There’s not much serious debate on IF there’s a bubble. There is and it’s a big one.
The debate is more on what happens from here and how does that bubble deflate. Gradually and controlled where weaker companies shut down and the strong thrive, or a massive implosion that wipes most everyone in the sector out in a hard reset.
They resisted (most of the) LLM boosterism and kept decent focus on SLMs that can run on-device.
I think the decision is first a self-serving one that's in line with how they want their devices and services to operate, but it also happens to be (in my opinion) the future-proof way of integrating consumer AI.
The circular funding is concerning, but more concerning are suggestions that supply might be vastly exceeding demand. Not that people don’t want chips but that the chip production now exceeds the ability to power them up and use them. The shortage is power and racks in data centers ready to go. Folks are running numbers suggesting there’s a bunched chips now just sitting around.
That, combined with some cooling from an AI hype bubble burst (see separate articles about companies missing quota as folks aren’t buying as much AI as the hype hoped) and there’s a potential ugly future where the headline demand plummets in top of idle chips waiting to be powered on. Suddenly the market is flooded with chips nobody wants.
One of the concerns with the company though is are they really “software.” Many cite experiences with the where they deploy armies of people doing things to clean up data and other hands on labor for the “software” to work just “software” where you buy a license and off you go.
The Big Island of Hawaii and the national park there is an amazing place. One of the only places where you can (relatively) safely visit a highly active volcano.
Yes this is all a bit quirky and nuanced but when you get into it these things are really good. It’s refreshing to see some really smart folks just focused on doing great things without blinding from VCs and MBAs pushing another hacky quick way to make a buck and cash out.
I agree. Wolfram gets so much crap ok this site but I think he’s produced so much interesting science and tech that has built up over decades, that’s very admirable.
Tech customers are massively AI hype fatigued at this point.
The tech isn’t going away, but a hard reset is overdue to bring things back down for a cold hard reality check. Article yesterday about MSFT slashing quotas on AI sales as customers aren’t buying is in line with this broader theme.
Morgan Stanley also quietly trying to offload its exposure to data center financing in a move that smells very summer of 2008-ish. CNBC now talks about the AI bubble multiple times a day. OpenAI looks incredibly vulnerable and financially over-extended.
I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.
I think your wording is the correct wording, not the "AI fatigue" because I don't want to go to pre-AI era and I can't stand another "OMG It's over" tweet at the same time.
Yeah. Hype fatigue is a good description. Every time I see them talking about having AI book flights and hotels I think about the digital assistants on phones. Didn't they promise us the same thing back then?
I won't believe any of the claims until I see them working (flawlessly).
> I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.
Some days I wonder if we'd be better off or worse off if we had a complete collapse of technology. I think it'd be painful with a massive drop in standard of living, but we could still recover. I wonder if the same will be true in a couple more generations.
I think it's dangerous to treat younger generations like replaceable cogs. What happens when there's no one around that knows how the cogs are supposed to fit together?
Yup. The tech giants surely know the correction is coming by now. They are just trying to milk it just a tiny bit longer before it all comes crashing down.
Keep your eyes out on the skies, I forecast executives in golden parachutes in the near future
Yes. IPO talks suggests there will be rushed attempts to cash out before this all implodes, but all signs are pointing to that ship having sailed.
I don’t see any big AI company having a successful IPO anytime soon which is going to leave some folks stuck holding the financial equivalent of nuclear waste.
The annoying part is that every tech company made an internal mandate for every team to stuff AI into every product. There are some great products that use AI (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Nano-banana, etc). But we simply haven't had time to come up with good ways of integrating AI into every software product. So instead every big tech company spent two years forcing AI into everything with minimal thought. Obviously people are not happy with this.
Some AI was done tastefully. Apple Photos search comes to mind. I can search for objects across your photos, and it does a reasonable job finding what I want. It's an example of AI that's so well done, the end user doesn't even know it's there.
Now Microsoft pushing "Copilot" is the complete opposite. It's so badly integrated with any standard workflow, it's disruptive in the worst of ways.
Google's photo app had the searching for years. It seemed a lot more useful a few years ago when it was using dumber image recognition models. Now it returns fewer matches on the same search. I tend to search the same things a few times a year as a supplement to some story and it's been frustrating to see in real time, a picture that used to come up when searching "car" or "guitar" is missing and instead unrelated pictures returned.
That's fair, but my point was that AI should be implemented in a way that's out-of-the-way but is still helpful to users.
I think LLMs are incredible, I think there's a lot of really good usecases where it can help promote recommendations and actions for a user to take. I don't think every user wants to have every app they touch into a Chatbot though.
It's not just that they are adding AI to every single product, it's being pushed on customers in incredibly intrusive and irritating ways that makes it seem as though they're desperate for their AI investments to pan out. If your AI productivity enhancement stuff is so amazing, shouldn't you be turning away customers at the door due to demand instead of brow beating me into finally signing up for it in submission?
This is what gets me with the AI promotion. If it's so good at increasing productivity, then where's all the result? Currently, we still have shitty software, updates that break things (Windows password icon?) and zero day threats.
How about tech companies focus on the actual problems first rather than desperately grabbing attention for a product that doesn't seem to deliver anything useful and instead hallucinates and regurgitates falsehoods. It's the opposite of a benefit and we're burning up the planet to make ourselves worse off.
The case is essentially seeking to put “AI powered search” on trial.
It’s long been established that one can link to other content and even provide short excerpts of what one might find on the other page. Essentially classic Google search. But when you pull so much content from the source and give the answer to the user without ever sending the user to the original content at some point one crossed the line from “fair use” to just theft.
By extension AI search is destroying the typical online advertising model, which is stacking up an every growing list of powerful companies now ready for a fight to resolve this.
The debate is more on what happens from here and how does that bubble deflate. Gradually and controlled where weaker companies shut down and the strong thrive, or a massive implosion that wipes most everyone in the sector out in a hard reset.
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