strategy, having my portfolio in cash means I can reinvest at the new fire sale prices.
I was able to pay off my student loans by buying oil stock at a 90% discount in March 2020 and then waiting a few years for the rebound. You don't even need to be rich to do it, just patient.
I wish I could convince SO to do this with our funds but they will just say im a doomsdayer
The good news is. Even if you don't change your strategy, you can just chill on index funds. When the bubble pops, they will go down, just keep buying more. In the long term, you will still make money. US index funds earn ~8% per year on average when invested for long periods of time.
Yeah, agreed. Just buy monthly a fixed amount of money in index funds. When it goes down, some people will double it.
I made the mistake of selling when covid hit and the market went down. I started buying again when the market was doing OK again. So I made two mistakes: sold low, bought high.
Oof, yeah. Having to make group decisions with money is tough.
Partly why I love being single and childless.
I can see that!
We will probably just ride it out
https://youtu.be/GVFgEBq0EKM
Market is so fake and manipulated that I no longer have any interest in investing in it. Like always for decades now it is a transfer to the wealthy system.
Whats the alternative?
I am just a plebe and have very little financial experience. No idea.
He knows which one is more likely to get really fucked in this bubble and it's not the shovel seller
Can we assume his puts aren't for 2026, but at least 2028 or later?
Something something irrational solvent something
One of the companies is making all the money and it's not Palantir.
I don't think you can buy puts that far out. The longest seems to be about 2 years, so I guess January 2027?
Has anyone else noticed the recent resurgence of mechanical turk jobs? It's all AI training work. Before the work was doing tasks directly. Now they have people training tailored AI models.
In other words the tech bros have found get another way to shoehorn themselves in as a middle man. Instead of having workers do the work itself. Now the work is delegated to AI. Which is trained to do the task by humans.
At first it said the LLM era was the end of mechanical turk work. It's going in a circle back to mechanical turks again.
There's an AI bubble?
I was pretty certain it was grifts all the way down lol
This is the most accurate take I have yet seen.
I'm thankfully OoL enough but I guarantee there are some AI backed crypto out there which is so deliciously awesome given the double down on smoke and mirrors.
I think it's all the way up in this case
I do think there is an AI bubble, but "guy who bets against things, bets against the latest thing"
It's like the dotcom bubble. Everyone got all excited thinking the internet would be the next big thing, change the world, revolutionize the way we do business. And it did. But not without a lot of hot air and snake oil getting sold along the way.
Not really comparable, maybe. This is more scam and less substance... There is no definition of "AI", is there? If you bring up the fundamental problems with genAI, they just pivot to expert systems. Classic scam artistry. They know they're selling hot air, promising digital workers that are already complete failures.
Of course computers will continue to be used in various ways ... Just like we've seen since 1951, right?
I can easily imagine having this conversation with someone in the late 90s, when there was so much excitement about the internet. If, as a skeptic, you were to ask me why the internet was really needed or why anyone would take the trouble to connect to it on a daily basis, I wouldn't have been able to give a complete and correct answer, not being able to predict the future with any accuracy.
But AI is already super useful as a tool for sifting through data, finding patterns and acting based on patterns. Its potential applications in medical diagnostics or surveillance (yes, I hate that too but it is what it is) are huge. People like to shit on LLMs but they do go beyond what search engines or scripts can do. But the real question is what AI will be in the next decade or so. And much like the internet in its early days, we can only guess at its future capabilities, how it will integrate with our lives, what will take off, and what is just a scam. Everyone is selling ideas that don't work yet but seem exciting. But just because it's inflated, oversold, and often untrustworthy, doesn't mean that AI as a whole is just a mirage. It will be huge, and change our world fundamentally. That said, I'm still shorting Palantir ;)
Those are the "expert systems' they were talking about. ML systems and not genAI. They are not the AI people mean when they use the word AI.
not a very tough bet to make tbh.
very misleading title and literally no commenters could even read the first paragraph here lol. Man the AI hate is truly reaching the looms now
are... you making that bet?
Nope can't be bothered with any gambling - life's too nice for crap like this.
If he needs a straight pin to pop it I can send him a couple
A billion dollar bet against a trillion dollar bubble. Cute.
That really depends on how much money he has.
I could t afford to bet nearly much against it but I would if the returns wouldn’t be enough to buy a soda.
I think it's a bubble but I'm also suspicious we're near peak investment and think it could sustain for a while yet. I wonder what sort of range he's projecting for the peak and timeframe
This is a long term investment, predicting that the bubble will burst _at some point _. It doesn't signify that he believes the collapse to be imminent. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent!
I don't follow the AI bubble trend at all. But I have been seeing alot of videos all of a sudden, popping up in my recommended talking about it. Who knows.
A few banks started issuing warnings, and some of the "biggest upcoming launches" were extremely underwhelming, like Sora 2 and GPT 5. Not only that, but the companies going all in on replacing workers with AI are still not showing a clear return on investment, so this combination is making people more aware about the bubble.
I just saw a TV commercial for a special series the local news is doing on traffic issues, and they used several quick background graphics, and at least one quick film clip that were obviously AI-generated.
You can argue over the appropriateness of AI, but most people would agree that it doesn't belong anywhere near a news broadcast. If you don't have footage, it is highly unethical to create footage to juice up your news reports.
It's only pervasive because the AI companies are losing money on every generated token while burning investor money to keep the lights on. If people had to pay for what it really costs they'd be using it a lot less.
I think you responded to the wrong comment.
I was responding to you finally noticing how pervasive it is getting.
It was relevant to your noticing how prevalent it is getting.
Now I most definitely don't want it to pop 🤣 moreso because the reality is the bubble popping doesn't hurt them it only hurts all the idiots who spent their meager earnings on this shit.
The rich never suffer, other than having to buy the smaller yacht.
It is a gamble for sure against innovation and a blind one too. I say this as it is clear right now that scaling up LLMs while very effective at substantially improving many AI metrics, it really did not have much impact on logic. I have been calling this the Cognitive Gap and it is really holding back AI.
Clearly the big LLM companies do not have a solution to this gap despite efforts like the reasoning models and that likely means we need an entirely different tech to front end LLMs or replace them.
This begs the question…who has a line of sight on how to scale up logic and the answer as near as I can tell is no one right now. Maybe there is something in a lab somewhere, or even with just a small team or individual, but it is not presently visible. It could come out any day now and make all those Data Center investments worthwhile or may take years before we see the Cognitive Gap close which will really make those same Data Centers completely out of alignment with the value they bring.
Shorting the AI industry is a roll of the dice, but less so than the blind investments still happening in Data Centres despite no clear path to improve logic and close the Cognitive Gap. In fact shorting seems like the safer bet.
Going to be interesting as if the Cognative Gap is not closed for years to come, those Data Center investments are never going to pay off as the value will just not be there. The entire USA economy is tied to AI it seems right now so the roll of the dice is perhaps the biggest risk / reward in history.
And even if they solve some problems with AI and make them smarter, they still have to solve the "actually making a profit" problem to justify these share prices. LLMs already have some use at their current level, but certainly not for the price they'd need to charge to break even, let alone actually making a profit. If they double the smarts but double the training and/or inference cost, they'll still end up in the same place.
I read a stat that if the true costs of AI was past onto users it would 42 times more expensive or something along those lines. Who know the right number, but it is obviously out of alignment with the value AI is able to bring today. Imagine instead of $20 / month it was $840 / month to just break even.
Funny thing is even that number would be based on all the people who can pay 20 but not 800. If it all has to be balanced by the users it would probably be an order of magnitude.... Or the market would play like it logically should and it would be like 3 companies paying a million a month. But what would they do with it? Sell it at a loss for like 20 per user and hope they figure out some way to make money :)
I don't like or trust the stock market and all of the back door manipulations that can, and have, been done, but this guy is not wrong.
Now if it never pops at least it's funny that he lost a bunch of money
Can’t wait.
I have been trying to make sense of all AI Capex announcements for a while and I don't get it. So please help me out if you know the answer.
US Investment in 2024 ~$400b, 2025 ~$500b, 2026
600. Global investment 2026 1.5$2.2t. Let's say $2t US Investment by end of 2026. Investment will continue into the future but let's assume that is not the case. Also that GPU will be obsolete in 5y. So, they have 60m to recoup $2t +ROI ~10%. So about $40b a month, US has a labor force of 170m. Thus, AI industry needs the equivalent of ~$240 per month per each employee. I don't see myself or my employer paying this for AI any time soon.They don't care about making profit by selling a product or a service, it's all a speculative bet. They think if they "simply" make AGI they will win all the economy forever, and that there is no second place.
I dont think the bubble will pop but I also dont think there will ever be agi from this.
This is primitive tech and cant do agi. We would need something completely different than language models.
I think Ray Dalio's take on it is correct. It's a consequence of currency devaluation, as people in general vote against the decrease in spending necessary to deflate the asset bubble. (1)
Predicting the random market movements is ... almost impossible, even for this "big short guy" imho.
Which would explain why the Fed is dumping trillions of dollars into banks right now.
Seems like more of a bet specifically on Palantir, unless there are a bunch of other smaller bets they didn't bother to mention.
of all the AI, thiel kept palintir, and his other LOTR-themed Ai companies very secretive. since mossad/IDF, and ukraine uses it, i bet it gives faulty/false positive targeting?
But as you said those are all secretive contracts. How would anyone know that kind of thing to bet against without some insider info?
Although I do think that there's a big AI bubble, the reality is that Pandora's box has already been opened, and it's not closing back up. The technology is here to stay and it will continue to be integrated into everyday life bubble or no bubble.
Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it's actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.
I don't see a future with big AI modrls like Meta AI, chatGPT, or Copilot going away those and others like them are used by people. But things like Meta's new all AI app or things of that nature as well as the tens of thousands of the empty startup AI companies are what's going to disappear. They're products that nobody wants or uses, and they're only there to inflate stock valuations. That's where the bubble lies. The tech is here to stay, but only in cases where it's actually used.
Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.
They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn't have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.
It was so over hyped from the beginning though. The broligarchs insisted as long as we fed it all of our data, and threw unlimited money at it, there was no way it wouldn't be a success. That's literally all America has been doing for nearly a year. They've forced it into every government department possible, even places where it clearly didn't belong. They've thrown billions at it, they allowed fucking 19 year old DOGE fuckwads to access hoards of sensitive data on every U.S. citizen, and stole every cent they could get their hands on. After all of that, how much has AI in the U.S. actually improved since January 19th, 2025?
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the technology itself. It really is exciting stuff that has a lot of useful applications. The issue has always been that the growth and development is driven by greed rather than realizing potential. With no government accountability or regulation and with the populace ignorant and apathetic, a bubble was bound to be the outcome
I agree, the potential for what AI could be is extraordinary.
The mess that the broligarchs/"technocratic elite" have created in the U.S. by insisting they be handed full control and be allowed to treat the entire country like their personal playground, has only proven exactly why oversight and regulations should exist and why monopolies shouldn't.
Lol well, wonder where he gets his information. Seems sus. I am familiar with who he is. Just curious what piece of information was the "tipping" point. People don't put money down like that unless they have insider knowledge, IMO.
Yeah they do though. His bet before the 2008 crash was similar. It's where the market is pointing. Publicly available data suggests there's a big ass bubble. The timing is essentially a bet. Last time it almost wiped him out because he was a bit early. We'll see how it goes this time.
I did a search on the internet for 'big ass bubble', and to my surprise the results had nothing to do with a.i.
Well he found out about the sub-prime mortgage fiasco by looking at the public filings that nobody bothers reading. All of the companies involved are public companies that have to file accounts. He'll be tracing what's going on and painting himself a picture.