To parallel to The Big Short this is the point in the movie where folks realize it’s mathematically impossible for things to not implode and so players are quietly positioning themselves for that eventuality before things are allowed to blow.
It’s been a dramatic shift these last six months but everywhere I look now folks are quietly preparing their battle armor to survive what’s about to unfold.
The tech will stay, but the AI business landscape will have a market-cleansing forest fire.
There’s a whole generation in tech now that’s never seen what happens when a bubble like this unravels. I fully expect we’ll see the likes of offices just abandoned overnight with food still in the fridge as AI company after AI company just vaporizes.
It’s likely to be bumpy for all but stay the course with diversified strategy. The .com bust and 2008 are just blips and cheap buying opportunities for most folks with diversified portfolios and index funds. We’ll likely see similar messy markets for a while but the world will eventually recover and move on.
The ones that get truly wiped out are those with a lot of paper wealth now that implodes, but have little liquid wealth. These types go from “super rich” to can’t pay their bills almost overnight. Cash is king for times like those ahead so if you don’t have a lot of cash on hand, now is the time to secure that if you can.
There were lots of big guys that bet against the bubble, but bet too early and weren't able to keep up with margin calls etc.
So I expect more of a sobering process for AI companies rather than a blowup, simply because they all still will have cash in the bank and some have actual products with clients that make use of them.
The most straightforward thing to do that would have saved you in 2008, 2000 (and even 1929 to some extent), is to limit debt exposure and have enough cash sitting around so you don't have to sell your positions.
People who held (and invested more during the low points) did just fine. The people who got hurt the most were in a position where they had to sell (their 401k, their house etc) for a loss.
When a crash happens, it's a buyers market. In some ways it's a transfer of wealth to the top.
The problem is, timing the crash is impossible. Inflation chews into your cash portfolio, that could've been used to grow wealth.
Edit
There are of course more complex financial instruments. And they're interesting, but essentially amount to gambling. Holding short positions on sectors/companies is a zero sum game. As a retailer, you're betting against firms that have a lot of money and insider knowledge. Even if the thesis is correct, it has to be correct at the right moment.
* identify a bad AI stock at $100 today
* produce an ironclad 100% guaranteed proof the company's valuation will drop below $50 by the end of 2028
* buy a bunch of long-dated puts with a break-even of $75
* see the AI investment bubble visibly falling apart in let's say March 2027
and you still lose if OpenAI acquihires the team at $80 in an attempt to prop things up.
Microsoft can as well.
So Anthropic only has a few thousand people which is nothing and OpenAI has also only a few thousand.
A lot of people working at these companies would find a new job easily and probably making a shit ton of money anyway.
The broader AI companies do not have that much venture capital, not that many peple and potentially not even that high of risks.
Deepseek didn't do their funding round because they could'nt even get the compute if they wanted to. So they might be very lean.
And even investors for OpenAI and Anthropic might accept that they stop R&D and just keep the services up and running as they are cost effective.
The bigger problem will be the industry itself: If i'm 5x more productive, and generate now more costs on the business, they will reduce headcounts to compensate for it.
I'm not going to predict how this is going to turn out in either direction but this statement gives me pause. I don't think that's ever been true. Yes, the siren song is strong but initially most new tech is met with skepticism. Are we so quick to forget "the internet/computers are just a fad"-type thinking?
Yeah, we reject anything new and scary. Gotta wonder what the cavepeople made of the wheel.
Edit: still triggered by heliocentrism in 2026? OK then.
If you have the time, I recommend reading Pliny’s Natural History. I think it really shows how much more open-minded these people were than we give them credit for. They just didn’t have the technology we have.
Invoking “heliocentrism” is the HN version of “Ive already drawn you as the virgin and me as the Chad.”
But it's humorous that Sergey Brin has a company dedicated to bringing back zeppelins and that's a lot more fun than Zuck's doomsday bunker or Bezos's doomsday yacht.
They had a ton of fundamental problems despite seeming like a good idea at first. It was only after we started using them did we realize they weren’t actually as good of an idea as they seemed.
Unless if they take down the flat rate subs and you have to pay api prices, usage will drop a lot. Right now I freelance using gpt, if I had to pay api prices I'd probably lose 50% of the income, if not more, with the ~40% tax on top I might as well spend my time doing something else
To give you an example of model in this class, the DeepSeek V4 Flash preview is a 284B A13B model, with a native quantization mixing 4 bit and 8-bit values. You can easily run it on an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell (or 2) at a reasonable quant, especially if you offload the MoE weights to 48-64GB of system RAM. This costs US$11,800 at Microcenter right now, and it will work in any gaming box with decent cooling and a modern 1000W power supply. Over the lifetime of the card, an entire system would cost you under $4,000/year. Power is about 300W for the card (either a blower model, or a workstation model with the power cap), and another 150W or so for the rest of the server.
Or you could buy it on Open Router from dozens of different commodity vendors, starting around $0.09 per million tokens input, $0.18 per million tokens output. This is a competitive market price, so some of the providers might be losing money or reselling surplus capacity. But given the underlying hardware costs, the numbers are in the ballpark. In other words, if you're willing to settle for lower-quality tokens, you can get roughly Sonnet 4.5 for close to free, or as a modest capital expense for a successful freelancer. Halfway decent tokens are cheap, and you can generate them in-house!
Sure, and people can just build their own dropbox for like $250 too.
How many people will bother though
Or you could just take your credit card and spend $20 on credits at https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash. I'm not sure that I could manage to spend even a $1/day at those rates.
My larger point is that while frontier tokens are a near-monopoly and who knows what they really cost, many real-world workflows can be run using commodity tokens, or even served in-house by anyone who can afford to hire US or EU programmers. And if you're willing to settle for what would have been a state-of-the-art coding model in October 2025, commodity tokens are close to free.
I doubt opanai and anthropic will go that road
This is a little dicier in post-agent AI, because it's easier for casual users to automate power-user consumption, but the providers have done decently in discouraging that.
I don't think we have pushed LLMs to their limits already, its still progressing its still crazy good and its able to run even longer today than yesterday.
But researchers are already working on more architectures.
Investors for sure don't care about people. Replace Accenture with OpenAI and you replace 800k people immediadly.
Geoffrey Hinton said it in his Videos: a normal person costs A LOT of money to train, educate, onboard, keep etc. they forget things etc.
AGI you train once, teach once then clone and copy and just run it.
We even might already crossed the line were it is already more cost efective to train 1-5 frontier models something it doesn't know yet than teaching this to a 1000 humans.
No, there's is a way to stop it. As obvious counterexample: go all Butlerian Jihad: death sentence for anyone caught "making a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's doable with a few laws and treaties. I'm not saying that's the only way it could be stopped, it's just a way it could.
I'm fucking sick of TINA, especially with arguments from vigorous assertion.
Does anyone remember expert systems?
Heinlein in his book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress imagined that people in the future would find it worthwhile, even necessary, to learn an artifical language LogLan so they could talk with computers. LogLan (Logical Language) would be designed to be totally unambiguous, a necessity for speaking with a computer. He didn't imagine that we'd simply throw so much compute at the problem that we'd teach computers to understand our vague, mumbled natural languages in all their diversity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
Sadly this does not let you speak to computers, just other language nerds with a lot of time.
Maybe those older than me have been through this kind of thing before in 2008-2009 and in the early 2000s but the state of the IT job market in the last year or two has been really concerning to me. Anecdotally I’ve also heard it’s very tough for new graduates these days.
As an already slightly outdated senior dev in the UK rapidly approaching 50 and not wanting to touch generative AI / agentic dev… … I'm increasingly looking forward to waiting tables, being a hospital porter, or anything else away from tech!
I'm thinking that if I get out soon, I might beat most of the rush and be safely employed before many of the rest of you are forced down the same path.
[more than a little defeatist, yes, but I've be been unhappy in dev for years so for me the AI driven displacement is just the final nail rather than the main big new problem]
Just out of curiosity, do you have a specific objections to using the technology? I totally understand the burnout however (I'm rapidly approaching 50 myself).
I wish the SEC would start auditing claims about AI for job cuts, not sure if its within their ball park but there's people claiming this, when they have no receipts, and then stock goes up, if that's not market manipulation, I'm not sure what is.
And yet...
(Not saying AI helps with that yet.)
I am not calling you out personally here, but this comment bears many hallmarks of the "accelerationist disease": thinking in abstract models rather than in concrete terms; optimising for the fangs of capital rather than human beings, imaginary infinite bets that lead participants to nonsensical conclusions
If AI replaces all labor in two years, unemployment insurance and savings can comfortably carry me over the transitional period to universal income or obsolescence of money.
Should AI stagnate at the point where 70% of software engineering jobs are gone, I am going to have a problem.
Concretely, I imagine that I would need to learn other knowledge work. If AI can also perform it, I would have to go into blue collar work.
Not exactly true. If AI goes from 0 to 100 quickly (human level AGI in a few years), we will all lose our jobs together and will have to confront this fact. There is no ignoring such massive societal elephant in the room.
If instead AI improves slowly, lots of people will lose their jobs, but majority will not. Those still with jobs may not be persuaded by the sizable jobless minority to support any societal changes, since they are still OK. This means the jobless will be screwed.
Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help
Accelerationists want to see their jobs go up in smoke because they think that if enough white collar workers are impoverished, everyone who was formerly poorer than them, will chip in to rescue us
Just like they didn't in 1985...
In a context where the state already has less tax revenue due to mass unemployment! It's completely bananas thinking that only survives on internet brainrot forums
Human-level AGI is by definition able to take away all human jobs.
> Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help
There is a massive difference between 20-30% of people in a country being unemployed (historical sector-wide collapses), and 80-100% of people in a country being unemployed (human-level AGI unemployment). The second situation is completely historically unprecedented and will *not* lead to the same results.
> In a context where the state already has less tax revenue due to mass unemployment!
If human-level AGI is an actual reality, taxation (and money itself) is no longer relevant. Only energy and resources may still matter.
You are in denial. If you don’t like this the answer was what the Unabomber proposed the whole time.
The Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) killed 3 people and injured 23 others across 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995
It's absolutely incredible to see this talked about as a "reasonable" position on AI taking jobs.
edit: updated as it is not clear if Mosura is being serious or exaggerating for rhetoric
You cannot stop the advancement of technology towards AI without the threat of violence towards those that pursue technology. The Unabomber was at least honest about that.
> edit: updated as it is not clear if Mosura is being serious or exaggerating for rhetoric
You are the HN manifestation of that woman’s face when interviewing Sydney Sweeney.
If humans are machines executing on some medium eventually it will be possible to emulate them on some other medium. Believing otherwise requires some essentially religious convictions on the existence of the soul or similar.
The only reason to emulate human intelligence is to capture it, exploit it, and reduce the negotiating power of those who have it naturally. Anyone who wants this is not a friend of human beings
This could not be further from the truth.
Creating a new educated, competent human takes ~25 years, and significant costs and resources.
AGI can be just copy-pasted at essentially no cost. Even a robot that is mass-produced for tens of thousands of dollars is still much less expensive and takes much less time to make than a competent human.
> Creating new humans is easy
If you did a survey I suspect agreement with this statement would be rather bimodal.
My doubt has nothing to do with religion.
I believe we'll never be able to harness the amount of technology required to replicate human intelligence.
We already have disruptions in Software engineering, image generation, video generation, etc.
Humans might not like AI, Companies do and with Claude we are no longer sitting on the right side, if a Product manager tells a Boss that the PM now can do also code, the boss will listen.
But we will see other effects in the next 5-15 years: population pyramid is crashing which will increase demand for people. We already have high demand for other jobs.
so i can see a transition for a lot of white collar workers to blue collar workers which will continue the disruption for everyone.
Then the robots come along and AI integration is done and we will have a real issue on our hand. When will this come? No clue i don't think its unrealistic to expeirernece this in my lifetime.
Junior programmers will be in demand again. Someone will have to fix the mountains of vibe coded technical debt.
Uber's a poor example because it did IPO in 2019 and its stocks are up around 75% since then.
> Increasing Corporate Skepticism: The news is full of stories of corporations that are throttling the employee use of AI since the costs to use the software are a lot higher than expected.
Real AI spend is out of control, with the news is full of stories about corporations trying to keep a lid on it, but also real AI spending is low and concentrated to a few firms.
I don't know. This doesn't feel very coherent to me, but rather like a collection of assertions that are adopted because they individually say something bearish about the industry.
Certainly some investments will have been overreaches, but I find it pretty unlikely that any of the compute build-out to date is going to be left sitting idle one or two or five years from now.
It’s not the same people doing both.
Also, cheaper RAM would be nice.
> The news is full of stories of corporations that are throttling the employee use of AI since the costs to use the software are a lot higher than expected
is not something I've seen. News is not "full of stories" of this behaviour. There are a few anecdotal stories here and there.
Let’s argue about SQL vs NoSQL again. I miss that.
https://startupfortune.com/cursors-ai-agents-rebuilt-sqlite-...
For example:
- Anthropic makes a profit right now and is seemingly on an exponential upward trajectory, so the debt being too much for it doesn't seem compelling to me.
- AI technology continues to get better exponentially and doesn't have any clear sign this trend is flattening. If anything, it's accelerating. So it's plausible the investor value is legitimate for these companies given the massive potential for continued profitability.
- I would say markets are typically very good predictors of the future. Many sophisticated investors know about the case for the future crash and are still buying at these valuations.
I am open to being wrong, but the assessment in the blog seems one-sided to me.
Polymarket currently puts the chance of such a downturn at 20% by December 2026. Seems like most people would put higher chances here, but I'm not convinced by the arguments. (https://polymarket.com/event/ai-bubble-burst-by)
- if every autonomous self-driving car is going to need some sort of edge AI data center nearby (for instantaneous exceptional incident handling)
- if every household robot is going to need some sort of edge AI data center nearby (for instantaneous exceptional incident handling)
- if there are going to be millions of self-driving cars and autonomous robots joining us in the next decade
...then we will need lots more semi-conductor chips, and data centers in lots more places, in the next decade.
But those silver boxes at the side of the road? Might see many more of those, and much larger, maybe red hot on top
They will release MacBook Pro M10 or whatever that can comfortably run Opus5 levels of performance local model for software development/general ai that is baked in the MacOS for 7k USD.
I often see developers giddy about the idea of AI being a bubble and waiting for the crash, but I suspect this event could actually be particularly terrible for us.
https://www.advisorpedia.com/media/media/2026/02/23/trailing...
Somehow we've managed to turn software from a machine for printing money to a machine for setting it on fire.
People say the AI bubble will burst, and I also think it will. But I want to think about how it might differ from other bubbles.
One positive factor is that during the internet startup era, there was almost no revenue. But now, big tech companies are generating profits and can absorb AI-scale losses.
The dot-com bubble burst, but the internet ended up being far more valuable than the bubble itself. I think the value was priced in early, and AI will be similar.
The core issue is always the same: there's a bubble and there are warnings, but you never know when it will collapse. And the people who act first on the warnings have to give up on the upside. The only winners are those who sell everything just before the crash. The problem is knowing when that moment is.
One difference from the dot-com bubble is that after it burst, a second wave of entrepreneurs leveraged the cheap telecom infrastructure that was left behind. So after the AI bubble bursts, will OpenAI and Anthropic fall and new companies emerge? I'm skeptical about that. Something feels different this time.
My biggest concern, though, is that if I suddenly couldn't use AI anymore, I'm worried about how long it would take to recover the coding skills I've lost after nearly a year of barely hand-coding. AI has become too deeply embedded in my life
I'm already on it, man, don't need to convince me!
The US produces stuff, and it produces ideas. Yeah, it imports a lot of stuff too. But it exports things like food, movies, and software.
Without AI, the financial sector may take a huge hit. But the US economy? It will still be here, still producing things that are valuable.
If you haven't noticed it's because you've stayed too close to the homeland.
The US is in a position where they have to debase the dollar all the way to zero and the Japan carry trade will slowly unwind for the worst as soon as the Bank of Japan (BOJ) begins to increase rates in more than 30 years.
Someone has to pay for all the trillions of dollars of debt for the data center build out that is being hidden from the balance sheets of the big tech companies.
The US has lost its appeal as a hegemon. Constantly threatening allies with invasion isn't helping either.
It's lost those titles when it started behaving that way.
So its cleaning the house of parasites o clock.
All four frontier models contracted with the Pentagon. Claude already having been involved in Operation Abduct Sitting President & Use Active Denial Systems to Make People Vomit and Shit Themselves 'because'. Institutional and corporate capture . Foreign nations now having our models trained to facilitate tailored political orientation. And the fact that these systems, for all their limitations perennially bewailed, have tremendous capacity as force multipliers for all the things civil rights activists were previously terrified about apparently just before all our problems were magically solved.
Snowden docs x³
Things that once took fusion centers, thinktanks, research, etc and thousands of manual processing hours -- now real-time, instant, with real-time 'understanding'.
I think the AI crash will be primarily comprised of collectively lamenting all the obvious things we overlooked.
And with great irony, the only competitor (or savior) to total US asymmetric top-down domination is China. Or wait, I think I got that backward... https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...
