The AI bubble could burst — and take the economy with it - The Boston Globe
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50104484
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/30/opinion/ai-bubble-economy-regulations/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.worksSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on sh.itjust.workshttps://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/30/opinion/ai-bubble-economy-regulations/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
125 replies
Yeah like the last umpteen times this has happened in my lifetime. We live in a society of greed, who knew it would be so unstable?
But this hype is real. Promise! Really real! Or the next one!
See entry level people believe it's fundamentals. Smarter people understand that it's reading people and knowing when they're dumb enough to invest and knowing when to bail before they wise up. So if you think about it in those respects, it is indeed an honest to goodness "real" thing. People are really being ripped off by con-artist.
But yeah, the days of the 1890s to 1930s of structured investment, measured risk, and mitigation of the unforeseen, those days are dead. There aren't market fundamentals outside of being able to identify rubes.
If that's the thing that kills the economy, the economy deserves to be killed
Which economy? The billionaire economy of the normies economy?
First one, then the other because it's only fair
ah, because the billionaires are going to suck the blood from the regular economy like a vampire to recover
Recover? No they buy low and double their take (or 100x or whatever the ratio is at this point).
We’re doing trillionaires now don’t forget. Even though Elon might not be anymore, there will be others unless we get our act together.
We will follow the billionaires into it economic hell. In solidarity of course.
Fuck, I wish we had a choice in this.
We could always make them feel like life is hell and death would be welcome, especially considering that they're doing it to us., and they. Do. Not. Care.
They can fuck all our pensions up for good and starve us. That’s what it took to start the French Revolution, this time it’s gonna be global though.
...you don't remember 2008, do you? Mass layoffs, small businesses closing in droves, difficulty getting loans, new grads unable to get adequate jobs for years (half the millennial cohort is still behind due to it)
No our federal government will spend billions to bail out whatever AI companies are favored by trump this week.
They prepare the too big to fail speech I think
Yeah, like we haven't been through multiple "generational" recessions.
At this point I feel like I've spent more time alive during recessions than not, so what's one more for the pile - especially if it means getting to watch the AI bros go bankrupt.
Saddle up, sea biscuit
It has always been either the economy crashing because the AI bubble pops, or the economy crashes because the bubble didn't pop due to AI successfully replacing enormous numbers of workers.
Or the economy crashes by AI replacing everyone and doing an absolute terrible job, causing stuff like supply chain collapse and communication/power outages.
I have yet to see someone explain how this whole thing actually works out. Just a dozen different scenarios that turn out terrible for almost everyone. The only scenario that works out is if a handful of people like Altman absolutely rule the world, become de facto dictators as they are the ones that control the few AI companies that run everything. And by work out, I mean it works out for that handful of people. For the rest of the world it's probably just about the worst case scenario. But you just know it's the scenario scammy Altman is hoping for.
It's not AI it's UBI. AI is going to happen. What was important was an orderly transition to UBI.
Oh? So there are hard numbers showing a positive ROI now?
Frankly, it looks like nobody making decisions is doing that based on numbers anymore, and if that's a case, it is definitely happening based on vibes.
Or not, if something new and shiny captures their attention before that.
That goalpost will soon switch to "well, this wasn't the real ai anyway"
That was always the real goalpost. Any claims otherwise were just fraudulent marketing
These LLMs are not the type of AI that's going to do the things they claim AI can do.
Yeah, when will people catch up on how they actually work (I'd put a "lol" here if it wasn't so sad).
UBI won’t work without LVT
What's LVT?
Let the dominoes fall.
Oh. Well.
It would be so funny that the economy crashes, making poor people poorer and rich people richer!
Because that is what happened in the past few crashes. So I'm not entirely sure when and where I should start laughing about this
in the past the rich got richer because the poor didn't understand who to blame.
sentiment towards the wealthy these days is far more volatile than it was in the 1930s.
And because we bailed out the rich.
And it will just happen again. If you think the poor will rise up or something like that, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Do not underestimate the US propaganda apparatus
at this point I couldn't care less if they do or not. humanity is fucked. we're in a downward spiral heading for the poop chute.
Not could. It's a mathematical certainty that it will. Barring a breakthrough miracle -- fat chance.
One day we shall reclaim the sullied em dash for ourselves once and for all!
It really feels like the options are:
An AI breakthrough has nothing to do with LLMs, it's like saying the auto industry will collapse except if there is an AI breakthrough that saves it.
That's what a breakthrough means. But obviously all the funding is burned up in more DCs with incremental iteration on the same design. So the bubble has to pop for real innovation. But I think this coming AI winter will be permanent, as things are very visibly falling apart.
Well yeah, but my statement is true anyways IMO. Deep neural networks are unchanged since the eighties I guess, and again IMO it's not they who need/can have a breakthrough, doubly especially since nobody seems to be working on anything else than "bigger datasets" and profiling and such.
That’s the point. AI was never meant to succeed. It’s a ransom. They are willing to kill the hostages so to speak.
I think that's kind of their idea. Be unsustainable and unprofitable, yet push to be on everything so the Goverment will bail them out.
The current everything bubble is too big to be bailed out. It will take down with it everything. Including the value of currency.
If this one bursting ends the USD status as Reserve Currency, that would be great.
Painful, but in the mid and long term great.
Yeah, Same here honestly
That’s why I bought gold and silver
I bet they're just running as fast as they can, not caring about which direction as long as they are "ahead".
I wonder if we will be able to get GPUs and RAM for reasonable prices afterwards.
I wonder if we'll be able to get food at reasonable prices afterwards
Asking the real questions...
Eh. I know how to hunt. I don't know how to manufacture GPUs and RAM.
Yeah wow hey maybe you should have fucking listened to everyone who’s been saying that for goddamn YEARS.
Too big to fail...again...
The 2008 bailout happened because it was the banking sector that was exposed. If the consumer banks fail, everybody's accounts go up in flames.
Part of getting that bailout was that the banks had to restructure to insulate commercial banking from investment banking. Supposedly the investment arm can now get taken out, and the damage to the commercial arm is limited. I'll believe that when I see it. The big question at the moment is "how exposed are the banks?".
Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic are all massively exposed. Nvidia and Microsoft might be big enough for a decimated version of themselves to come out the other side. Everyone else is going to the wall. No need to bail them out though. That's a contained explosion.
If the bank are making loans of hundreds of billions thinking they're sure fire money makers, but actually they're piles of shit, then it's 2008 again. That's when we see if they really protected the commercial arms of their banks.
Well, since all new protections from 2008 have already been shredded, what would you think?
If that's true in the US, then god help you. I know they still exist in the UK.
I don't have any money. Crash away. Fuck it.
Same with the GFC, 2007. I was broke, and did not even notice.
Yeah, some of us don’t have much money to begin with lol
I’ve put all my money in pogs so I should be ok.
Uhh, bottle caps are the future.
Nuka-cola is hard to come by here tho.
I've wondered ... are the bottlecaps radioactive?
How does that work out when you have a pocketful next to your nuts?
You joke, but you can buy it. Jones Soda makes it. That said, it's not worth buying except to keep the bottles as collectibles.
In-game, no they aren't radioactive. Most of the wasteland somehow isn't radioactive enough to set off a gieger counter. Yet a lot of the fresh meat and produce are radioactive. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
I quit drinking soda years ago as I got older and needed to cut shit that was making me fat.
I will (like every other year) occasionally have a Mountain Dew or a Sprite.
Soda is lovely stuff, but its definitely radioactive.
I'd try slurm. Once. Ain't putting the bottlecap next to my nuts tho.
Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.
This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.
You can have sex without worry!
About as radioactive as your pants.
World War 3 will keep it going!
I've heard World War 3 sucks. Can't wait for World War 4, hope they finally get all the bugs sorted out.
I hear that one's going digital only. We won't even own our own grenades anymore
No, actually, that's the one that's going to be fought with sticks and rocks (per Einstein)—either because technology has crashed and burned, or because those will be the only weapons anyone can own.
Pay the yearly subscription and save 30% on our SaaS (Stick as a Service)!
But after ww3, bugs are all that's left to eat!
Well yes, that's why we have to sort them out, count them and send them to the frontlines to feed our soldiers! Glorious victory will be ours!
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
Bob Dylan
Dylan has more good advice here, when it comes to bubbles you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!
I didn't know Bob Dylan was poor! /s
He was at one point in his life.
I thought I was going to learn something new, but he just seems to have done the regular job search that many artists do? He had a stable family with a house and so on, didn't live on the street or anything. Struggled the first year to get contracts for what I read but that's about it.
Yeah, I guess poor is over stating it. Not rich maybe.
I have hundreds of thousands of dollars to lose if the market pops lucky for time is on my side. This feels like the dot com bubble
The economy has not been good since the 70's and I wish economists would collectively pull their heads out of their asses and stop towing the line of the ones in charge.
What you or I experience is completely decoupled from the stock market, or the GDP, and has been forever.
As a person who is studying economics, I agree with you on this
It’s time for progressive socio economics
I can burst it quick if I invest in Nvidia and AMD.
AMD is an industry leader with a huge economic moat and I think they will be okay when the bubble pops. I'm not sure about Nvidia though, despite having superb chips, because the problem is they loaned to companies to buy their chips. So, Nvidia's finances will be strained because Jensen Huang created a ponzi scheme that could not repay or be profitable to itself.
Not really a ponzi, more like circular financing. Nvidia exposed itself to the AI bust for no reason other than to keep the money flowing to buy their chips for a little longer. They were selling shovels in a gold rush and screwed it up by letting people finance the shovels. They're not in the finance business, they're in the chip business.
nvidia gives a trillion dollars to AI, AI buys a trillion dollars of future, currently unmade video cards to run the AI, nvidia gives AI another trillion dollars, AI buys another trillion dollars of unmade future cards, etc etc etc.
Its the biggest, highest energy economic ouroborus I've ever seen.
I cant see how nvidia survives the pop, and quite frankly, I'd be glad to see nvidia die. its been dragging the GPU market in bad directions for a decade+ now and I think it'd be better to be free of its influence.. and it'd open the door to new players to step up and competition again.
I’m usually a rationalist but nothing can convince me that Sod’s Law isn’t somehow baked into the structure of the universe.
Sigh. Guess I'm gonna go read Ed Zitron's latest rant.
Haven't read it yet, no idea what he's on about today, but here's the link.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-more-you-buy-the-more-you-lose/
Well, two years ago he was kind of right. But not in the way he meant it. But I should have bought 64gb instead of 32gb RAM when I built my gaming system
For what? I have 64gb and have almost never utilized it all. Maybe if I used integrated graphics running modded factorio on a big map with all of the graphics overhauls.
Future, not present, requirements.
I rarely hit 16GB but to each their needs!
To sell the unused 32gb at a maybe profit?
The scumbags are getting better at making sure they end up rich when it happens. The only important thing from their point of view.
I am entirely disconnected from "the economy". Fuck AI and fuck the market. Tech cunts have it coming.
When the economy crashes, and it will, rich peoole won't suffer, they will enrich themselves even more. Its always the poor that suffer
So you don't go grocery shopping?
Did you know the economy has doubled every 20 years, with productivity alongside it, but the benefits don't show up for us down here?
We should have a 3/4 day workweek with cheap good food, early retirement etc etc but we don't.
And I'm saying this living in the EU.
And how does one become disconnected from 'the economy'?
Lying to yourself is a really good start, followed closely by not buying food or services like internet
What good will that be 'gainst the 20 stout men and their crossbows that will besiege you on the high road as you go to market on the Lord's Day?
So the top 7 companies hedged their entire futures on something unsustainable? In the last 12 months Oracle already laid off over 50,000 employees to bottom-line their AI goals (30,000 ish and 21,000ish a couple weeks ago).
Are we at the point of stocking up on materials and pulling $$ from banks for the inevitable collapse?
LFG
Well, ehm... Worldwide or "just" the US economy who build up on this shit the last year or so?
Not sure how the follow up impact will be on other countries, but first of, the US will be fucked
Not having to pay crazy security contract or having to pay extraordinary amount or use Chinese/open sources models
Listen, I work IT at a managed service provider, which means I see a dozen + small to medium business environments daily.
The number of users that I know of, out of the hundreds or thousands that I support, who are actively using "AI" continually to do their jobs... Well, I can likely count them on one hand
There's a bunch that use whatever free tool they are allowed to access. Which kind of flies under the radar for me, but I still don't think you're dealing with double-digit percentages of people using "AI" that actually spend any money on it.
And these are business users, who work at businesses with rather deep pockets at times....
People are not buying the product. "AI" in the business world, isn't making any money. So from what I've seen, this is less a matter of if, and more a matter of when and how bad.
As a tech person, I am not threatened by AI. It can't do my job. Also, I'm the one who fixes it when things go wrong. And the only thing I'm looking forward to is being able to pick up cheap RAM, and storage when this all comes crashing down as AI companies cash out and liquidate their inventory. Maybe I can pick up a cheap AI server and repurpose it to be a 3D/gaming virtual desktop, so when my friends come over with their cheap laptops and on board graphics for a LAN party, I can just provision them a virtual gaming computer and we can go ham.....
I'm going to save my sheckles until then...
I have limited experience with the market but I see it this way: anyone with AI holdings should liquidate at their earliest convenience. I don't think they'll be keeping up this charade for a lot longer. Anyone who has tech holdings, either cash out, or be prepared to have that money held up for a while because it will take a long time for the prices to recover, and unless you want to cash out at a loss, you're going to be holding for a long time. Everyone else, hold onto your butts. Probably everything will probably dip when the fecal matter hits the rotary air movement device. Non tech areas of the market should recover pretty quickly, so meh?
This is obvious to me that the whole thing has failed. That realization hasn't hit execs yet.
AI chips arnt usable for personal use though, they seem to be limited to be used by the AI datancenters and not your computers
Not strictly, there are usualy hurdles to overcome for home usage of datacentre tech, but it's possible.
An easy example that comes to mind is that the datacentre GPU's might have cooling configurations that rely on a large amount of airflow from the surrounding cabinet, which you'll get in a datacentre, but not so much in a personal tower.
Also, noise, in a datacentre, noise is much less of an issue than in a personal computer, so they can eschew noise reduction in favour of performance.
Many people that live near data-centres would disagree, but i mean strictly from a usage point of view, not a broader community perspective.
The hurdles are basically insurmountable with the hardware released after 2024.
The NVL72 for the Blackwell generation cost about $3 million and takes up a single server rack. The power consumption is about 130 kW, and most configurations require dedicated plumbing for the liquid cooling.
To put things in perspective, a residential electrical hookup is usually 50A or 100A for a house, with recommendations that anyone who is going to be charging electric cars should have 100A service. 100A at 240V is 24 kW.
So one server rack uses as much power as the maximum electrical capacity of 5 homes. You'll never be able to pull that off in an actual residential environment.
Oh, and the newest 2026 generation, the Rubin NVL72s, use something like 230 kW of electrical power, almost twice as much as the previous 2024 generation.
i was talking more of the prosumer and close to prosumer units that could theoretically be retrofitted or housed in homelabs.
If datacentres went down en-masse i'd assume there'd be mix of hardware generations there.
Damn though, i didn't know anything about the stuff you just mentioned, so my estimates of what could be available/usable are probably way off.
Now i have to go and do a deep dive, thanks.
some AI coprocessors, you're right. they can't be used.
Most of what nVidia is offering, while lacking display outputs, can still be used for gaming/VDI/vGPU use, and in general aren't particularly bad at it, usually quite the opposite. might take a bit of work to get them going, and nVidia hasn't made it easy with their whole licensing thing. Putting aside the challenges, it's usually possible to adapt their SXM datacenter GPU modules to work with more common frameworks like PCIe, and then utilize those as virtual GPUs in a virtual desktop. This is not dissimilar to what they're doing with the geforce now platform.
The big benefit of the chips is that they come with loads of memory, so cutting them up as a vGPU is actually a really optimal use-case. Most games are memory limited, which is to say they need more memory than most GPUs have, so the limit in performance is from the memory limitations, not the graphics processing limitations.
The AI processors that are GPU based, like almost everything that nvidia is using, can mostly be repurposed, but those that are ML-only, like AI coprocessors that show up in CPUs like the AI optimized CPUs from AMD and Intel, can't really be re-used, but they're usually not released as a standalone product. Those may still be able to perform physics processing offloads.... so maybe not useless? I'm not sure.
economy of paid subscriptions needs to die. ☑️
I agree, I deleted almost every app that has a subscription
If the apps have a pay once and buy once option then I keep and don’t delete
Please do. I'm tired of reading PKD novels, they're more fun happening IRL.
Ah, the weekly post with this title.
"Congress could legalize weed!" Yeah, but it don't.
could, you mean will. when that happens all those tech people in AI will likely be first to be laid off, the first signs would be the sudden evaporation of AI tech conferences in many hubs,. and all those catering companies, food companies that depend on these conferences is going to hurt too.
AI isn't going away just like dotcom companies didn't go away. They are in for a steep hair cut though and many companies will not survive.
This is going to be a mix of the 2000 Crash and the 2008 Crash.
You misspelled multiplication
Possibly even compounding, considering that there are more than just a Tech Stocks bubble and Realestate bubble at the moment (though those 2 are the largest) and any one blowing will probably cause the rest to blow.
On the "upside", the Tech Stocks bubble is mainly in the US and countries with semiconductors as a large fraction of their Economy, such as South Korea.
Yippee!
Sold everything with massive profit early July. Even if it doesn't crash, I'm happy.