Yay, yet another once in a lifetime financial crisis.
Well yeah. Sam Altman just came out and basically said he needs a few trillion dollars and government backed loans. This shit is going to be BAD.
Has anyone else noticed the recent resurgence of mechanical turk jobs? It’s all AI training work. Before the work was doing tasks directly. Now they have people training tailored AI models.
In other words the tech bros have found get another way to shoehorn themselves in as a middle man. Instead of having workers do the work itself. Now the work is delegated to AI. Which is trained to do the task by humans.
At first it said the LLM era was the end of mechanical turk work. It’s going in a circle back to mechanical turks again.
Now I most definitely don’t want it to pop 🤣 moreso because the reality is the bubble popping doesn’t hurt them it only hurts all the idiots who spent their meager earnings on this shit.
The rich never suffer, other than having to buy the smaller yacht.
If he needs a straight pin to pop it I can send him a couple
This is in a category I’d like to call hopebait. People so badly wish things they feel are bad simply stopped themselves, that they’ll upvote anything that appears to confirm this.
In this instance, there is nothing of substance in this article to suggest the end of anything is anywhere near in sight.
One guy, who makes bets constantly, made another bet.
Seriously the stock market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
People are idiots.
Is there a consensus there’s an AI bubble? Sure?
Can anyone predict what will happen? LOfuckingL
There’s an AI bubble?
I was pretty certain it was grifts all the way down lol
I’m thankfully OoL enough but I guarantee there are some AI backed crypto out there which is so deliciously awesome given the double down on smoke and mirrors.
I think it’s all the way up in this case
I’ve got a problem with articles like this: “The guy who got it right once is betting a second time he’s going to get it right”. and then the article continues: “Even though he’s got it wrong a bunch of times since, he got it right that one time… So this has gotta be his second time!!”
The odds of being right x times in a row must be really low, correct?
I just phoned a business today that ended up with an “AI receptionist” when they didn’t answer the phone.
They wanted to take my name down, asked who I was leaving a message for, and then recorded the message…
My god what a painful process that was. It was absolutely useless. Firstly it got my name wrong, and then the name of the person I was leaving the message for wrong. No “Janet” my name is not Don it’s John, and no I’m not leaving a message for Kim Its for Kam. And then it needs to repeat your entire message back to you in order to make sure it didn’t fuck it up which amazingly the message was probably 95% okay but it was a giant waste of my time when a FUCKIN VOICEMAIL WOULD HAVE SUFFICED
an online store, for games used a fully AI agent as a CS, it was giving them the run around, till i kept asking about escalting it, finally it was able to either contact them shortly or through email.
Had an issue with Comcast today. They forced me to use their Xfinity app, but what I needed to do wasn’t an apparent option within the app. The only option I saw was a support chatbot. The chatbot listed a link to the option I was looking for. The link opened a webview within the Xfinity app, in which there was a link to download the Xfinity app.
Unnecessary Apps and chat bots. Two of my least favorite things referring me back and forth, forever, in an endless loop.
comcast is probably the worst cs, plus they always trying to pedal you shit.
Peddle but yes, they’re monsters
referring me back and forth, forever, in an endless loop
Just like they intended.
I’m reading along and I’m im like, “yep that’s dumb and that’s dumb, and that’s dumb. Yep that’s dumb and that’s dumb too.”
Then I read the last 7 words and, “Oof… yeah that is REALLY FUCKING DUMB”
What does his height have to do with anything? Are we body shaming?
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Huh. I understood that as “big player in shorting world”
You understood that part correctly, but misunderstood the joke
It’s a movie title ‘the big short’ which tells the story about the housing market bubble crash
My money is on the American bubble popping. China would do just fine. As to Europe’s? Probably not developed enough to seriously impact them, but probably able to fill America’s void once the bubble action has died down. America is pretty fucked in general, so it isn’t so much AI in particular, but rather a ghost economy.
Something based on imaginary stocks, grift, de-industrialization, ghost jobs and falsified labor statistics, likely mixed with a debased dollar, just doesn’t bode well.
Most of the European digital infrastructure is caught in the web of Microsoft, and will be pulled down with it when Microsoft inevitably lose their bets on AI.
Europe should focus mlre on using mivrosoft, google and amazon (european) alternatives
What a shitty take. Imagine betting on something with a poor human rights record and countless privacy violation. America may have it’s faults, but it will get ironed out like it always does. I’m hoping for everybody’s sake that China doesn’t become the new global superpower. America has the soft power thing down to the t at least.
As for the other claims you made, source?
In my humble opinion Bush kind of fucked America up, but that is fixable.
Dude. I live in the US, and would like it to be a super-awesome place that genuinely leads the world in morality and prosperity.
Unfortunately, my nation has been going down the toilet. If you haven’t noticed, things like ICE’s raid on Hyundai, the undeclared war and crimes upon Venuzela, over 1,800 people disappeared from Alligator Alcatraz, Mike Johnson refusing to open congress, the SNAP denial, and other bouts of malicious stupidity are very bad signs for the future.
In any case, I don’t like China, but it is likely to be a superpower for awhile until India or someone else takes the crown. The crown was America’s to lose, and I am pretty sure we are losing it.
Something based on imaginary stocks, grift, de-industrialization, ghost jobs and falsified labor statistics, likely mixed with a debased dollar, just doesn’t bode well.
This is literally describes China, what are you even talking about?
It is a matter of degree. While China has issues, America’s is much worse across the board.
Again, what are you even talking about? Literally everything you listed China is doing much worse in, not to mention other major issues like a demographic crises on top of everything else.
You’re an actual moron if you truly believe that.
even if chinas AI doesnt work out, they probably do a slow deliberate fall, orchestrated by the ccp. much like they did with the evergrande ponzi scheme.
I do think there is an AI bubble, but “guy who bets against things, bets against the latest thing”
It’s like the dotcom bubble. Everyone got all excited thinking the internet would be the next big thing, change the world, revolutionize the way we do business. And it did. But not without a lot of hot air and snake oil getting sold along the way.
Not really comparable, maybe. This is more scam and less substance… There is no definition of “AI”, is there? If you bring up the fundamental problems with genAI, they just pivot to expert systems. Classic scam artistry. They know they’re selling hot air, promising digital workers that are already complete failures.
Of course computers will continue to be used in various ways … Just like we’ve seen since 1951, right?
I can easily imagine having this conversation with someone in the late 90s, when there was so much excitement about the internet. If, as a skeptic, you were to ask me why the internet was really needed or why anyone would take the trouble to connect to it on a daily basis, I wouldn’t have been able to give a complete and correct answer, not being able to predict the future with any accuracy.
But AI is already super useful as a tool for sifting through data, finding patterns and acting based on patterns. Its potential applications in medical diagnostics or surveillance (yes, I hate that too but it is what it is) are huge. People like to shit on LLMs but they do go beyond what search engines or scripts can do. But the real question is what AI will be in the next decade or so. And much like the internet in its early days, we can only guess at its future capabilities, how it will integrate with our lives, what will take off, and what is just a scam. Everyone is selling ideas that don’t work yet but seem exciting. But just because it’s inflated, oversold, and often untrustworthy, doesn’t mean that AI as a whole is just a mirage. It will be huge, and change our world fundamentally. That said, I’m still shorting Palantir ;)
Burry also lost money since 2008 making shorts like Tesla. The Big Shart.
I mean, he is not wrong per se, he just had the wong timing.
With shorts timing is all that matters.
…what if he had the Jiang time?
Looks like very mixed returns. Which is what you’d expect from a strategy of betting on areas that are significantly overvalued.
The market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent
See Bill Ackerman and Herbalife.
Federal regulators should have shut that shit down ages ago, but the grifter party loves MLMs (look at how the DeVos family made their money…)
Ackerman and Valeant. He promised congress he was going to stop price gouging on drugs.
Nah.
Oh god, I just saw another storefront in my local area that popped up. My coworker dragged me in there, and aside from the incredibly overpriced products, the countertops were loaded with pamphlets on doing the herbal life thing.
Can investors remain irrational long enough for OpenAI to remain solvent?
They have been irrational longer than you’ve been an investor. They have become exceedingly efficient at it.
Nvidia down ~8% this week, Palantir down ~10%
Maybe the needle really is shifting.
Maybe, but he’s also been super wrong a bunch of times on his skitzo twitter account so grains of salt and all that. Not saying the guy isn’t smart, clearly called one of the biggest systemic crisis of our times, but he struck gold once and struck out a bunch more often.
Because it’s more likely that he got lucky once and his short position was strong enough that he could keep paying the premiums than it is that he is some super genius who knew something noone else knew
The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won’t burst? Keeping it going will require in ever-increasing amounts of money to paper over the gaping chasms that keep cropping up, and eventually the amount of money necessary to keep it going will cease to be feasible. Then, after taking gullible investor for all of they’ve got, the whole thing will fall over in the world’s most well deserved and predictable market crash.
The subprime mortgage collapse was inevitable only in hindsight, you had to have a good understanding of the market to see it in advance. To see the level of corruption and false promises that have to be made in order to make the mortgage bubble possible. But everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open, I’m not talking about the “how many Rs are in strawberry” questions either, I can sort of see why that’s not really a fair question. I’m talking about the fact that every single business that has ever tried to replace its employees with AI, has always failed, and failed almost immediately. Even Amazon couldn’t make it work.
inevitable only in hindsight
I’m not so sure. I’m still friends with a guy who told me emphatically “you dont understand what we did, we destroyed the global economy” and then explained the whole subprime mortgage scam to me, back in like 2007. Lots of downstream businesses, new home builders, paint and drywall companies, building materials stores, started folding several months before the official crash as well. I wasn’t nearly as aware of things then, I was a grown adult but not yet 30 and with little formal education, but there were definitely huge flashing signs. Only the media, based 100% on the words of the banks and insurance companies, thought that a crash was undetectable.
I’m not sure quite what it would look like yet, but I’m willing to bet if you look where these data centers are being built, when the cash runs out to keep the whole scam afloat, these big companies will stop paying their bills. The smaller companies providing services and supplies will run out of money before the huge mega corpos start showing signs, so that is one of the metrics I’m watching closely. I just happen to live in the shadow of these data centers so I’ll be pretty close to it, that is if I’m right.
One of the first deals I did in real estate (~2006) was a sale at 115% loan-to-value, no money down, seller-paid closing costs. The buyers received $2500 at closing. Nobody batted an eye.
I remember the news reporting about record breaking amounts of mortgage defaults in like 2007 as well. The signs were all there, but people were too oblivious or high on their own supply of farts to see them.
Anytime people are like “we couldn’t see this coming” I never understand why they are allowed to pass that obvious lie off in public.
The AI bubble signs are in plain view everywhere you look right now. If (or much more likely when) it bursts everyone will be talking about how they couldn’t possibly see it coming again.
If people say they couldn’t see this shit coming, maybe their myopic asses shouldn’t be in charge of anything important ever again.
There was quite a lag between the variable-rate mortgage rates going up and everything noticeably exploding, so lots of people who were aware there was a real risk of things going tits up decided that it hadn’t and therefore wasn’t going to and had stopped looking for signs by the time they started to appear.
I think the idea is that, whilst shorting, you get squeezed. The question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ and if it takes too long and you’re $1B deep you can lose your shirt
Yep. The market can stay irrational etc
The thing is though as long as it goes down that’s usually all you need. You don’t need a total collapse.
That’s the thing though, options are generally relatively short in duration, with most being a few months. The longest options are around 1-2 years out.
Could AI stay keep its hype for 1-2 years? Probably. Will it? Who knows!
I assume he has enough funds to buffer and roll it forward if it takes longer than he thinks.
The question is, will he still see a profit if it takes 5-10 years? Will his investors stick with him even if he loses billions? They almost left in 2008, what if this takes longer than that?
If you’re taking the contrarian stance in investing, you have to be right both about direction and timing, and timing the market is very hard if not impossible.
Yep, you can only do so much risk management and hedging, and only for so long. There comes a time when you have to cut it off but, you know, hubris
I think, AI quality aside, it’s mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA’s market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society’s ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.
And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn’t think we’d get this far - the 2008 crisis didn’t do it, COVID somehow didn’t do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don’t deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Uh oh, I can stay solvent for quite longer
And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.
The thing that boggles my mind in all of this is the possibility that Trump installs some absolute toady tool bag in at the Fed and then just has the federal reserve bail out all of the bad investments. It’d mean probably hyperinflation, but who cares about normal shmucks trying to live a life? It’s much more important to pay the genius, scammy billionaires so they can keep their mega yachts fully gassed and assed.
everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open
To me it is four things in particular:
- How AI use erodes skills in the subject AI is being used to assist in. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been demonstrated across all industries from software developers to radiologists. Most experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
- How AI use shuts down critical thinking, and makes users more stupid. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been clearly demonstrated by MRI scans of the prefrontal cortex while users are actively using AI.
- How AI use makes the user slower. This is the only user point that is not 100%, as only less than 2% of the most senior and skilled users show a slight increase in work completed… after more than 12 months of using AI. Projections have been made on the other 98%, and over 90% of them will never work faster with AI than without it, regardless of training or experience.
- The gratuitous hallucinations, which are only increasing in scope and severity with every AI generation. It arises entirely from the constraints the AI are rewarded with - providing no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - and anywhere from 60-80% of all responses are hallucinatory or incorrect in some fashion, depending on the current model.
In prior generations, any industry with such performance would be laughed clear out of the boardroom.
But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist.
After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
Ugh… Minor rant.
My aunt is into tech like me. She dived head first into the AI in the middle of the hype instead of during IoT era when machine learning (the foundation of GPT models) was part of a larger SDK for building smaller tasks. Now she won’t stop pushing it onto my mom like a salesman by saying she should do this and that with ChatGPT or whatever, and it’s so freakin’ annoying.
Luckily, I’ve told my mom straight up to not buy into it.
Huh. Never noticed the MLM parallels of the current AI hype so much before. Literally levenschtein distance of one, should’ve spotted it.
Investors have been happy to incentivise companies to hire idiot CEOs and managers who say the right buzzwords but reduce output by making bad decisions and only hiring people who don’t think they’re bad decisions, so an automated buzzword-dispensing idiot isn’t necessarily going to seem to investors like a downgrade compared to what they think most workers are. They’re just as likely to think AI lets them invest in companies where even the lowest tier employees are potential CEO material, and continue not noticing that the per-employee efficiency keeps going down. Data showing that layoffs nearly never pay for themselves doesn’t stop stock prices soaring whenever one happens, so I wouldn’t expect data showing AI makes companies less profitable to stop stock prices going up when a company announces a new dumb way they’ll use it.
Do you have references for these claims? I believe you, but I’d like to know more.
All this you listed is the reason why we are fucked if we keep depending more and more on “this” AI and don’t get a revolution in the AI field to replace the current one with AGI. Because in ten years we risk losing a big chunk of expertise and if we don’t have an AI that can really replace the current one with something that can actually replace experts then there will huge infrastructure problems across multiple industries.
Everyone can see it coming, but they believe the AI companies’ hype that the AGI breakthrough will be here “soon”. Which if actually true, might be worth the bet.
For my money they either hit AGI and then we all die, or there is a crash before that. Yay.
The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won’t burst?
Nobody believes the AI investment/growth trajectory we have right now will continue for infinity. What nobody knows is: when the correction will occur.
- Do you pull your investments out now and sit on the sidelines waiting for the fallout while your principal loses value daily from inflation?
- What does the correction look like when it happens? Does all the value evaporate on day 1, the first week, a month? This is important to figure out for this strategy to know when to go back in.
This is the info/decisions you’d need as an average investor. What Burry is doing is the riskiest type of investments with shorting the market. If growth continue to occur he and his fund will have to pay for the growth to those whose shares he borrowed to short.
In summary, its not enough to know that a bubble exists, but to profit from it you have to figure out when it will burst and when the full burst is done.
Rich dumbasses found a place to waste all their money instead of the government taxing them and using that money for important things. they let them waste it on some climate change accelerator
