AI Is a Bubble, Just Admit It

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

zerosizedweasle

19 points

32 comments

Techstory

calmmixed

Debate

80/100

AIBubbleMarket Valuation

Key topics

Bubble

Market Valuation

If AI revenue by 2030 needs to be more than the combined 2024 revenue of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia just to recoup the costs of depreciation on the chips then it's a bubble.

The post argues that AI is a bubble due to the enormous revenue required to recoup chip depreciation costs, sparking a discussion on the validity of this claim and the nature of AI's impact.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

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Based on 32 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Sep 25, 2025 at 11:58 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Sep 26, 2025 at 12:00 AM EDT
2m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
12 comments in 0-3h
Hottest window of the conversation
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04Latest activity
Sep 28, 2025 at 12:15 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04

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Discussion (32 comments)

Showing 32 comments

fullshark

3 months ago

2 replies

Good luck timing the burst, everything is a bubble

ImPrajyoth

3 months ago

2 replies

Earth is?

foobarbaz33

3 months ago

1 reply

Possibly yes. Artificially kept going by the Sun and Earth's own molten core. Once those go out out it's game over for earth.

delichon

3 months ago

1 reply

Earth appears to be generating at least one species that is capable of atomic matter to energy conversion. Maybe it is planning ahead.

csomar

3 months ago

That atomic matter origin is the Sun though. So all is propped up by the Sun at the end.

Jensson

3 months ago

Earth is a lava bubble with a thin film of cool earth on top. A relatively small meteor would pop it.

WorldPeas

3 months ago

Check out page 6 chart 1 "US real GDP growth contribution from tech capex"

https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/ins...

cranberryturkey

3 months ago

1 reply

A bubble much like the dotcom bubble. but the internet didn't go away...it was flourishing 3 years later.

zerosizedweasleAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

Yeah but those companies went bankrupt.

cranberryturkey

3 months ago

1 reply

True...the ones that raised $2M with just a domain name and vaporware. THat's notwhat I'm seeing in AI right now

zerosizedweasleAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

No, WorldCom and 360Networks were fiber companies. A lot of internet infrastructure companies went under.

cranberryturkey

3 months ago

2 replies

Yes, but my point is the fundamental tech didn't disappear. Those companies failed but thousands have been flourishing ever since.

zerosizedweasleAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

I get your point. I'm not talking about AI in the future of the economy after the bubble burst settles. Or about the technology in the future. I'm talking about the cold hard economic calculus / numbers staring us near term in the face.

andsoitis

3 months ago

I think the issue is your framing. You say “AI is a bubble…”, when I think you mean more something like “the gold rush around AI is a bubble…”

BoredPositron

3 months ago

The infrastructure got delayed significantly.

leakycap

3 months ago

1 reply

Forecasting the global AI market revenue in 2030 when we're only about 1,000 days since ChatGPT launched seems unlikely to be accurate

zerosizedweasleAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

Yeah but that's where the numbers need to be to make the current spending add up.

leakycap

3 months ago

Only if you think the market is not significantly shifting. Saying this now is like saying how much dirt will be needed to fill in a sinkhole while it's still caving inwards.

farseer

3 months ago

1 reply

Chips are unlike cars and there is very little wear and tear. If depreciation of Chips and subsequent losses is your criteria of how this bubble will burst, you may be in for a rude awakening. With Moor's law already finished, the Chips can be used for at least a decade or more even with lower efficiency and more power usage.

raw_anon_1111

3 months ago

1 reply

The failure rate of GPUs is quite high.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

farseer

3 months ago

1 reply

>>We could not verify the name of the person who describes themselves as 'GenAI principal architect at Alphabet' and therefore we cannot 100% trust their claims.

Here is a counter claim (not study): https://cyfuture.cloud/kb/gpu/what-is-the-failure-rate-of-th...

raw_anon_1111

3 months ago

Why does that read like AI slop? And who is cyfuture?

ActorNightly

3 months ago

2 replies

The concept of a bubble doesn't exist anymore. In the past, investors were way more tuned to value investing. Now days, investors dgaf about value as much as hype. As long as they can generate hype, the money will flow. And everyone is bought into the hype.

And really, overall its not really a bad thing, because money flowing = economic activity. The only downside is the focus of technological progress gets lost in the sauce, with a lot of companies thinking short term rather than actual persistent value.

oldsklgdfth

3 months ago

> The concept of a bubble doesn't exist anymore.

It is a reminder that economics is firmly based on behavior. Interesting to see how economics reflects on this period in time.

> gets lost in the sauce Thanks you for referencing the contemporary rap philosopher Gucci Mane [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0-F88c6Hrk

kerningije

3 months ago

People said we have outsmarted downturns just before every major downturn in the past century and a half.

Boom and bust is how complex systems develop. The biosphere down to that slime mold mapping out food sources. It's always a pulse.

Oh it makes for a bumpy ride for the monkeys? Yeah. It does. Will the monkey outsmart the physics of complexity? Unlikely.

gethly

3 months ago

Yes it is. Everyone knows it. We're just waiting for it to pop, that's all. Wait for China to refactor their DeepSeek v3 to run on Huawei chips. Then you'll see the US stock marker crash.

vismit2000

3 months ago

It's not a bubble at technical level, although it is at financial level.

sebastienBuilds

3 months ago

Every new technology creating opportunities and a overload of attention creates a bubble- however AI or Gen Intelligence through Language Models is giving us a tremendous amount of opportinities - A bubble so huge that it also contains many bubbles as well such as vibe coding and agents -

seydor

3 months ago

What if we admit it and also approve it?

Stock pumping is this generation s real estate

adrianwaj

3 months ago

Aren't bigger GPUs increasingly being seen on phones? So I'd expect more local AI. And is this true?

"Privacy is the real bottleneck for autonomous AI agents. Sapphire + ROFL looks like a solid answer: on-chain confidentiality for state and logic, off-chain trusted execution for computation."

https://old.reddit.com/r/oasisnetwork/comments/1nqhi4p/is_th...

What does crypto/blockchain have to do with AI?

gooodvibes

3 months ago

Sure, some companies and products might be overvalued - so what?

Why do some people insist on screaming about this from the rooftops?

red-iron-pine

3 months ago

lotta tech bros have a lot of money in it -- and those bros own online marketing

they're never going to stop until it's dead and dusted.

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ID: 45382469Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 1:42:01 PM