Maybe, just maybe, the bubble started bursting now.
This reminds me of something that came up recently. Copilot started hallicinating quite a bit more than usual in Copilot reviews. That made me think about the cost of operarion. As they burn money like this, I won’t be surprised if they start decreasing inference quality to decrease cost per user. Which also means people relying on certain model behaviour for tasks could get nasty surprises. Especially within automation workflows where model outputs aren’t being reviewed.
IIRC, OpenAI lost $12b for all of 2024. CNBC reported that OpenAI restructuring this week, has MSFT not only with 27% equity stake, but a 20% royalty rate on revenue going forward which is certainly a nearly impossible hole for OpenAI to get out of.
OpenAI has published analytics on “suicide interactions” which proves that they mine their users data. Support for US military and Israel ensures that their mission is to destroy humanity, unless humanity pays it more to be more loyal to it. Everyone’s “don’t be evil” actually means “don’t be evil unless fascism pays more”
The Israel/US empire needs OpenAI to build ever bigger/more comprehensive models that are even more expensive to use than ChatGPT/Sora’s status as most expensive models. They need the analytics function to oppress population, and the empire is certain to side with OpenAI if it seeks revenue enhancement through theft of IP, including their users’ IP. It is dangerous for anyone to use OpenAI services because theft and oppression by empire condoned symbiosis is by design. But the race for ever larger more expensive models means trashing the previous generation models quickly, which means no time for ROI from development.
OpenAI will need massive military/government contracts to support its $1T in investment promises. All of those are to opppress Americans/humanity. Meanwhile, government has just sponsored 9 independent supercomputer projects, plu8s is dedicated to the MechaHitler vision of reality, and so OpenAI must commit to unrestrained evil in order to get their fair share of the oppression mission, and survive. Expect US government contracts to develop models for it, but with OpenAI profitting from government and private surveillance use.
apparently the bubble might not be as extreme as some people think because the major AI players are all being propped up by companies that actually produce revenues and profits
The problem is that the companies that actually produce revenues and profits are also in turn being propped up by AI.
Like Nividia which… Oh all based on AI revenue.
They’re the ones selling shovels in this gold rush, though.
And even though NVIDIA is better place as they do produce something, but the something in play has little value out of the AI bubble.
NVIDIA could be left holding the bag on a super increased capacity to produce something that nobody wants anymore (or at least nowhere near at the levels we have now) so they are still very much exposed.
This.
The Metaverse was a Multi-Billion dollar bubble. Did anything happen when it popped? No? Because the company behind it prints money.
What? there was no such thing a “bubble” around the Metaverse… (at least not the economic slang term “bubble”)
From the first video of the Zuck presenting the idea, everyone just laugh it off… Meta did waste tons of money on it but they had the money to burn so there was no bubble at all in play here
If I am rich and stupid, I may think a pool in the roof of my house is a great idea. I can spend the value of the house having it built and then have the house collapse on me. Since I am rich, I can just buy another house or pay to rebuild it and that’s the end… no bubble.
However, if I am pitching plans for pools on roofs… and millions of people buy into it, many of whom can barely afford my terrible plans, when the houses start collapsing, too many people will be left with no house or means to procure another one… that’s a bubble
such as?
You know if you invest all your winnings into all the companies that buy your stuff so that they can buy more of your stuff, you are actually not generating any winnings.
Hard to say, really. Yes, MS can absorb loss if the value of their stake in OpenAI goes to $0 overnight, but how much of their stock value is based on expectations that they can sell cloud compute for billions of dollars? And how many private and institutional investors have a stake in that?
Microsoft also lowered stake in OpenAI from 32.5% to 27%
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/the smaller the share, the smaller the quarterly losses. Other sources have included that MSFT now gets a 20% royalty on openAI revenue, but its not in that PR. It’s not clear why else MSFT share would have fallen.
is this $11,500,000,000 in real money or speculative money?
There is no difference anymore
Yes, lol.
You think it’s 11.5B worth of gold bars?
Catch yourself up on the discourse; you look like a fool.
You look like a blocked user.
Oh no!
Anyway…
So they “lost” $11.5B? Cool, I lost 20 bucks last week and still had to explain it to my accountant 🤭 Feels like the entire AI industry is built on “don’t worry, growth will save us”, but at some point someone has to pay the electricity bill…
It’s magic that will magically transform the world and make everybody rich and magically do our work for us. Like in Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
No, you don’t understand. Lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume!
AI is funded solely by sunk cost fallacy at this point. I wonder how long it will be before investments start getting pulled back because of a lack of ROI. I can already feel the sentiment towards AI and it getting pushed in everything turning negative amongst consumers recently.
Why do you think AI is pushed so hard?
Everyone is aware this has to be useful. Too much money.
Still the powers that be will do everything to avoid a hard crash, which would be so much earned.
AI is funded solely by sunk cost fallacy at this point.
and the us economy an gdp relies solely on ai make of that what you will.
Yeah, Trump will prop it up with tax dollars to prolong the inevitable. That’s the American way.
One of our biggest bookstores contracted with a local artist for some merch. That artist used AI with predictable results. Now everyone involved is getting raked over the coals for it.
No surprise, they just announced a 4th round of layoffs too. 😟
https://www.koin.com/news/portland/powells-layoffs-employees-10292025/
I wonder how long it will be before investments start getting pulled back because of a lack of ROI.
Just wait for the next hot thing to come out
Investment is done really to train models for ever more miniscule gains. I feel like the current choices are enough to satisfy who is interested in such services, and what really is lacking is now more hardware dedicated to single user sessions to improve quality of output with the current models.
But I really want to see more development on offline services, as right now it is really done only by hobbyists and only occasionally large companies with a little dripfeed (Facebook Llama, original Deepseek model [latter being pretty much useless as no one has the hardware to run it]).
I remember seeing the Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 (“the first AI phone”, unironic cit.) presentation and listening to them talking about all the AI features instead of the real phone capabilities. “All of this is offline, right? A powerful smartphone… makes sense to have local models for tasks.” but it later became abundantly clear it was just repackaged always-online Gemini for the entire presentation on $2000 of hardware.
more development on offline services
There is absolutely massive development on open weight models that can be used offline/privately. Minimax M2, most recent one, has comparable benchmark scores to the private US megatech models at 1/12th the cost, and at higher token throughput. Qwen, GLM, deepseek have comparable models to M2, and have smaller models more easily used on very modest hardware.
Closed megatech datacenter AI strategy is partnership with US government/military for oppressive control of humanity. Spending 12x more per token while empowering big tech/US empire to steal from and oppress you is not worth a small fraction in benchmark/quality improvement.
The problem is there is little continuous cash flow for on prem personal services. Look at Samsung’s home automation, its nearly all online features and when the internet is out you are SOL.
To have your own Github Copilot in a device the size and power usage of a Raspberry Pi would be amazing. But then they won’t get subscriptions.
I knew it was a bubble since Computex January 2024 when Derb8uer showed an “AI PC case”. He asked “What’s AI about this PC case?” and they replied that you could put an AI PC inside it.
You are talking more about the term here being used everywhere out of context.
I am talking about companies slapping “AI” on their products and systems and raising their value, in the same way that companies in the 90s slapped “dotcom” on their branding and raised their value.
They’re investing this much because they honestly seem to think they’re on the cusp of super intelligent AGI. They’re not, but they really seem to think they are, and that seems to justify these insane investments.
But all they’re really doing is the same thing as before but even bigger. It’s not going to work. It’s only going to make things even more expensive.
I use Copilot and Claude at work, and while it’s really impressive at what it can do, it’s also really stupid and requires a lot of hand holding. It’s not on the brink of AGI super intelligence. Not even close. Maybe we’ll get there some day, but not before all these companies are bankrupt.
The dot com bubble 2.0 is on the horizon
How many years did Uber go markiing a loss ? Amazon similarly.
this is not a bad analogy, but you are off by orders of magnitude
more importantly, both Uber and Amazon always had a path to profitability (Amazon specifically was already making tons of money on AWS long before the store front made money). AI has already been shown to not have a path to profitability; whatever little value companies around the world have been able to extract, cannot pay the cost of producing it.
think of it this way:
You produce a little car that can drive 2 people and some bags around, it costs you $1000 to make and you sell it for $3000 which a ton of people can afford… you have a path to profitability
I enter the market with a car that can carry 20 people, plus full on luggage for all and it moves twice as fast… but, in practice, I can only really move 3 people and often take them the wrong way, also the luggage was a complete lie and I can only allow passengers with their purses… also my car cost $50,000 to make so I would have to sell it for $70,000 and nobody would pay that when they could get 20 of your cars for less… also also, I promised the people making some parts of my car that would invest 7 kajillion on their companies somehow.
Which company would succeed? yours or mine?
Amazon didn’t make a profit, they didn’t lose 11Billion a quarter
When I lose $11 Billion dollars, I have to go to bed without supper.
If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.
The difference between 100 million and 11.5 billion is about 11 billion. If you own a bank 11 billion that’s not only that bank’s problem, it’s the economy’s problem.
It’s about 11.5 billion, really.
It’s exactly 11.4 billion, really.
Well, if you want to get exact, sure. But if we’re talking about half units, like 11 and a half billion, then 11.4 is so close to 11.5 there’s no difference and calling it just about 11 sorta implies that it’s a more significant difference IMO
So I wondered a bit how much it actually affects the economy.
“S&P 500” companies’ market cap is about 57 trillion dollars with a P/E ratio of about 30. So openai by itself is dragging down the total s&p 500 earnings by only about 0.5%. The bigger problem is that there are multiple companies like openAI, and a large chunk of the entire economy’s valuation is tied to the promise that all the AI companies will somehow become profitable sometime soon.
According to this article written in July, it’s a bit more dire than that if you take a step or two back. Basically, openai and their copycats/derivatives are being held up by investments from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who in turn are being held up by investments from Nvidia. If/when the whole chain collapses it’ll be more than 0.5% of earnings that disappear.
If OpenAI goes down then it will start a domino effect as people lose confidence in AI and AI companies. That’s how the bubble pops.
So it ALL depends on the definition of “soon”?
Probably
I was referring to the general concept behind the quote.
I originally want to post the OG (apocryphal?) variant:
Owe Your Banker £1,000 and You Are at His Mercy; Owe Him £1 Million and the Position Is Reversed
But it sounds rather quaint these days.
Partially, if OpenAI lose 11.5 billion, someone get 11.5 billion, the money is used to pay something it did not vanish in a cloud
12 billion in one quarter…. Holy fuck
What’s a few billion to a TRILLION company? That’s peanuts. Everything is fine fellow citizen.
I look forward to the AI bubble bursting, and billionaires looking shocked, ‘because there were no signs’
They won’t lose any money…
In contrast to the housing bubble, where a lot of the value was in overpriced houses sold to individuals, this overpricing is almost entirely in tech stocks, and tech stocks are almost entirely owned by by the wealthiest 10%, even 1%. The tech billionaires have limited ability to divest themselves of their own overpriced companies and absolutely will lose money.
None of them are going bankrupt, they’ll all be just fine when the market recovers in a few years, because that’s the nature of capitalism. A bunch of peons, who convinced themselves that the bubble-value of their 401k meant it was safe to retire, will suffer, will have to go back to work - if you’re not an oligarch, losing money is painful.
In contrast to the housing bubble, where a lot of the value was in overpriced houses sold to individuals,
was?
34% of single-family housing are now rented out. We’re not building enough housing, a fact that hasn’t changed since the housing bubble collapsed. So, a lack of investment in new property, large funds putting money into existing properties instead, and less risky homeowners overall means we don’t really have a housing bubble. We have a supply shortage, leading to high prices. The correction for that isn’t a crash.
What housing bubble are you referring to?
If you watched that movie, you would know that wasn’t a housing bubble, and it had nothing to do with pricing. It had to do with lenders selling mortgages to anyone who could fog a glass, knowing full well they wouldn’t be able to repay them.
They will be fine either way…
Hubble bubble S&P’s in trouble
But that’s what they wanted anyway, isn’t it?
Burning shitloads of money.
Waiting until they can later, finally, rule the world.
Yeah, the usual startup approach. Burn investor money to get into the market (or in this case create a market) by offering services below cost. Once they have enough users and their investors want their money back they’ll ramp up prices.
Problem is they are competing with cheap web services like deepseek and local free models. Those alternatives are gonna become more popular when chatgpt starts charging.
They are spending like crazy in the hope for some inovation that will give them an advantage that others can’t copy for cheap. That is a very difficult thing to accomplish. I bet they will fail. That money ain’t coming back.
I’ve been looking into local models lately, mostly out of vague paranoia that I should get one up and running before it becomes defacto illegal for normal people to own due to some kind of regulatory capture. Seems fairly doable at the moment though not particularly user friendly.
They’re OK. It’s kinda amazing how much lossy data can be compressed into a 12GB model. They don’t really start to get comparable to the large frontier models until 70B+ parameters, and you would need serious hardware to run those.
Remember when OpenAI launched Dall-E 2? You got a few tokens for free images and then had to pay for it. Presumably that was at least some reflection on the cost of producing the images.
Now you can create video for free and consumer expectations that generative AI should be super cheap have been set. That genie is not going to go easily back into the bottle.
I definitely think that was such a major blunder, but also it was probably done to make it a struggle to compete for smaller or starting companies.
