AI bubble could burst and take global economy with it, IMF warns
AI investment has helped keep markets and economic growth ticking along, but the IMF fears the boom could quickly turn to bust if the promised profits fail to materialize. With tech giants borrowing billions and investors piling into the same handful of companies, a selloff could leave more than just Silicon Valley nursing a hangover.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/13/ai-bubble-could-burst-and-take-global-economy-with-it-imf-warns/5302781Open linkView original on reddthat.com
92 replies
Been doomsday-prepped since 10 years ago. Expecting the worst at anytime.
I am using chatgpt without paying them. I'm doing my part to waste their resources! When AI finally stops being shoved down my throat, it'll be a good day.
You think they aren’t harvesting your data for advertising?
And even if you are somehow anonymized, any usage to juice their numbers is what they want.
If you want to stick it to ChatGPT, use their competition. GLM, Xiaomi, Deepseek, Mistral, Nemotron, whatever;their absolute deepest fear is the public pivoting to actually free models. And you can use them with whatever level of privacy you wish, since you aren’t locked to vendors.
I mean, we could also just not have AI at all. I dunno what point you're trying to make, but it's not landing. I am extremely anti-AI, and I want it to just go away. But, guess what, it isn't, and they will keep shoving it down our throats until the AI bubble bursts and they take the global economy with it.
@NocturnalMorning @brucethemoose How can you be "extremely anti-"AI" and still use a LLM?
There is no right life in the wrong one. Theodor W. Adorno
There is no ethical use of "AI"
Oh boy, another, you want to improve society, and yet you participate in it argument. Gee, how original. I understand what you are trying ti get at, but you aren't going to win any friends going around telling everyone they are evil for using a tool that is being shoved down all of societies throat.
Hell, my work has an internal AI tool, and I refuse to use it. Are you happy? Probably not.
Then why not use Reddit, too?
...But you're already on Lemmy.
No one is making you use ChatGPT; there are free alternatives every direction you look. This is not a 'participating in society' argument, it's a really low-effort choice, far lower effort than choosing to use the Fediverse.
@NocturnalMorning It's not about winning you as friend. It is your free choice using Chat GPT or other "tools" as you call them mad by antidemocratic transhumanistic Tech Oligarchs.
Do you just go around trolling people everywhere you go, or are you incapable of having a discussion with people without insulting them or someone else in the process? You're preaching to the choir anyway...
@NocturnalMorning Call it trolling if it makes you feel better but knowing about the negative effects doesn't make it better.
The whole AI bubble is just one big bet: "AGI is around the corner and will replace all white collar jobs"
Now, LLMs get slowly better but aren't AGI and it's unclear if our current approach is even capable of reaching AGI.
Sadly the US went 'all-in' on the bet and everyone except the ultra rich will feel the pain.
They know climate change will take down capitalism. They are hoping for AGI to save them.
The lack of progress is one thing.
The value for money is another: AI companies are still burning through vast sums of capital, while users are indeed using the products more and more... but still nowhere near at a price that would even cover the companies’ costs, let alone be profitable. If each token costs a few dollars, demand is likely to shrink significantly again... because as long as the systems operate stochastically and, logically, produce erroneous results, it may take a very large number of tokens to obtain a result that’s actually usable (this is especially true when using AI to replace workers whose tasks and skills you actually have no clue about).
So even if the bet materializes, we lose. If it doesn't, we also lose because the economy implodes. Fun times.
Best thing about this whole AI bubble is that the mask is off and everyone can see. The rich will dump us in a instant.
AGI will never happen with LLMs, but if you think in terms of a human brain out can be effective language and output and image recognition module. But there's no there there. Something else entirely is needed for true thought and sentience. But llm ai is already sufficient to translate machine thought into language sentences. You just need the spark of life that can actually think for itself.
I know it's probably not intentional but you make it sound as if "just putting a spark of life" into the machine is easy
No, the spark of life implies something magical or unknown that you can't make. Like a human can never make a spark on their own, you need something from the outside to make it or happen.
like god? \s
It may be easy. The issue is that nobody knows what that even means.
please.
Burn it all down!
If so, the technobros did this. The technobros should receive most of the consequences. There should be dire consequences but we all know who will receive most of that. The system is broken.
in a sane world. in this world, where the system is working as intended, tech bros will reap rewards at our expense. hopefully the working class response will be of a scale commensurate with the scale of the injustice.
I'll stand with you! ✊
Sorry. The techbros will get bailouts. Its the pensioners that will starve.
It's the pensioners who made most of the money from NVDA and MU price graphs going vertical anyway. Friendly reminder that people over 55 own 73% of the US, much of it via index fund based retirement funds and such. Isolating just the boomers, they own 8x more wealth than billionaires (though there's a fair bit of overlap of course, with a lot of billionaires themselves being boomers). Total over 50% of the US (including everything from cash to real estate to stocks) is owned JUST by the boomer generation.
Which is not to say the techbros aren't the problem, but in absolute dollar amounts, they're not actually the biggest beneficiaries - only per person did they make more money off this. Not as a class.
That's why the techbros made sure to buy the politicians.
This will be like 208-2012 but this time around it's the techbros businesses which will be deemed "Too big to fail" and get saved with public money and the central bank printing money to buy their bonds, whilst everybody else pays for it with Austerity.
Remembet that they don't have the money to do it. It's also investors to blame.
Oh absolutely, investors doing no due diligence on their part is complicity.
*Techbros
Techno-bros raving at the club
you will have to dish out those consequences otherwise it won't happen.
What profits? Nobody has money to spend and llm companies lose money on $200/mo subscriptions.
They lose money on those $200 a month subscriptions, but e.g Anthropic won't let you use the sub outside of Claude Code, so for anything that would use their API, $200 gets you less usage than one 5-hour session of that subscription.
Which doesn't stop them from losing a bunch of money to training though
"Greedy shitbag tech bros pushed it. Greedy shitbag investors threw every penny at it. So whoops, the whole world is held hostage. Sorry fuckos, you, John and Jane public, are going to pay to save the global economy. Greedy fucksticks aren't allowed to lose."
...can't wait.
Yeah the "business" tycoons do that every decade or so. Some busts are bigger than others. Not much any of us can do about it unless we tax the hell out of corps and wealthy so that they can't build enough self serving shit to then dump the economy once they've scraped as much money as they can in the current cycle.
I'm convinced at this point the goal is to just not use money. Why do we have to be tied to this shitty fiat currency that isn't directly tied to physical worth?
Yep, that's the point at which people will recommend gold (which I've never trusted, either) or real estate so you're not homeless when everything goes poof.
Burn it all down!!! Shits not sustainable nor stable for 90% of the world population!!! Burn it all down, tech dweebs!
It’s not just sustainability. Dicks who think they can rule the world need a reminder of thier mortality.
I hope AI dies with a wheeze and a babble of nonsensical output that leaves the pseudoscientific and influencer crowd poring over it looking for meaning in it for decades.
Buffett Index: total stock valuation vs. GDP
1928: 130%
2007: 130%
2025: 220%
Now guess where most of that stock growth and GDP came from? I'll give ya three guesses, but you're only going to need one.
Propane and propane accessories?
unexpectedly good churro sales?
The Legend of the Whopperito™?
I can't believe it's not salsa?
don't stop, i'm so close
If they were at all serious about AGI there would be less focus on ever-improving the dead end of LLMs on that. They just want employers to think they can pay robots less than their workers, full stop.
The impossible mission force?! What are they doing making public statements?
They've been comprised. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to infiltrate the IMF and remove compromised agents by any means necessary. If you are captured or killed the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck. This message will self-destruct in 5....
Gigo
good
if an oppressive corrupt regime is purposely hampering social progress for billions of people, not only should it fail, it should fail globally on a scale that resets global economies by centuries.
Yea, good. Billions of people should starve so a couple of wealthy people lose a bit of money but not enough to need to sell their yachts. Let's blow up the global economy!
ah, a centrist!
tell me. how many people will die from malnutrition and neglect when the human race is enslaved by a ruling class that only cares about increasing profits over social programs?
how many people will die when the environment crumbles and it's impossible to grow crops or support livestock without the power held by a ruling class?
tell me. how many people are you willing to sacrifice to ensure economic stability continues?
Could????
Find out by tuning into the next season of The Economy!
COVID took the global economy with it.
Losing AI would be like... I don't even know, insignificantly small compared to that.
If AI up and disappeared tomorrow when I clocked into work, it might actually make my job easier. I could be even more productive without having the slop floodgates open every day.
The problem is not the "losing of AI", it's the loss of human and physical resources that went into AI and will ultimatelly yield little or no Economic value when they could have been gone into productive Economic activities.
The human part is similar to COVID - people's time that could have been used in Economically productive activities was lost and will never come back - however the AI bubble differs in that actual physical resources have been wasted (mainly building and equiping datacenters) whilst during COVID fewer physical resources were used (mainly in vaccines and PPE).
Also the AI bubble is mostly concentrated in the US, whilst COVID was global, which means that the damage of it blowing up will probably be worse in the US, whilst that of COVID was much more diffused.
But the really big things is not even the AI bubble blowing up per-se - it's that there are other bubbles which are ready to blow (such as realestate Worldwide and auto-loans in the US) plus a worldwide Oil crisis caused by America's war against Iran, so the Economic shock of the AI bubble blowing will be amplified by the latter and will likely make the former blow up, almost certainly adding up to even more damage that the 2000 and 2008 Crashes (possibly as much as both put together).
COVID was a slowdown of Economic productivity, this shit will probably be the Find Out stages all on top of each other of years of Fuck Around misallocating resources in multiple Economic domains.
The new pseudoscience taking out the incumbent pseudoscience is the net zero we need.
thats rich coming from the IMF.
The economy as it stands is a house of cards built on promises no one keeps but enough people believe.
I have never claimed to be an expert on anything but the moment you let the fate of something rest on the guess of how much it will cost if everything goes the way you think it will, when the other half of the room hope it goes the other way seems mad.
Good.
No shit, Sherlock!
DUH. The Great Depression of 1929, and it took the world economy, and it fomented into World War.
Then we riot.
Don't worry, they'll use your taxes to make it profitable. Then, when AI can do your job by being trained by your data, they'll fire you and throw you to the curb and suddenly start talking about sustainability and the issue of overpopulation.
Yeah, well I warned them, but did they listen?
If profits are what will make it fail. It is going to fail. They need everyone to subscribe to their premium tiers at this point.
Wouldn’t matter. The cost to execute the tokens is greater than the subscription. It’s all VC funds that they’re burning every day. It’s inevitable to fail unless they can convince every day users to pay $2k a month
I'd pay them 2k a month for every month they pay me 10k for. Ofc I need to be paid first because otherwise I won't have the money to pay them and still comfortably live.
No that’s kinda the point. If AI charged for actual cost, no one could afford it. It’s all subsidized now. Basically a money shredder
I know, I was making fun of them by suggesting a "give me your money and then I'll give you some of my money"-circlejerk because that can never be sustainable in the long run.
API costs start to approach the operating costs of these systems. The ultra premium subscription tiers still lose money.
Tech has high market value because there’s the potential for growth, and the cost to grow is minimal after the initial startup costs. Adding a subscriber to a newspaper costs, say $0.20 for each subscriber; adding a Facebook user has a cost approaching zero as the user count grows. The problem with GenAI is that the inference cost grows linearly with usage, and the constant creation of new models means the training costs are also not recouped.
The debt the datacenter builders are taking on are being traded as junk with high interest rates already, and they’re going higher. They’ll never generate the income that the rates demand much less recoup the cost of building.
probably even slightly more than linear at this point as they use up so much electricity and other resources that it becomes more and more expensive to serve more users. User 1 is easy, that's just the existing data center. User 1 million, well, you need a new datacenter and drive up hardware prices, but it's fine. User 10 million, you need to build/rent gas power plants, figure out where to get water from, RAM and everything costs 5 times as much as it used to, bribe local politicians to build despite backlash etc.
The economy isnt going anywhere its just going into a recession again, nothing you havent seen before if you were born before the Bush administration.
So, if it takes the global economy away then you could still eat an apple but there would be no price tag attached. Money has always been a middle-man of questionable and ever-changing value.
It's not taking the global economy away in that sense.
It'll blow up the global economy in that a lot of people will be unemployed and everyone's retirement funds will crash (which is fair, because AI is what made them go up so fast in the first place). A few rich people will also lose a bunch of money, but the clever ones will actually profit off it.
Let's hope so!
let it pop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zUUtf7gOe8
If the thing we call an economy no longer becomes sustainable, maybe going to QUD mechanics of trade or going back to bartering might become a thing.
Live and drink, friend!
Okay just wake me up when UBI starts.
🤞🤞🤞
That would be awful, we must save them and give all our money to their wonderful project. We will sacrifice ourselves and live in the woods while they improve their drunk chatbot that should cure cancer any minute now.
Live in the woods?! Are you crazy, you need to work so you can pay taxes that will become their bailout!
You can go
starvelive in the woods when AI can do your job after stealing your data./s mandatory
TBH I don't see how it could take anything with it. The money invested will still exist except for interest on loans and unrealized gains which don't actually exist because of overvaluation.
This isnt like the mortgage crisis. Anybody who gets fucked over by this crash deserves it.
In fact, the longer this is allowed to go on without crashing the more money people like Jason Huang siphons from pensions.
2 exceptions to what you said.
The money loaned still exists, you're right. Trouble is it's not in the AI companies anymore. It's been spent. It's gone through them out to other companies (like Nvidia, MS Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc).
Good
It won’t. Bubbles don’t burst.