JCM9

You’re getting downvoted because you touched on a sensitive spot with some folks, but you’re right.

If other countries want to stop their reliance on US tech then they need to build better tech. Your BlackBerry quote shows that playing out in reverse. A non-US company dominated the market, a US company built something better (the iPhone) and the non-US company imploded.

Amusing that the bits the “manufacturer asked to be redacted” in the images appear to be the identifiers for common off-the-shelf electronic components, including a standard memory card. Is that really super secret IP?

A lot of banks just have one of those coin counting machine things (like Coinstar but not Coinstar).

Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.

Thanks and fixed. Darn autocorrect.

At this point if you don’t think AI is a bubble then I don’t know what to tell you.

This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins.

Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”

Perplexity is one small iteration away from just a classic AI wrapper.

It was amazing early on in demonstrating what search could be, but frankly there’s not much reason for it to exist much longer.

The big players can, and are, just replicating its core functionality. The moat is gone.

I’d have to agree that they’re probably near the top of the list of companies about to get wiped out by a bubble deflation. Possible they get acquired by some sucker looking to establish AI creds but the market for that has probably passed as Wall Street is becoming super skeptical of all things AI at the moment.

The author isn’t wrong here.

With the Wall Street wagons circling on the AI bubble expect more and more puff PR attempts to portray “no guys really, I know it looks like we have no business model but this stuff really is valuable! We just need a bit more time and money!”

It’s not good, and is a sign the market is getting increasingly bearish on the future of AI from a business standpoint. That doesn’t mean the tech is bad, but these are signs Wall Street is saying the math doesn’t add up here and thus there’s storms building on the horizon.

Coreweave has taken on a ton of debt to pay for everything they’re building. Investors can make money by lending Coreweave money and charging interest (aka a bond).

Separately, investors can buy a derivative product that is a bet that Coreweave won’t be able to pay this money back. This is a called a “credit default swap.” If Coreweave starts missing payments or can’t pay back the loan this instrument pays out.

The price of the instrument is linked to the likelihood that Coreweave won’t be able to repay the money. Given growing questions around their financial business model the price of these derivatives has been rocketing up over the last few months. In plain speak this means the market increasingly thinks Coreweave won’t be able to repay these loans.

Thats mirroring broader Wall Street sentiment these last few months that the math isn’t adding up on AI and all the spend committed isn’t mapping out against money likely to be available to pay for all that. Investors are increasingly making plays for the AI bubble popping and the price of these credit default swaps shooting up is one metric indicative of that downturn positioning.

The data on this is available in various financial data platforms and has been written about by financial news outlets.

Yes, the price of Coreweave default swaps has jumped 53% since October. In the eyes of the bond markets they’re basically toast… a ticking debt bomb waiting to implode.

I’m bullish on AI as tech but folks are starting to sniff out that the financials of everything going on at the moment aren’t sustainable for much longer.

I hope we have more of a “reality correction” than full blown bubble bursting, but the data is increasingly looking like we’re about to have a massive implosion that wipes out a generation of startups and sets the VC ecosystem back a decade.

This would basically start to turn cloud providers into CoLo facilities that just host these servers.

Makes sense longer term for NVidia to build this but adds to the bear case for AWS et al long term on AI infrastructure.

Good article although especially in tech it’s not so simple. Thanks to games with depreciation and other financial engineering a company may look “profitable” but still be quite unhealthy or at risk. One generally needs to look at “profit” in the context of cash flow.

I.e. a company could be “profitable” but also basically broke at the same time with no cash to pay people or suppliers.

The issue is, in part, a concern that ChatGPT responses are often just simple derivations of the original content in ways that wouldn’t be considered fair use.

This sort of thing is pretty trivial to implement from the start, they just chose not to because they wanted the data themselves

Get the popcorn ready for when that all implodes. Most of these folks getting funding don’t have the slightest clue on how to build a sustainable business.

When the bubble pops, and it’s very close to popping, there’s going to be a lot of burning piles of cash with no viable path to reviver that money.

This is BS. It’s like saying “We robbed a jewelry store and sold the jewelry. Now the police are poking around to see if anyone is wearing the jewelry we stole. Blasphemy! But don’t worry we will protect your privacy!”

Of course the Times wants more evidence that the content OpenAI allegedly stole is ending in things OpenAI is selling.

For all the AI slop and studies saying AI is more hype than substance I will say that this use case is one that seems very legit.

The stock photo industry was always pretty bad and silly expensive. Being able to custom generate visuals and photos to replace that is a good use case of AI IMHO. Yes sometimes it does goofy things, but it’s getting quite good. If AI blows up the stock photo industry few will shed a tear.

By low, sell high. Any Nvidia shareholders would be foolish not to sell at least part of their holdings right now. Don’t ride the bubble to the bottom.

With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content.

With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate long term tragedy of the present AI hype cycle. Expect “made by a human” to soon be a tag associated with premium brands and customer experiences.

Nice job! I love these sort of projects.

Boeing had a tough patch, but anyone that follows aviation knows Airbus has had its fair share of massive screw-ups over the years too.

The article is a case study in playing with statistics to give the message you want. A different, and simpler, way of saying the same headline is that it’s much harder for ideas to get investment in the UK.

While the “unicorns per dollar invested” stat looks good the “good ideas killed off because someone didn’t invest” stat looks really bad.

The US market doesn’t pride itself purely on unicorns created, but on the fact that it’s a vibrant ecosystem that invests in ideas even if they might not become a unicorn. That fact seems lost on the meaning of the headline.

We see business go through this cycle a lot. Some new “better cheaper” thing comes along. Everyone implements it to keep up with the Jones’s. Suddenly there’s no differentiation because everyone has it and everyone thinks it sucks. Suddenly going back to some reworked version of the old thing is the new black.

One such example was call centers. In the 2000s implementing a call center in India was all the rage on cost cutting. The customer experience was terrible and suddenly having a US-based call center (the thing companies just abandoned) was now a feature.

I think we’ll see similar things with AI. Everyone will get flooded with AI slop. Folks will get annoyed and suddenly interacting with a real human or a real human writing original content will be a “feature” that folks flock to.

Microcenter feels like going back in time (in a good way). It has a very 90s vibe to it. The staff wear khakis and blue collared shirts. Even the signage uses serif fonts in a way that looks, comfortably, dated. I hope they don’t change.

The medical profession has generally been more open to AI. The long predicted demise of Radiology because of ML never happened. Lots of opportunity to incorporate AI into medical records to assist.

The legal profession is far more at threat with AI. AI isn’t going to replace physical interactions with patients, but it might replace your need for a human to review a contract.

Unfortunately, lawyers make this sort of thing untenable. Partially self-preservation behavior, partially ambulance chasing behavior.

I’m waiting for the billboards “Injured by AI? Call 1-800-ROBO-LAW”

The other problem with free busses is that in NYC people of all income brackets use public transit. That’s rare amongst cities. New Yorkers know that the subway is way faster than a chauffeured SUV for most trips and so you’ll see millionaires riding alongside those of far less means. Folks of all means also use the busses.

The MTA needs money and so making busses free for everyone is silly when many riders can certainly afford to pay. Various means tested approaches are in place and are the sort of thing that generally gets broader support.

The whole “tax the rich” line makes for good stump speeches but doesn’t work in practice. The rich have good accountants that let people avoid most of these ideas.

The “free bus” thing was sort of a classic political move of promising people free stuff and hoping nobody bothers to check if you’d even be in charge of the thing in question. In this case yes the mayor doesn’t control the busses, or any of NYC Transit for that matter.