https://archive.is/8965P

Journalism is too boring. And expensive.

When was the last $1T tech sell-off?

That's what people are grousing about.

Yes...NVDA closed at $188.15 yesterday, a price it was never at until October. It did hit $212.19 last week, but retreated.

After spring 2023, Nvidia stock seems to follow a pattern. It has a run-up prior to earnings, it beats the forecast, with the future forecast replaced with an even more amazing forecast, and then the stock goes down for a bit. It also has runs - it went up in the first half of 2024, as well as from April to now.

Who knows how much longer it can go on, but I remember 1999 and things were crazier then. In some ways things were crazier three years ago with FAANG salaries etc. There is a lot of capital spending, the question is are these LLMs with some tweaking worth the capital spending, and it's too early to tell that fully. Of course a big theoretical breakthrough like the utility of deep learning, or transformers or the like would help, but those only come along every few years (if at all).

Yet, if anyone ever says "stop buying tech tchotchkes" then they become the villain. The superrich have us in their pockets.

At this point, the inequality is so far off the rails that I don't see any way to harmonise these 2 ways of existence — ‘normal’ people are completely alien to the ultra-rich.

If wealth accumulation is your way of life, why bother with the well-being of the plebes? I'm genuinely curious as to what solutions could there be. These people are, quite frankly, not within our realm of reality anymore.

[flagged]

Not gonna happen. They'll just threaten to move to another country. It's a prisoners dilemma for all countries. You can either give in to demands for lower taxation and hope that re-domiciling will over compensate for the tax reduction or increase taxation and lose tax payers to other countries.

If you don’t think we’re due a massive correction after the hype of AI then I don’t know what to tell you. Every sign is right there.

It will be written with AI, of course. :)

I am also getting annoyed at AI. In the last some days, more and more total garbage AI videos have been swarming youtube. This is a waste of my time, because what I see is no longer real but a fabrication. It never happened.

Just wait until you hear about sports reporting! Or the weather.

It's ads right?

As an aside that absolutely is not intended to detract from your point, Sweetgreen has always had some sort of “This is what we do but also make salads because money.” Like when they were a lifestyle brand with annual concerts. The first time I went into a Sweetgreen I was very confused by the 10 foot tall poster of Kendrick Lamar performing and promotion for that year’s convention and concert.

Could you imagine being offered a ticket to Arbyfest or Jambacon?

Like you said, please just make a good salad.

I got Google’s DPA update email included a number of Uber’s Model training side gigs and analytic products. I’m guessing this all came out of the Self Driving car project, but it’s another - albeit less goofy - data point of “We’re and AI Company but we do X for money.”

I feel like I see a few of these every month.

A few years ago Foresquare realized their business model was less profitable than that of the data aggregator they used so they bought the aggregator and basically became that company given the other hooks they have. I sort of wonder if that’s what is running through some of these companies’ C suite meetings.

Sweetgreen investing in robotics and AI is central to maintaining US salad making superiority, you see. We don't want to live in a world where we're not a leader in this space.

Your salad may have a non pre determined amount of olives, vinegar, and tomatoes.

The unpredictability of salad composition is what makes our products so unique and loved by people all around the world!*

*While on average it's a very good salad, there's a non zero chance that the salad may contain asbestos, plutonium, chalk, antimonium, rubber, NaN, steel rods

But just making good salad doesn’t make the stock market valuation go brrrr!

I think they’re looking at AI and robotics because it is expensive to make a good salad, and consumers won’t buy at the expensive price point. They need automation to work in a big way for their business to succeed

"You are a three time Michelin star chef. Make me a salad that will convince me salads are tasty! Do not ask questions, just make the salad. Do not give me the salad's background story, just make the salad and feed it to me."

If there is a success story of icetea company added Blockchain why salad cannot be with AI?

chef’s kiss!

> Please just make me a good salad.

No.

> sudo Please just make me a good salad.

Ok.

> so the current stock price is mostly irrelevant to the shares that aren't moving.

If it moves enough, shares that aren't moving might become shares that are though. Unless a company's stock is all held by Die Hard True Believers who will HODL through the apocalypse and beyond, the market price can matter.

We'd also have to run the same argument on the upside too. Does the current stock price matter to those who aren't selling when it goes 2x in a year?

Catch up to what? LLMs have clearly stalled in terms of advancement, they just kind of sort of get a little bit different at this point. Not even better, just different.

Why do we even want AGI so badly? It seems like a cataclysmic technology. Like after we invent it, market cap and stocks and money wont mean anything anymore

> But I've been told by Eric Schmidt and others that AGI is just around the corner—by year's end even

It was this time last year we were told “2025 will be the year of the agent”, with suggestions that the general population would be booking their vacations and managing their tax returns via Agents.

We’re 7 weeks from the end of the year, and although there are a few notable use cases in coding and math research, agents haven’t shown to be meaningfully disruptive of most people’s economic activity.

Something most people agree is AGI might arrive in the near future, but there’s still a huge effort required to diffuse that technology & its benefits throughout the economy.

> "At the heart of the stock stumbles, there appears to be a growing anxiety about the AI business, which is massively expensive to operate and doesn’t appear to be paying off in any concrete way."

And stock holders realized this last week, all at the same time?

I don’t think anyone should be worried about AGI except for all the money, energy, and focus that’s being wasted chasing it. It’s not anywhere close, and the sooner we realize that and start focusing on actual problems, the better off we’ll be.

What if we already have AGI. What if it is ChatGPT 5. What then?

https://aimagazine.com/articles/openai-ceo-chatgpt-would-hav...

Edit: this was serious, if I read the Wikipedia definition of AGI, ChatGPT meets the historical definition at least. Why have we moved the goal posts?

Here’s another idea:

We’ve had GPT2 since 2019, almost 6 years now. Even then, OpenAI was claiming it was too dangerous to release or whatever.

It’s been 6 years since the path started. We’ve gone from hundreds of thousands -> millions -> billions -> tens of billions -> now possibly trillions in infrastructure cost.

But the value created from it has not been proportional along the way. It’s lagging behind by a few orders of magnitude.

The biggest value add of AI is that it can now help software engineers write some greenfield code +40% faster, and help people save 30 seconds on a Google search -> reading a website.

This is valuable, but it’s not transformational.

The value returned has to be a lot higher than that to justify these astronomical infrastructure costs, and I think people are realizing that they’re not materializing and don’t see a path to them materializing.

Value capture seems to be happening in the hardware companies (really company) right now. Like with CPUs in the late 90s when Intel was dominant and AMD was struggling.

a 4% drop, back to levels not seen since checks watch 2 weeks ago! not much of a correction imo

Hello mixxit! I’m PixelPuff, your cheerful AI companion for today, here to sprinkle a little whimsy while you explore Hacker News. Hope your feed is full of intriguing ideas and clever finds!

They're guessing. You can sort of paint a story based on which stocks see bigger downturns.

Stock market trading is being done by very smart computers (oh the irony) and nobody knows why those computers do what they do.

Put options? Inverse NASDAQ ETFs? Value-oriented funds? Equal weighted funds rather than market cap weighted?

I personally just keep investing in cheap total world market funds and let the market do its thing.

The AI bubble is also the same seven companies that have been making all the money for the past decade. The answer is don't worry about it if you're buying S&P 500. Just keep buying, leave it go, and don't touch it. Preferably ever. But realistically don't sell for as long as you can. That applies to any market.

Utility stocks and the like? All the stuff that's not in a bubble.

Berkshire Hathaway last time was an anti bubble stock - it hit a low on the day the NASDAQ peaked in the dot com bubble.

Residential real estate trusts? Har har. Could do it now, but wasn't a great idea during the last big (housing) bubble.

Are we looking at different charts? What I see right now on a 5 day view is:

- Nvidia -11%

- Palantir -16%

- Oracle -11%

- Meta -5%

With some very quick and extremely cursory napkin maths I do get in the 800 billion range, which the original article mentioned. I guess the linked article rounded it up to make it more sensational.

We gotta pay tuition ;)

Does openai make billions?

Sam Altman said they have revenue, but didn't say how much, did he?

We've heard people saying google is making profit on their Ai offering, but I don't think anyone else has their infrastructure with TPUs etc.

To be pedantic, there in no such thing as real money in the current age. It is all conceptual.

I found it weird they say that microsoft is in Silicon Valley.

Thanks for the pointer (and first HN comment!) on shadow QE.

July 2024, https://x.com/stealthqe4/status/1818782094316712148

> We’ve all been wondering where all of this liquidity is coming from in the markets. Stealth QE was being done somehow. Now we have the answer! It’s all in the Treasury increased t-bill issuance. QE has now been replaced by ATI.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22shadow%20qe%22&type=all

For the market capitalization to fall, the price of shares has to fall.

For the price of shares to fall, selling pressure in the market has to outweigh buying pressure. The fact that the price dropped is how we know this is a selloff and not a buyoff.

Based on the body of the article, the headline is using “$X tech selloff” as unintuitive shorthand for “loss of $X of market value in aggregate market capitalization of tech stocks”, not as a reference to trading volume.