Outside a relatively small world of circular investment and FOMO feeding FOMO the general consensus seems to be “let it burn.”

It appears very unlikely we will ever see an IPO of OpenAI. Anthropic appears less doomed, but still iffy at best. Tons of other large, but little discussed, AI startups are just dead-companies-walking at this point.

The likes of AWS are showing good headline numbers but are taking out massive debt to build infrastructure that looks increasingly unneeded. Those with capacity are looking to offload it, quickly. Yes AWS has “committed contracts” for this capacity but if those commitments are with shaky AI startups then it’s mostly just fluff PR and these hyperscalers will get left holding the bag on all this debt.

I would argue we still have not even really gotten started.

What do we have in the decade ahead? Robotics in every household, models 10x+ faster and more intelligent than today.

Really no significant impact in life sciences, R&D, and 'offline' world / robotics today as of yet, which is where most of the value will live.

Of course we know it. It’s been obvious since at least 2023. Everyone in AI oversells, except a few companies that built an actual business with revenue, like Midjourney. There is no AGI coming anytime soon no matter how much hype is being thrown around. We are not in the singularity. However, peak bullshit is NEAR.

> And the fundamentals here are OpenAI and Anthropic, which are massively valued companies. They have humongous commitments and are generating real revenue on the order of twenty billion a year.

I think the size of their commitments is predicated on demand. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate is now close to $50 billion, a fivefold increase from a year before [1]. They are making big investments, like $200 billion on Google's TPUs over the next five years [2], but those numbers seem justified by their expected revenue this year alone. If Anthropic cannot capture that revenue, someone else will.

Stock market valuations are a different beast, I personally think we have been due for a correction for ages now. But criticism of AI investment and particularly betting that it will all come crashing soon appears misguided to me. I can see a future where AI expenditures shifts around, not a future where everyone simply stops spending in AI all of a sudden.

[1] https://www.marketscale.com/industries/software-and-technolo...

[2] https://www.resultsense.com/news/2026-05-06-anthropic-200bn-...

There is something I have been pondering recently. If we compare the cost of AI subscriptions (let's say Claude's 100/month) to a median developer salary (let's say 100k/year to 200k/year), the difference is orders of magnitude. This fills like a gap that needs to close. I suspect llms are too cheap right now but will raise their prices to a point where only big companies will be able to afford subscriptions to use them. I think soon we will see models that are only sold at very high prices.

It's obvious. Most people were expecting this.

I mean we are due our 6-8 year financial crash that we won't learn from. Once again it'll be coming from the USA's feral financial investments all to be bailed out by the tax player whilst the rest of the world picks up the pieces. Maybe its time we moved away from the petro-dollar if the USA can't be trusted to keep its finances in order.

Just before coming to read this article and thread, I read how Hyatt got rid of something like 30% of their call centre staff, and how the industry is gearing for replacing human work with AI.

There is sadly ample fiscal headroom in mundane drone-like work that was being outsourced (still cheaply, I might add) that AI can replace and even do a marginally better job of. I suspect AI prices can even increase and it will still be profitable for enterprises.

Companies like this will certainly keep expanding their AI use, and once they commit to that, there's little stopping them from moving to open models or local inference if need be.

My concern is less over the bubble and more over the social cost of AI. Call centres and the like provide a tremendous number of jobs. As AI moves into enterprises more and more, where are all these people supposed to work? Become baristas? They certainly won't be "learning to code"... What sorts of social and other unrests will this cause?

These forces I think will muddy the waters and make predictions difficult. Say what you want about the AI bubble, but if it pops, it will be different than previous ones. The bubble doesn't even need to burst because of the insane economic model, if enough people are economically devastated by it, it will cause ripple effects of its own.

Note that the “AI Bubble” term used here is only defined in the context of market speculation. If you are not an investor of AI companies then there is nothing to worry about for you. If you are an investor, then you should know that people can’t really predict when bubbles burst. Every prediction in the markets is a speculation and some investors can simply bets against the popular expectations to make good money.

Movements of AI stocks shouldn’t be confused with “AI as a technology” and “AI as a business”. Market valuation is a different game.

> The same thing happened with their massive investment in Anthropic. They accounted for $53.4 billion due to deals with Anthropic last quarter. He said if you follow one Anthropic dollar through the earnings release, it's counted in AI business revenue, chips business, and AWS segment revenue.

That is insane if that is true, is that even legal?

There's a bubble around data centers, mainly. That's fueled by projected demand of AI and assumptions companies make about how the pie for that revenue is going to be divided up.

What's very real is the rapidly growing amount of revenue for both OpenAI and Anthropic. That's already tens of billions per year and growing quite rapidly. Investments against that kind of revenue aren't completely horrible. To a point. But at the multi trillion dollar valuation level, of course there are going to be issues with living up to those expectations.

In my view some of the base assumptions are looking not so solid currently. It's not a given that OpenAI and Anthropic will end up with most of the revenue. The Chinese trust Silicon Valley just about as much as vice versa. Which is why they are doing their own models, chips, and data centers. This is driving a rapid commoditization for things like frontier models, open model weights, and chips. This in turn gives countries outside the US a lot of options to stay independent. Which burst the bubble that all that global revenue was going to flow towards Silicon Valley. Some of that still might. But that will have to happen based on cost and merit.

There are also geopolitical circumstances that cause most data center plans to be bottle necked on permitting, chip shortages, grid connectivity, availability of gas turbines, gas, solar panels, inverters, batteries, water, and other resources. As it turns out, you can't just willy nilly plan for hundreds of GW of data centers and expect those to pop into existence overnight along with all the needed infrastructure. Most of the announced/planned capacity for this will likely not be realized. Certainly not this decade. 5-10% by 2035 would be a lot given all the constraints and scarcity. No amount of reality distortion can change the physical constraints on this topic.

The good news is that most of the money needed for this hasn't been spent yet. And what has been spent won't be going to waste. Up and running data centers are a hot commodity right now. They won't be running idle if a bubble bursts. But probably investors dreaming of multi trillion dollar IPOs might be a bit more cautious now that SpaceX stock is trading well below its IPO value.

The title's clickbait (from The Register, of all people - colour me shocked!).

There's nothing really groundbreaking at all in there, just "chips are expensive, and open weights models hosted locally in enterprise could displace Claude/GPT"

well if bubble pops, everyone will die EXCEPT google

UNLESS openAI/etc actually succeeds in making AGI that never hallucinates and goes over the current LLM limitations

as for google... well they own the web

(+google has plenty of other revenue sources, so it can just pay out its AI survival)

if you're a website owner, would you welcome chatgpt/etc's data-collection bots?

but... as for google's bots... you need your website to be on the Google search results...

The bubble in the US pops maybe. China is only limited by chips, not costs.

> I caution anyone looking at API prices: they dropped the price, but is it actually less expensive?

> Yeah, they dropped the price, but count the number of tokens you're tossing into it and see if it's actually cheaper. It's good for marketing, but the rub is how much you're actually using.

The level of discourse is so horrible now, I don't have words. Are these the ones making predictions on AI bubble?

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