Topically—the whole reason for the login walls was to fulfill the requirements of their Google/OpenAI data deals. OpenAI wanted to pull up the ladder behind them.

It's a very typical failure mode for publicly-traded companies. For a CEO to have the incentive to do something that will kill their company, in a few quarters' time—in exchange for a one-off windfall that will boost the stock price, CEO compensation, &c. Short-termism at the "eating the golden goose" level.

> [May 2024] "In its IPO prospectus, Reddit revealed that it has contractual agreements to license its data to customers including Google worth a combined over $200 million. And, in its first earnings report as a public company, Reddit reported a 450% year-over-year increase in non-ad revenue, attributable mainly to those agreements."

> "Reddit stock was up 11% in extended trading following the announcement of the OpenAI deal."

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/16/openai-inks-deal-to-train-...

Sample size of one: this decision has resulted in me accessing Reddit exactly zero times since the implementation. And no I will not use the “new” UI.

This has actually been a time saver, and I haven’t missed it even for research. In fact it’s made me realize just how bad Reddit was as a source for research, these days. It’s all bots and activists with an axe to grind.

Not sure the required-login thing is at fault here at least at scale.

I myself do way more searches in "<question> on Reddit" and then just look at the AI generated response from Google Gemini.

Zero clicks.

I assume you mean the already-imposed login-wall for old.reddit.com? AFAIK the login-wall for everything hasn't started rolling out.

Didn't they sign a huge deal with Google a while back to let them train on reddit data? Did they not understand that if their content was in google ai google would send them less traffic?

Or the site being infested with bots and generally getting slowly shittier?

I haven't used it for months since the admins permabanned by 15 year old account for citing a controversial wikipedia article directly related to a controversial UK news story on a UK news subreddit.

Kinda annoyed me because I am more aligned with the normie take and was just steel-manning in good faith – which was clear from my comment and made clear again in my appeal.

To be fair though, apparently there are topics which are not allowed to be discussed on Reddit and I naively didn't realise this.

Because AI cost fears here likely refer to companies responsible for AI buildout and use.

PCs dropping in volume can signal better AI demand.

Oh, my takeaway was "everyone's entertaining themselves by talking to AI models rather than browsing other sites" 'cuz.. that's what I'm doing? I find myself watching YouTube less and engaging less with Reddit because it's just more fun living in my own little creative self-exploration bubble of AI + memory of my past convos.

Some good news!

Or: We put up with your shit but something better just came along.

I think Google's lock on search was coming to an end anyway. They enshittified so much the last few years that most people I know started looking elsewhere. Of course the masses take much longer because they're more stuck in their habits but I think the writing is on the wall anyway.

The biggest issue is that a site that pays to be on top of the search results is usually not the one the user is looking for.

Except the other models/harnesses can already search the web. The only reason why I still end up on google is if I need to check the spelling of a word ("Didn't you mean xyz instead?") or for very quick and small checks ("Number of inhabitants in X city")

If I need to _really_ search, something that would take comparing multiple links, I go to Claude/ChatGPT directly.

Just yesterday, I was looking for a small tool, I didn't really know the name, but had a picture. My first reflex has been to paste the picture in Claude, and ask it to find me places where I could buy it, that delivered in my country.

Yeah us too. Just keep using the same hardware for a while longer is what they're saying. That's fine for me, 3 years was too short a cycle anyway. And lenovo's ThinkPad range have been getting much worse. My T490s still had a great keyboard but my T14s gen3 is terrible. Almost no travel and no feel to it.

If it were up to me I would have kept the 490s but they insisted on replacing it :(

Maybe than Google Search, but not than the Internet.

I switched to engaging more actively on Lemmy. But it's funny how many comments like this there are in this thread, kinda makes me happy I wasn't the only one who couldn't deal with the forced log in bullshit.

We still need all the grid enhancements, just not for the data centers communities don’t want.

In many places if people charge their car and run the AC on a hot day the grid struggles. So the grid investment won’t go unused if AI implodes.

> In 2008 the USA managed to export the shit assets generated by the mortgage boom, mostly to Europe

I didn't know about this. How did it work?

If Europe was able to muddle though the 2009 financial crash, then the US will be able to muddle through the next one. Cause that's just what you have to do.

To me this feels peak doomerism, and frankly tiring. The consequences of a total disaster are laid out in big detail but the possible causes leading to the disaster are...assumed and literally not addressed in the comment.

I mean, the premise is "who's going to get wiped[...]?", but the harder question is why would they? And that answer is not trivial because these companies are actually generating money and are competitive. The people and investors running these companies and investing are also not just standing still.

I think one can assume these companies are all a massive scam, but having used LLMs in my day to day every day from the very same companies this article talks about, I don't feel so. I only see the integration of intelligence becoming deeper, and even if cheaper per unit(token), many more tokens will be required. Productivity unlocked is further unlocking business and social opportunities we are only now exploring and getting to know. In the very essence it is very easy to see how this will turn out badly: after all a collapse passes all the known floors on the way down, but we have no idea where we are going up with this technology. I don't buy the comparison with the dotcom bubble because it is very easily falsified by simple metrics as the profitability of these technologies in the present. In the dotcom companies were not profitable, and many other counter examples disprove the comparison applicability. I will not even comment on the comparison with the subprime loans which were related to real estate, which has very little unknown upside.

Anyway, have some faith people this is hacker news, and with LLMs I never was able to do so much cool tinkering in my whole life. I have custom modifications on my gnome shell, I have privately developed file servers, I have automations that make use of my rooted TV, I have a prototype web page to help my folk's small business. I am able to support and learn from the LLM about topics that would be too expensive to get input from. For example with a calibrated microphone the LLM generated the custom equalized bands for my type of amplituner. It looked at a picture of my living room and suggested moving certain furniture like the curtains and measure it. With LLMs I was able to take pictures of nice rugs in the internet and visualize them in my living room before actually buying to great effect. So many possibilities... Focusing on the known unknowns is the easy part, let us have our imaginations run wild and let the whimsical hacker spirit return.

> The big question is: who's going to get wiped, and what will that mean?

The end of democracy, that's what all of this is about and why we've seen so many of the super rich build private bunkers or buy entire private islands, talking about shock collars for their staff to keep them from rising up. They're preparing.

You shall own nothing and rent everything, and the easiest way to achieve that is to wipe out everyone's retirement savings.

> Chip producers (Tiawan SK) will also get burned.

They'll be fine. They already got paid, and if the AI bubble crashes, there's years of pent up consumer demand just waiting for affordable slots at the chip fabs.

> Basically the USA will be looking at a great depression.

The US is looking at a return to medieval times. Rich elites lording over the poor masses.

Alternatively, we'll see World War 3. It's notable enough that most countries have slowly risen the temperature on disaster preparedness, even those not in direct line of fire of Russia.

Concerning from one POV, for sure. But from another, hooray putting money into R&D instead of hoarding cash reserves.

I doubt it, and from what I hear it's the opposite. I sat with a potential client just today that had a sort of working mess of vibe coded stuff to handle parts of his business (one man show). He was now looking for a proper solution to replace because it took too much time to maintain, it was unstable, etc. He wanted something that just works that he can rely on.

I think a lot of SaaS tools have a great future. But they will require less engineers to build.

What happens? Then folks move on and build other businesses.

It’s been sort of funny to watch the tech industry realize that the main thing being disrupted by AI is tech itself.

> which Intel doesn't manufacture.

Doesn't manufacture anymore*.

This company has been run so far into the ground over the last 15 years. Such a fall from grace, with so many decisions that just seem to never be correct.

For the record, "the future" you are describing is running a tiny LLM from 2 years ago.

Those on-device weights are horribly outdated, underperform for their size, and cannot be updated to use a different model. I don't think Nvidia is afraid of Taalas.

Intel and NVIDIA aren't hoarding GPUs in data centers. You can buy them if you have money, but billionaires are hoarding money.

That sort of thing did happen in the past though. Complicated engineering operations scaled up in months and years. Immediate post war era saw massive buildout of university engineering departments, more PhDs minted than ever before.

The fact we have so much latent demand and aren't getting these benefits right now is depressing. Where is our silico-industrial buildout? Why is our federal government cutting unversity research funding, and not expanding it to train more PhDs to run in demand fabs? We are being led by short thinking greedy assholes is why.

I’m actually not sure where the gap is, in the US, on foundries. It might be more like people with a bachelors and some experience.

We could also maybe use more semiconductor physics PhDs?

EUV, or EUVL, no?

The upcoming cards for local inference use LPDDR (which is also not immune to the shortage) - but maybe it's time Intel gets back to its roots and produce some memory chips. CXL Optane would also shine as a KV cache store.

>> You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand.

> I don't know if anyone told you, but GDDR is included in the current RAM shortage

    My understanding is that the 2025 RAM shortage
    did not cause the 2022/2023 ARC shortages.

Even with insane memory prices, 16GB of GDDR7 is ~$200-300 at most. That by itself isn't responsible for GPU prices to explode. The fabs are just producing more profitable chips, so everything else becomes more expensive as they compete for a much smaller remaining capacity at TSMC.

Definitely not just a memory problem.

>> You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand.

> Intel was at best breaking even and likely making a loss on each ARC card.

How do we know that?

It is true that Intel's AXG segment sustained a loss in 2022. But AXG included the ARC line, the HPC lines (CPU, GPU) and other AI support components.

Further complicating the 2022 numbers, most of the AXG revenue that year was intersegmental; Intel was selling to itself. In 2023, Intel reorganized and moved ARC into CCG. ARC P&L was buried and outside analysts were unable to even guess whether ARC was turning a profit or a loss.

ref: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/50863/00000508632300...

https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/intc-doubling-down-agai...

This guy is seriously evil. He has just absolutely speedran becoming a POS. No surprise him and Musk fight.. they're fighting to see who can hurt humanity the quickest.

Isn’t this just capitalism in practice?

Let’s not forget the fed raised rates but kept them unchanged this time even though they clearly need to raise them further.

In general it’s an earnings story though I agree.

It’s rather obvious that if the dems take the senate and the congress next week, it will be fight for survival for the ruling top, with Trump at the top spot, as they will be looking at a very real possibility of getting trialed and jailed.

Given what Trump did when he lost the election, we can bet that whatever comes now will be way way more nasty and disruptive.

Then, if the dems don't win, it will imply a massive scale of election fraud, which too will stir sh*t in another, but equally significant way.

So one way or another, the market volatility is all but guaranteed, and a significant market slide is also very likely as people will be parking in cash/gold for a while. And weak tech earnings is just the right trigger.

Some of it is also just political fighting making it inconvenient to sign contracts and do work specifically right now. Even places that have favorable build out plans for data centers have strong fears on moving forward with them with how much political ads are using them as a focus.

Good news on that front is that political fighting typically evaporates with the campaigns. Bad news, of course, is that it typically comes back with them. So contracts have to be executed stupid quick.

Which flat out makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration to give a good faith attempt at executing and honoring what came before.

Apologies, I didn't mean that at a personal level. Obvious the conversation here is happening. I was more gesturing at the national media which is basically eggshell walking around this admin.

Interesting enfough, wave years tend not to produce much of this post-election bump. And often a small near term dip followed by a muted year

But let’s consider what causes a wave. Economic anger.

> Stocks going up has been so normal for so long that it doesn't get much press. Any significant drop is way more newsworthy.

It's true that stocks tend to go up, but it's also true that large daily moves are pretty close to 50/50. It's brownian motion with a trend. The drops really do get more press than the spikes, and I don't think it's because they're less common, it's because negative news catches more attention.

Well it's proven its worth to me by now.

I wasn't convinced the first year or two. Too much hallucination, too little sense to really be useful.

But now it helps me like an assistant. It researches stuff for me and keeps me on track. I have ADHD so I have trouble with that and I procrastinate starting things because the first steps are boring. It really helps me with that and as a result I get way more done.

What it doesn't do is doing everything for me, it's really an enabler more than anything. I'm not a software developer so YMMV.

Economically though, I won't spend more than 20-30 bucks a month on it. Neither will my employer (even that much for all our employees is already tens of millions a year) So how they're going to get those trillions back I don't really know.

i thought youtube is taking off like crazy due to reduced attention span for tv/movies.

I love my Steamdeck but I've never found the argument for Linux gaming very compelling when it explicitly hinges on running Windows emulator software. It's really just an argument for consoles. PC gaming isn't really a good idea because PCs aren't really a good idea, and with the PCs, the big 3 OSes aren't really a good idea either. Salvage the kernels and build narrow, bespoke things without all the cruft.

And yet every time you get on a MacOS thread, there's always some easy command line fix to some obvious problem. And it's the same in Windows, except it's a PowerShell command or just jump into the registry. People just ignore that though.

> Microsoft has lost their moat

I think it's a little more complicated than that, there was a submission about it earlier [0], where the author argued:

> EACv2 can't accept self-signed kernels and bootloaders, that would defeat the purpose. This means that, in order to play Fortnite on Linux, you will be forced to use a distribution that Epic approves of, with a bootloader that Epic approves of. This almost guarantees that anyone not running RedHat software is shit out of luck. But it gets worse. [...] Microsoft gets to decide what Linux distributions will run Fortnite. [...]

> Microsoft, the company that, has throughout its entire history, thrived on first controlling the competition to destroy them. They even coined a term for it: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". [...] You might as well install Windows at that point.

[0] news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298563

I can only imagine it's a small slice of users that are skipping the first party API's of the big labs to use openrouter instead.

I was going to echo the same. I'm less bothered by the hype than the vagueness of it all. Use AI, management doesn't know what for, figure it out. Also, prove productivity gains somehow, we're not sure how to do that, figure that out as well. Figure out AI security too, we saw a scary article about that.

I dare say my retirement would appreciate the buying opportunity a bear market would afford, provided I get to stay employed.

The depth of the current bubble extends way beyond a handful of nameplate AI companies.

The insane spending has effectively been acting as a nationwide stimulus for construction, the trades, hardware feeders, electronics companies, energy companies and then the downstream effects of the affluent class ("The 25%") spending more as they see their investments grow.

The economy is a net, not a whack-a-mole.

Agreed, the reckoning will come sooner or later. Better sooner.

> Personally, I don't think a bubble burst will be much fun, but hey.

Agreed, but if there is a bubble, then bursting sooner rather than later is probably the better outcome.

> Many people are tired of watching the world slowly getting worse

It does seem like in the past 10-15 years the timeline has gone pretty dark.

Well, their future pensions are invested in these companies...

Losing trillions in market value isn't a minor correction. It's a rout.

I don't see how the cost of inferencing existing models can become prohibitive. Multiple providers are selling DeepSeek 4.1 Flash tokens at just above cost, and seem to be doing so profitably.

What we do potentially lose out on are the next few generations of models in the case of a market correction, as the big labs won't be able to afford training anymore.

Cost won't become prohibitive, it'll trend towards utility.

I feel very confident making the assertion that if you work a white collar job, and cannot find $200/mo worth of value in the current crop of SOTA models/agents, you probably don't actually know how to wield their abilities.

For those who do, the models could be worth upwards of $5,000 month easy.

Sp500. It was at 6300-6400 at one point this year.

I personally have dumped everything into money market funds. That should give you somewhere between 3 and 4% return assuming you're using a dollar one.

Into bonds, yeah

Try asking it about a sporting event or score. It literally just makes shit up. I asked it Tuesday if there was a world series game; it told me with complete confidence there wasn't and that Milwaukee was leading the series 2-1 after losing the night before.

Agreed. I have no doubt I could throw curveballs at it, but it has been getting things mostly correct for a while. And the fact that I can follow up with a direct challenge is kind of nice.

I'm in the same place. I hate how AI is being shoved into everything... But I feel like I'm living in a completely different reality than the people who find the Google bot useless.

Though, most of the time I use it to find a reference and ignore the AI summary. Or to put a label on a topic I'm pretty sure exists but don't have a name for (e.g., "<insert problem statement here>. I'm pretty sure this is a known problem in <insert domain here>. Is there a name for it and what is the most recent literature?"

Or will confidently assert something that 1 person speculated about on Reddit

That is the correct way to use a knowledge retrieval chatbot. The problem here is the AI companies present them as these all-knowing things, and they're so new that most people do not know how to use them effectively (sort of like how Google-Fu was a superpower 20 years ago).

Taking a response at face value is just asking for trouble; they're useful primarily for finding references. The summaries are a good way of prioritizing what to read, and if nothing else the documents it cites tend to be relevant.

The people who get burned by these things are the ones who just blindly trust the generated text.

Also some of the skill is learning to feel out when you can trust it and when you can't, but if you're just starting out, always assume the bullshit machine is generating bullshit.

They don't have anyone who fights for the consumer. They just make things and rename it all the time. No one knows what their thing is called today

It seems to basically one-shot off of the top X search results. If you ask it a spec I would expect it to be quite reliable. If you try to use it for anything with nuance it will typically fall on its face.

It has at least improved with the second category recently that it seems to be more right than wrong. But it still tends to work your query into whatever results it got, which makes it downright dangerous for when people are doing searches on health-related information.

It's also multi-modal, right?

Google search was a breath of fresh air 25 years ago, it became shit. AI will go the same way.