Why You Should Expect an AI Crash(www.economist.com)
59 pointsby toomuchtodoan hour ago9 comments
  • rooftopzen15 minutes ago
    Circular financing, without regard to technical limitations. We've known about this for a few years. Old news.

    AI hype organizations like Latent Space (+ others) ban people who disrespect any aspect of AI today, and articles like this get buried.

    • layer83 minutes ago
      Isn’t it what they call Recursive Self-Investment?
    • mattbrewsbytes7 minutes ago
      Circular financing and various forms of booking sales ahead of or for future delivery are things that have caught up with other companies in the past and/or were straight-up SEC violations. Enron is an example.

      Does Jensen's replacement have the industry connections, clout (or bully factor depending on perspective) and appetite to continue the circular financing? Its the CFO I think that is replacing him and they may have objected to these things all along and might have been over-ruled.

    • hiddenvulkcan12 minutes ago
      Yeah doesn't seem like news. More of a case of when than if.
      • robot_jesus9 minutes ago
        In the words of Keynes, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

        A crash (or at least notable correction) is coming but I sure as hell couldn’t time when.

        • janalsncm7 minutes ago
          Yeah, and also the similar quote that being early is just as bad as being wrong.
          • koolba3 minutes ago
            Could be worse when near term cash is paying 5% and TIPS are paying 2.5-3%.

            As they say, when you’ve won the game, it’s best to stop playing.

    • janalsncm8 minutes ago
      HN has been talking about a crash for almost as long as Dario has been saying white collar jobs will be gone in 6 months and Sam has been saying they’re 6 months away from AGI.

      At this point we may literally get commercial nuclear fusion power (which has been “30 years away” for the last 60 years) before any of the other things happen.

    • aleqs6 minutes ago
      hey c'mon, there's no need for that kind of language. it's called 'recursive financing'
  • 9 minutes ago
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  • zmmmmm9 minutes ago
    Well, now the CFO is in charge of nVidia we may see some problems.

    Because while a founder CEO can play fast and loose with gray finance rules, I don't expect an appointed CFO can do the same. At least not one that expects to work again if they are found liable for it. It is kind of interesting in this way that the board has made this choice. It almost says they are looking to insulate against some liability here.

    • ajrossa minute ago
      The more cynical framing, especially on this site, is that the "Founder CEO" has a presumptive immunity from prosecution for banal stuff like bookeeping. They aren't perceived as beholden to the shareholders in the same way, because we in the peanut gallery think they "own" the company more than mere investors do.

      But obviously no, in the real world fraud is fraud and if you get caught cooking books with other people's money you go to jail.

  • what22 minutes ago
    Anyone got a gift link or archive?
  • uptrails20 minutes ago
    I wake up, I read articles about how the AI crash is coming. I figure that it's not actually coming because everyone is talking about it, so it's priced in.

    And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop, so I figure that the crash must be coming because there's too much optimism.

    I go to sleep. Then I wake up and read...

    • Spooky233 minutes ago
      [delayed]
    • pessimizer7 minutes ago
      > decide that it's not coming because everyone is expecting it and pricing it in.

      I'm in the same boat. I'm hoping that the crashing is moving slowly enough that it can unwind carefully, and that not enough data centers got started that things can't simply be cancelled without much harm.

      A bunch of fake money borrowed on commitments over data centers never built and plowed back into the ouroboros rather than escaping into the larger economy seems like it could be unwound with only a few people going broke. The only wasted real production would be in all of the chips - and they might be able to go somewhere, somehow. The data centers currently built will certainly be well-utilized - the overcapacity hasn't actually, physically been done, right?

      If a bunch of circular financing went into doing something that never fully happened, is that a crash or a lifting of a mask over a real economy that has continued its previous slide?

      And if capacity ends up fully utilized and prices do go up, won't there be dozens of viable half-done projects, the best of which that could be dusted off and rolled out again?

    • achandra0313 minutes ago
      > And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop

      Really? It feels like most people are talking about an AI bubble, with a vocal minority in opposition.

    • aleqs15 minutes ago
      ..and how much of that AI optimism (and some pessimism) is generated by the same proprietary llms? Recursive self-enbubbling?
  • blocked_againnn8 minutes ago
    I guess a broken clock is right two times a day, 14 times a week and 700+ times an year?
  • Sevii13 minutes ago
    Great can't wait for GPU prices to come down.
    • mohamedkoubaa11 minutes ago
      Someone else is going to figure out what to do with them before gamers can get their hands on then again
  • dleeftink9 minutes ago
    In life, one should expect anything. In compute, one should expect zero.
  • sneak8 minutes ago
    It’s no longer smart to predict an AI bubble pop. The question is only when. Any article trying to sound smart without giving dates and justification for those dates isn’t saying anything.