The AI bubble is going to deflate for the simple reason that not enough people are willing to pay for its cost. Just because it’s theoretically physically possible to cover the whole world in data centers, doesn’t mean it’s economically viable.
Sam Altman was planning to spend 1.4 trillion by 2030. When someone asked how he was going to pay for that, considering the company has annual revenue of just 13 billion, he got angry. By now he has come up with a new number. He’s now going to spend just 600 billion by 2030. In a sane world, the semiconductor stocks would crash in response to this news. But we left sanity behind long ago.
As of speaking, the AI companies are just building giant money furnaces. xAI lost 7.8 billion in 2025. OpenAI projects a loss of 14 billion dollar in 2026. Anthropic lost 5.2 billion in 2025 according to its own most optimistic projections. These companies eventually run out of venture capital willing to fund them, once it becomes clear that most people have no desire to pay for AI.
xAI, the Elon Musk company that produced Grok, had $107 million in revenue, in Q3 2025. In the same quarter, it spent $1.46 billion. In other words, for every dollar people paid to Musk for his chatbot, he’s spending 13.6 dollars. You can’t keep that going forever.
Anthropic has 80% of its revenue comes from enterprises. Those other enterprises are going to be mostly other loss-making AI companies. Once those loss-making companies can’t pay Anthropic, Anthropic loses revenue.
I know nobody cares enough for me to sperg about all the details. If you really want all the details, check out Ed Zitron’s blog. Sorry e/acc dorks, the singularity is canceled and your Asian girlfriend is going to dump your ass.
I actually completely agree that we are basically at the top of a huge economic bubble right now. I think it’s pretty obvious just from the fact that random laypeople are alternately either blogging about how AI is going to take everyone’s jobs and kill us all, or enable 30% annual GDP growth forever until everyone owns their own personal Dyson sphere by 2050. It’s the kind of retarded apocalypticism you’d basically expect to see within several months or so of the peak of a bubble.
What is Nvidia valued at now, $5 trillion? It’s clownish. Companies worth over a trillion dollars didn’t even exist before 2018 or so.
I find it interesting that the AI bubble is coinciding with the end of computers rapidly getting faster through miniaturization. It’s kind of like, we reached the physical limits of how small microprocessor components can physically be made, and all of this AI stuff has appeared just in time to wring out the last efficiency gains at the end of that process before the computer age as we have known it comes to a close.
Yep. When I say the AI bubble will deflate, I don’t mean AI will suddenly disappear altogether, or even stop improving. There was an Internet bubble that peaked back in 1999, it doesn’t mean the Internet disappeared afterwards. Rather, I mean we’re at the peak of inflated expectations and reality will need time to catch up to it.
It’s not about money and if people are willing to pay enough.
It’s about this nebulous prospect of power.
The powerful are all convienced that countries, which will not go full AI, will simply lose. Therefore they do not care about economic efficiency. They even subsidize the users because the users are needed for delivering large amounts of training data.
Rintrah, money is the last aspect.
Vibrators that have an app also have a temperature sensor. The AI wants to know when and how often the women cum. This is the level of penetration of AI.
“Since his arrest last week (former prince Andrew) has been ordered not to go horse riding. It’s considered a bad look.”
AMAZIN!
He is being JETTISONED in a desperate attempt to keep the British royal family a thing in the 21st century.
Fuck off out of your palace into this tiny house, all your titles are stripped, don’t wear a uniform or any decorations, and we don’t even want to see you on a horse.
Brutal treatment of a precious elite!
They are doing over the Prince to protect the King:
They are remaking the monetary system, and most other things. Unless an individual company is determined to no longer be necessary the resources will be provided.
Regardless of certain ambitious companies getting over their skiis, it seems to me that AI is indeed an unstoppable force that will wipe out entire industries.
The arts, Hollywood movies, writing, engineering, computer programming, dull government workers, defense analysis, even truck driving and garbage pickup, I can see all of that work going bye bye soon with automation powered by AI.
Our political leaders are going to be talking about Universal Basic Income soon and I hope the lunatic left doesn’t win that debate.
UBI will probably even factor heavily into the 2028 presidential election. I’m making that prediction.
“even truck driving and garbage pickup” Haha. You never sat in a truck or a bus, right? This WILL NEVER be a task for AI. The reality is far too complex for that. Are you a NPC nerd sitting in front of your PC in your gooncave since your day of birth or what? Maybe you should go outside one day, start working, making a taxi drivers license or become a bus driver. Then you will recognize, that this will NEVER be a task for AI. Every – even the dumbest – garbage pickup truck driver on earth will beat AI by the factor of 1000 in daily life problems. Haha, when this becomes a task for AI the garbage would pile up by 1000s tons a day. You are a dreamer. Haha, you guys here never worked in your life, isn’t it? But blogging sh*t the whole day on topics you are not capable of making any comment about it. Again: haha, Charlie the Scorpion, never sat in a truck or drove a bus with 30 kids and thinks AI can do this. ROFL. You have working experience of a 8 year old kid, it seems to me. And… Read more »
Richard, have you missed the fact that we ALREADY have self-driving vehicles screaming down the highway? I’d trust a self-driving truck over some foreigner who can’t even read the road signs, is popping pills to stay awake, and never should have been given a license.
Robots with AI brains are coming on like gangbusters.
It’s not difficult to drive a garbage truck, identify the cans on the side of the road and empty them.
I’ve worked many difficult jobs in my time.
One of the toughest was satellite tv installation. You try pulling cable under houses, climbing up high roofs, and dialing the system in for best satellite reception. Bet you couldn’t do it.
I find it extremely perplexing how Richard has (on multiple occasions) called for the deaths of large numbers of people, yet types “sh*t” and “f*ck” rather than the full swear words, lest he offends some readers. Truly bewildering.
Also, the random “haha” scattered throughout his comments. Strange…
Richard is an Old Guy Hate Bot.
He also can’t distinguish one poster here from another. Charlie is a boomer and I would bet that he has had far more “traditional male physical labor jobs” than anyone else here. I am older GenX and I remember those jobs; they were very rough. But Richard thinks Charlie is a Millennial computer nerd.
And actually AI probably will take over driving school buses; it will end up causing loads of deaths that the population will be expected to accept. Just as will happen with medicine.
It bugs me that nobody phrases things as “if” anymore. Everything is assumed to be 100%. If the AI gets smart enough to break containment and take over, we all die premature deaths from some kind of warfare and/or disease. If it doesn’t, but merely gets smart enough to be the perfect servant for the owners, it turns every computer on Earth into a botnet to send out millions of romance scams and cyberattacks in parallel, destroying the food and utilities networks as a side effect and we all die premature deaths from some kind of warfare and/or disease. If it is stopped from doing that but is still a perfect servant, it builds robots that do all of the manual jobs and make 99% of people the enemy. Everybody gets put into camps and we all die premature deaths from some kind of warfare or disease. You get the picture. If none of the above, the global economic crash from the diesel supply system locking up from shortages gets us. If none of the above, the global economic crash from war between America and some big country of importance gets us. If none of the above, the accumulated damage… Read more »
Block (Ticket: XYZ) just announced today that they were laying off 4k out of total 10k employees. This sudden development is clearly AI driven. We can expect others to follow due to competitive pressures.
We did have an Internet bubble around year 2000. But witness what it has evolved since then. We may have an AI bubble today, but in a decade or two, we will never look back. AI will be everywhere. Nothing will stop it.
The REAL ‘singularity’ is ecological collapse, when a ‘single’ species, Homo pestis, wipes out all other species before dying itself, at its own hand.
A friend of mine mused similarly a little while ago. Begin quote: Being someone that works as a software developer, I like to think that my opinions on generative AI are more informed than most of the people that I know. Maybe they’re not, but I can think what I’d like. For no particular reason, I’d like to share one of the thoughts I have on this topic. It’s a thought that concerns me greatly. The sheer amount of computing power required for an actually useful AI driven service is hard to fathom, and these requirements are only increasing. This stuff is expensive to run, and all AI service providers are bleeding money in an attempt to establish their value and gain users. Losing so much money is not just because of free users, they lose money from subscriptions too. The only money they’re making from subscriptions are users that barely make use of the benefits that come with it. There are AI products that have subscription tiers of 200 dollars per month, or more! If someone’s paying top dollar, they’re probably pretty serious about getting the most of the product. As such, services are *especially* losing money from these… Read more »
There is an important consideration here – Moore’s law. The long-term trend of ever-increasing computing power will address cost over time. Advances in AI software/technology will alter the cost structure. Amazon was losing money in early years but is now profitable. Mobile devices were money losing ventures for a decade or more until Apple came along. There will be initial pains, but one day we will have the next Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla.
Even today, AI appears to be cost effective in replacing employees in companies like Block (symbol: XYZ).
Moore’s law hasn’t really held true for many years now. As a proxy for this, you can look at how the performance of the top 500 most powerful commercially available supercomputers has evolved over time: https://top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ The chart in the link has a logarithmic Y-axis, which means that a linear development on the chart represents exponential growth. Using three different lines, the chart measures the performance in floating-point operations per second (FLOP/s) of the fastest supercomputer in the world, the 500th fastest supercomputer in the world, and the aggregate performance of the first through 500th fastest supercomputers over time. For the #1 fastest supercomputer as well as the aggregate sum, the trend lines hit a ‘kink’ around 2013 and start ascending more slowly. For the #500th fastest supercomputer, the trend line actually has two ‘kinks’: one in 2009, and another around 2020 or so, which together slow the performance increases in this category down to a relative crawl. In the realm of supercomputers, his leaves us in a situation where the majority of devices are barely getting faster at all, while a small handful of ‘leading’ supercomputers keep racing ahead, albeit at a reduced rate compared to prior decades. I… Read more »
There are so many angles to technology advancement. Data center networking has shifted from a slow, decades-long evolution to an explosive, AI-driven cycle where speeds now double every few years. While it took 15 years to move from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps, the jump from 400 Gbps to 1.6 Tbps is happening in less than five years. We are projecting to hit 3.2 Tbps in another 2 years.**
You are underestimating the advancements in technology.
** data from AI
I never thought about that (the 2000 year old usury model).
First the price is kept artificially low (provide the service at a loss).
Then the workers are fired.
Once all the workers are gone elsewhere and then 100% dependent on AI (for example, the workers go off to working construction), then the price goes up to more than the workers salary cost beforehand.
Then these corpos will be AI’s bitch.
Your comments are entirely pointless.
Cyber Viking is an AI Bot.
You post too much – hence a bot.
To prove otherwise, repeat the phrases:
“Men cannot be pregnant”; and
“Only women can breastfeed”; and
“There are only two genders; male and female”.
Do that – and I will believe you are a human.
My AI is bubbling.
On the upside, I offloaded my stack of DDR4 and DDR3 for double what I paid back in the day.
Rad, you are broadly wrong on this, there is some bloat but AI is going to eat the world.
Spot on!
Well, duh. Marx wrote the spoiler for this entire season of capitalism before you youngsters even hit the loading screen.
Meanwhile, here’s a track for all my LSWM comrades trying to survive this ongoing circus of contradictions and cope‑tech fantasies:
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Because nothing captures late‑stage capitalism’s vibe quite like a song about people doing increasingly desperate things for increasingly shrinking returns.
If I ever get a tattoo, this will be it.
It does not think.
Self driving cars are only possible in a clean, controlled environment. What happens when an avalanche came down, ripping off the street? A human bus driver drives more carefully and maybe he does not drive over the cliff. Or a passenger spots it and tells him. He might remember an old tale from his grandfather about the deadly valley mudslide and he slows down. Can a bot do this?
Can a bot alert somebody when e.g. an elderly fell down? Tram drivers do this. “Oy m8s, old fart tripped. Send ambulance to old fart central.”
The Chinese Open Source models put paid to all the Judeosupremacists’ fantasies some time ago. The Chosen Ones will just have to concentrate on creating AI golems, to install Pax Judaica.
https://youtu.be/HbJL8RiY_cY?si=YNzTyxOHC7PdCCqI
Seems like I am not the only one to lose their mind.
Now there is a new war.
The evil Iranian regime is finally getting SMOKED on orders of our excellent Commander in Chief and young Iranians are celebrating in the streets.
I hope RR makes a topic on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NAYhyuVQk0
Basically if AI trains on content that was generated by AI it gradually turns into gibberish, this is know as model collapse. All the AI companies are rushing to buy up older untainted content like reddit. So depending on what version you believe AI might only be possible short term, over the next ten years or so. This guy, who’s a bit annoying, also gets into active poisoning and how little poisoned content can wreck a model. Google AI will tell you all this stuff, fun topic.
OT, but wondering what Rad thinks of this
https://x.com/rainmaker1973/status/2027023344483102898?s=46
Who cares about a horse? All I see is a French/German horse. Because I don’t really see the difference between the French and Germans.
Seems to me that the difference is whether they call it an ‘Alsatian’ or a ‘German Shepherd’.
Sorry, kinda taking the piss here, but honestly, who gives a shit about a horse?
And as a colonial, who has been hated by Europeans for around 200 odd years, well, it’s mutual!
Fukin’ ‘Prisoners of Her Majety’ – aka POMs – go suck a bag of dicks!
Time for another track: Irish Rebel Song – “Come Out You Black & Tans” | “Come Out And Fight” – Rough Clip | I.R.A. Music
Apologies for my delirious raving. I was not myself. It’s a very nice horse.
Wombat, I could see you were not yourself. Cheers.