Technology

Why bother worrying about the downturn if the world bends over backwards to stop you hitting the ground?

It is basically impossible for Visa to go bankrupt, for example. The moment the threat looms, governments are going to leap in and save them. They're too big to fail.

I moved all my 401k monies into international funds several months back. I’m killing it on my returns. I am not a financial advisor, however. (Not that I think most of them aren’t buffoons)

I'm actually wondering if we're headed towards a deflationary event. I don't think the underlying customer base can support a lot of the prices now as wages have stayed well below inflation, plus I believe some of the inflation is artificial profit taking. Oil is half the price it was a few years ago, so transportation of goods should be a lot cheaper. Energy as a whole has been getting cheaper too as new renewable generation comes online, so those costs come down too.

The economists would think some deflation would be the worst thing ever, but the inflation spike of the last few years doesn't seem to have a solid foundation.

As someone on r/Wallstreetbets once said, I can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

As someone on r/Wallstreetbets once said, I can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

There's enough people who genuinely believe the company is worth that to keep the value high for a very long time.

And those are useful tools, which will always be around. The current “AI” industry bubble is predicated on total world domination by an AGI, which is not technically possible given the underpinnings of the LLM methodology. Sooner or later, the people with the money will realize this. They’re stupid, so it may take a while.

Realy? I get what you want to say, but at least the power consumption of the machine you need the model to run on will be yours forever. Depending on your energy price it is not 0 per query.

That's great if they actually work. But my experience with the big, corporate-funded models has been pretty freaking abysmal after more than a year of trying to adopt them into my daily workflow. I can't imagine the performance of local models is better when they're running on much, much smaller datasets and with much, much less computing power.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, of course, but I just don't see how it's possible for local models to compete with the Big Boys in terms of quality... and the quality of the largest models is only middling at best.

A lot of those things have a business model that relies on putting the competition out of business so you can jack up the price.

Uber broke taxis in a lot of places. It completely broke that industry by simply ignoring the laws. Uber had a thing that it could actually sell that people would buy.

It took years before it started making money, in an industry that already made money.

LLMs Don't even have a path to profitability unless they can either functionally replace a human job or at least reliably perform a useful task without human intervention.

They've burned all these billions and they still don't even have something that can function as well as the search engines that proceeded them no matter how much they want to force you to use it.

The dot-com bubble? A whole bunch of investment money was poured into businesses operating over the Internet from around the time dial-up became widely available. A few years later, investors realized that "on the Internet" wasn't necessarily the key to making a crapton of money and the stock market crashed. A bunch of companies (many of which never made it to profitability) went under, and a fair number of people lost their jobs. Pets.com was one of the more notable victims.

This doesn't, however, mean that no business is done over the Internet today.