'Big Short' Investor Expects AI Bubble Burst 'Sooner Than Later'
9 days ago by return2ozma to c/technology
Exactly this. If you hear people talking about investments around the Thanksgiving table, its time to bail. All the smart people got in months ago and have left, they are just looking for bag holders now.
Lmao, I think all the smart people avoided investing in AI in the first place š
Why would someone ask a person to explain an AI response they didnāt understand? Like, youāve already offloaded the most important part from a human brain (getting a fucking answer)ā¦ Why wouldnāt you at least then ASK THE AI TO REPHRASE AND SUMMARIZE the response you didnāt understand? Thatās the thing itās actually good at doing ffs.
When the normies are trying to invest in AI, theyāre the last to invest and know to throw money at it
They are also the largest group by far. Doesn't really mean much aside from the fact that adoption is now widespread.
I don't think it's going to add up to a trillion dollars a year though, lol.
AI and the Enshittification Era w/ Cory Doctorow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw
I donāt think itās going to add up to a trillion dollars a year though, lol.
It will. The real question is - what will be the price of a loaf of bread in the multi-trillion dollar economy?
nope. their capex alone is going to destroy them, then their investors will realize they're all fucked and the real fun will begin
The CEO of SoftBank says they need five trillion a year.
...to "meet demand." ...
He's saying "there is no bubble."
You'd think he would know better...
If AI is so good they should try asking it that. See where that ends up.
Oh, great, thanks! You're a real lifesaver. [Proceeds to pay more than he would have paid for the real developer, to spend more time to create vibe-coded tech-illiterate trash.]
Thatās the great AI grift, by the time you realize itās not working, you already spent your money.
All you got is some half baked product that kind of works maybe. But how do you deploy and support it especially when it goes wrong?
How do you recover the system? And get AI to patch the system and do the next release? And guarantee it all works because now your customers are angry and demanding it just work tomorrow.
Maybe, maybe not. Bitcoin circa 2017 underwent a similar transformation and if you avoided that investment you would have missed a big opportunity. Time will tell but mass awareness isn't the predictor.
AI is obviously a bubble.
That said, Burry has also predicted 6 of the last 2 crashes.
He got Tesla wrong. Very hard to underestimate meme stocks.
Does anyone expect a large business to not fail when theyve been as poorly run as Tesla?
Also can we talk about how Musk seemingly is propping up all his companies with the values of his other investments? And that most of that money is government contracts?
More like 20. Besides, most of these articles are just reporters misunderstanding Burry's trades. Guy is a trader, in and out. By time you know his positions, he's sold and moved on.
Calling a bubble is easy.
Calling the top of the bubble or the bottom of the crash is the more or less impossible part.
It could very well be a bubble, and come crashing down to a low point that is still higher than it is today.
I agree in principle. Itās getting harder to believe that is possible at this point.
A combination of 1) companies maturing their AI policy and ending the āinfinite play timeā model most have had since 2021 e.g. cutting spending and 2) open source and open parameter models becoming better and better and cheaper. Data centers will still be in demand for #2 but the ai providers will hurt.
I donāt follow this extremely closely, but didnāt most companies end number 1 at least 6+ months ago?
Some have, most haven't. And those that have had mostly adopted the philosophy of "Every token spent is a a token spent well; except the ~10% of staff that abuse/misuse them".
And with that philosophy, you naturally want to set the per-person budget at around the 90th highest spender. Which is what most did (some version of it).
So very few companies have actually set a truly restrictive policy. Just a "don't abuse this" policy. But that will change IMO.
Just like this ābubbleā has supposedly been about to pop for years.
Burry is going by hard numbers and making a rational call. The markets are not rational, which is why it is hard to predict the timing of a crash. There are no good reasons why TSLA should be over $30.
He's a good person to heed for safe, longer term investment.
I own a beer bar, and we work with some friends who have a catering business that does pop ups on our patio. They've been using AI to generate flyers and then tag us to have us share them to our larger audience. I stopped doing it because they look like trash, get low engagement, and are off brand for our art-inspired space. They got upset with me that we weren't helping promote, and I explained my position on their AI flyers, and they sent a very lengthy email back about how AI is being utilized by small businesses in ways that we're still scratching the surface to understand its value. I popped the email into chatgpt and asked if it wrote that email and it said it did, lol. Now I have more work on my hands to design their flyers for them, but it's worth it.
it's so bizarre to me that people who work with food don't realize that the ai trash is producing images that are REVOLTING, do not look like food, and actively deter people from their products.
you'd be better off with a half lit shitty polaroid of actual food than putting that trash on your branding, so much of it is nightmare fuel
You're definitely right, the food looks so phony. The thing that's wild is half the time they make a flyer, there's only bricks of yellow text on a black background that's too much info to read. I'm visiting San Francisco right now and saw a pizza shop last night that their entire menu was AI garbage and was so shocked how prevalent it's become.
I used to work in a wine store. Customers would always joke āhahaha i just pick them by the label šā and I would always say. Thatās not stupid, wine is about aesthetics. Someone who makes good wine will appreciate the value of a good label. And the inverse is true, people with poor taste wonāt care about their label, but they wonāt be able to make good wine, either.
Iām saying judge a book by its cover. How else are you gonna know whatās in the book without looking at its cover??
. . . You're supposed to open the book . . .
big fan of Our Daily Red because it doesn't give my wife migraines lol.
valid points all over.
I had a friend in Uni who studied food science. She went on to work in marketing a a sculptor for advertisements. They sculptures were hand crafted to look delicious but would have been completely inedible, if anyone was stupid enough to eat them.
It is an art form and unfortunately a lot of people fail to appreciate art.
/me tries to eat the chiseled from marble pie.... ooh, this tastes like owies
Itās always an āitās inevitableā argument.
I mean, it literally does though. The email sounded phony AF, especially knowing that the person's first language isn't English and it was overly proper sounding. I copy and pasted it into chatgpt and said "did you write this email?ā and it's response was" yes, based on the writing style and phrasing, I wrote this content."
I've been using ChatGPT a bit at work lately, since they've already paid for the subscription for everyone. I've learned that it is a bad idea to ask it any leading question, because it is likely to just give you the answer you want to hear.
It's not deterministic.
This is the first thing about LLMs always, and what most people can't seem to understand.
LLMs are a thing where you give an input and get an output, and it happens to correspond to reality much of the time. But there's no actual understanding there.
It does not remember things it made, so no. It doesn't work that way.
It doesn't remember but that won't keep it from answering a question as to whether it thinks an email was AI generated. It'll also be happy to confidently answer a question with a wrong answer to.
A usual ramen spot I've been going to for the past few years for some reason replaced the old images of the food on their menu with AI-gen ones and it looked so weird. I saw it last time I went for my usual, but I kept looking at the art and like a Lovecraftian horror the longer I looked at it the worse the details appeared. It literally affected my appetite because psychologically I couldn't help but think I was ordering some freak-ass food as depicted in the new ai-gen pictures, and the ramen just didn't taste as good to me that day. And I don't think I'll go back anymore :(
You should tell them
The amount of food menus with it on is ridiculous. If you sell food you want it to look good, appetizing etc, so making it look like plastic tat is counter effective.
Second I immediately think they either don't care or are uninterested in their product. That makes me question how much they care about their food, safety quality taste etc. It's an immediate no for me.
I recently read a decent article (in Danish mind you), focused on the positions some volunteers had from getting more fans to their local football club... Because they now posted stuff on Facebook.
Then followed up by an expert on engagement, and statistics on about half the population felt AI image generations to be off putting - And a fair chunk of the remainder not really caring, and a small minority finding it cool/useful.
That experts main position, was the human touch was lost and the volunteer of the local football club would most likely get more people to stadium if they asked a bunch of 2nd graders to draw match day posts.
Because it would genuinely connect to people. So yeah, a lot of smaller businesses and volunteers are currently having a feeling all of this AI gen is giving them more traffic and attention, but in reality they're getting more attention because they went from doing nothing to doing something
Typically, one expects a "bar" to have beer and liquor and the ability to make at least basic mixed drinks (rum and Coke, gin and tonic, etc.).
A "beer bar" usually has a wider variety of beers on draft and no liquor or mixed drinks.
Some places have different licensing costs and requirements for places that serve beer and wine only vs also serving spirits.
AI is being utilized by small businesses in ways that weāre still scratching the surface to understand its value
Exactly, that's the point! Google and Microsoft can burn their billions of dollars scratching that surface to understand it better. For small businesses, it's NOT ready as you saw through real business results.
I'd probably have better luck shorting stocks if I could trigger a (rightful) panic like this guy can.
I've come to realize that I was assuming that there was a limit somewhere to "the market staying irrational". I'm not so sure anymore
You could argue that a heavily debt-based business that requires years and years of more debt before becoming profitable would respond to rising interest rates quite negatively, but, yeah, the whole thing is already enitrely irrational.
I'm keeping some popcorn in reserve for OpenAI's IPO.
But the question is whether or not they're actively holding debt or just letting themselves get diluted through investments.
There's more supply than demand for compute at the moment, so Microsoft is more than happy to buy ownership through Azure credits - Likewise Amazon is with AWS credits
Oh, they're definitely holding debt in addition to whatever else the hell is going on with their shell games.
the market is irrational
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So I saw a few relevant newspieces:
~ Companies are now ceasing their mandate to workers to use AI to do things that used to be done without AI. They're now saying don't use AI just to use AI. They're trying to reduce their token purchases.
~ The estimation now for AI use cases is to reconsider if tokens cost ten times their current price. If the use case is still worth it, then that use case will likely survive the bubble. If it's not worth it, it's time to hire back employees.
~ The hyperscale AI industry will have to make $6 trillion annually to break even. Amazon makes $2 trillion by selling people material stuff. Walmart is similar. There may not be a market for $6 trillion in tokens every year, even from government projects. Also, it's a bad sign if government projects are propping up the whole stock market.
~ China is mostly turning to a software AI model which does home and small business AI tasks fairly well without buying compute from a hyperscaler. You get a gaming machine, get open source AI software and a dozen terabytes of training data, and you should be able to create slop, vibe code or fix the grammar and style of your report. Also, hyperscale models are opinionated and don't like certain topics. Home-grown AI doesn't have those objections.
Also, hyperscale models are opinionated and don't like certain topics. Home-grown AI doesn't have those objections.
Unless you create or review the training data and train your model yourself, home grown AI models do have those objections.
Some companies already run Chairman Xi's big models on-prem and do not limit token usage on those.
I think for small to medium sized businesses, those who are using cloud providers already, they will continue to purchase ai compute just like they do any other cloud service. For larger enterprises that have the manpower to maintain physical infra, it will be cheaper to self host inference.
For regular users, I suspect most people will use a provider, but are not nearly as willing to pay for it (at least not that much more than a typical streaming service). Power users (especially younger ones with more time in their hands to spare) will use local inference.
How much of Amazons $2T in earnings is AWS earnings? If that already includes AWS spend, then $6T isn't gonna happen any time soon.
The AI bubble will "burst" as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.
The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it's not doing that fast enough and it's beginning to look like it never will. We've been hearing that the AI bubble will "burst any day now" for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can't be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we'll see that suddenly the "invisible hand of the free market" will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that's why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.
The "invisible hand of the market" is such a fascinating myth, because it frames the results of capitalist endeavors as inevitable and almost holy - but as soon as the sufficiently wealthy and well-connected suffer a setback, then "government bailouts" are granted.
The invisible hand is actually very visible of you dare to look close enough.
The basic supply & demand, āinvisible hand of the marketā stuff applies at like. A farmerās market. This is the context Adam Smith was talking about when he made up the invisible hand phrase. If one farmer has cheaper produce than another, heāll probably get more customers. Anything more complicated than a local farmerās market isā¦ more complicated.
The problem is this time American national debt is too big for the size of bailout needed for AI.
Housing is already maxed out so where is the next thing to prop up the market?
Itāll have to be robotic automation.
Itāll have to be robotic automation
Factories are already robotic. Replacing humans is just more tech bro bullshit, like how AI will fix your toilet.
It's not invisible though (despite them wanting it to be). The hand is the culture of the investment banks. They set who the winners and losers are, and if there was one thing The Big Short showed very well, it's that anyone going against that culture is exiled.
SPCX is the model all AI companies plan follow. IP0 valuation of 2K X forward Earnings.
Your retirement fund will be the exit liquidity forced to buy through indexes as the stocks crash and flat line.
They already have. Public Banks are huge investors in the private credit companies that underpin a good amount of the AI bubble.
The Magnificent 7 have been driving the stock markets gains for the last few years. They have also created independent companies to build out the data centers. The debt for these companies is off their books and funded primarily by private credit markets and is underpinned by contracts with the big 7 for data processing once the data center is built.
Projections by the Mag 7 have driven their share increase. So what happens if one or two of the magnificent 7 miss their projections? Well look at Oracle, its stock is tanking because it missed projections.
If the Mag. 7 stock tanks so will your 401ks. When their stock is worth less they will stop plowing money into AI. Suddenly all of the companies with contracts to build the data centers will loose their source of revenue. No revenue and they canāt pay off the loans to private credit. Private credit companies will start to go under and begin to take down the public banking companies that invested in themā¦
Its a house of cards ready to fall if any of the Mag 7 start to flounder.
It's a good time to learn about what investments are in your 401k if you have any. You can look at the data sheets on the investments to see what stocks the index funds are made of. I'm moving mine to International index funds that are not tech heavy. I'm no expert in investing but I have heard that it's sound to invest in companies that make basic things that people need.
Healthcare, consumer staples and utilities are considered to be defensive stocks because they are always needed regardless of economic situation.
I am minimising my exposure to US stock market as well. There is the perception that the European stock market doesn't have the explosive growth the way that US stocks does but it is at least safer.
Japan could also be considered safe and their stock market have been on the rise after 30 years of stagnation.
Morningstar is a decent source in breaking down the holdings of nearly every ETF and Mutual Fund.
Exactly, as long as it's billionaire buddies with trump, they can always print more money to keep the bubble going. When they realize they need to print the money to keep the rest of us afloat, that's when they'll let it crash.
ownership class
pension funds
Same thing. Pension funds ARE the ownership class.
I've been commenting that people over 55 own 52% of the US and baby boomers as a generation own ~8x more than billionaires as a class, but I re-checked and I'd quoted the wrong number in a bunch of my comments. 52% is for baby boomers only. All over 55s added together are actually over 70%. Let that sink in.
The entire goal of the economy is to let old people enjoy the spoils of the young's work. Even billionaires are just a symptom of a larger, systemic issue (which is not to say they shouldn't be hunted for sport, that should still happen).
They own, but they don't control that ownership. Their savings are used as investment funds, but very few actually know what they are invested in. That control is in the hands of the indexes. S&P, NASDAQ and the like. Just because NASDAQ blessed SpaceX with being part of their index, millions of pensions bought the stock.
Over 55 isn't babyboomers anymore that's gen x.
I think this kind of data is exactly what you'd expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you've got more savings then people who haven't been working their whole lives.
Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you'd expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).
Over 55 isnāt babyboomers anymore thatās gen x.
And silent. But notice how little the percent goes up when you add both silent and much of gen x to it. Most of it is still baby boomers.
I think this kind of data is exactly what youād expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course youāve got more savings then people who havenāt been working their whole lives.
Yes. So why are people whining that their paychecks aren't rising, that they can't afford property, etc? All that goes to old people who, via retirement funds mostly, own the companies that young people work for. The housing is owned by old people and companies belonging to old people. If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.
Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what youād expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).
Median baby boomer is worth like 400k, average is near 2 mill, so of course it's still skewed, 10% of baby boomers own 70% of their wealth. But what I'm trying to argue is that you can't have both a great working life and a great retirement life at the same time unless the amount of retired people is small. Baby boomers enjoyed a great working life and now they're enjoying a great retirement life, but they can only enjoy the latter because everyone else's wages stagnated. No other generation has ever been as rich as the baby boomers, no other generation's wealth outclassed the preceding generation as early as theirs. They're enjoying more time at the top than anyone before them. Gen X and millennials on the other hand are getting there much later in life and I don't know if Gen Z will ever be the wealthiest generation before most millennials are dead.
People just aren't having enough children for this whole retirement thing to work much longer. Millennials might never retire, Gen Z will definitely not retire (and this isn't specific to the capitalist system). But we get to pay baby boomers to retire.
Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether. We can't have 5 retirees living off the back of one working person, that's absurd.
Ironically the AI everyone's fighting against, combined with a better economic system of course, is the only thing that can change things. When there are truly very few jobs that need a human, we can finally consider having so many non-working people for so few working people, without outright straddling all the working people with debt. Maybe not AI as it is now, but AI that can truly replace knowledge workers to the point that it can design automation for physical jobs on its own. As it is now, even supposedly "communist" countries need people working well into the 50s and 60s, and it'll get worse when their demographics crises hit.
If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.
This is a counter factual, I think it'd be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55's savings if wages had kept pace.
I don't actually think that people need to work forever otherwise the old prey upon the young. I think this is more of an inequality issue, that is remedied with taxes on wealth (i'm mostly basing that opinion on "capital in the 21st century").
Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether
Yes yes, make the old's work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me. It seems like you've consumed too much zero sum game.
I also think AI has way too many negative externalities (more propping up the ultra wealthy, contributing to climate change) to counter it's positive effects.
Too big to fail!
OpenAI had their little failure of a presentation recently, and they're introducing a "fast response" tier for 6x the current subscription cost. This is their attempt to get people used to higher pricing. They are bleeding money, and they will need to raise prices sooner than later to start attempting to make it back.
Once they do, a good chunk of their customers will simply stop paying, forcing the AI companies to further raise prices, causing more customers to leave, etc.
AI companies are trying (and failing) to be indispensable, and they need that to have any hope of survival. It's only a matter of time before they collapse, and only then might we see what's actually beneficial about machine learning.
I saw a meme recently- WinRAR is more profitable than OpenAI. Kind of funny to think about
It's a safe bet.
The bubble will burst, that's our boom-bust cycle. I think we're at the point where it is always a few bad decisions away.
I'm actually impressed that it's still going
Coincidentally, The FED was made to stop boom-bust cycles before WWI. It's never, ever worked, and it will never start working.
Yeah the fed did a great job preventing the Great Depression lmao. You know what really stops boom/bust ? Taxing the wealthy and holding them accountable for their crimes. Also all those pesky monopoly regulations, post Great Depression regulations like glass stegal and other regulations that have been systematically dismantled in the last 40 years.
Heās been saying this for 4 years
And it's somehow a surprise to you that the worlds richest corporations collectively can keep up an investment bubble for four years?
They'll not be able to do it indefinitely, and profitability of any LLM business is not on the horizon so far.
I'm saying Burry's opinion on the timing is irrelevant.
He calls a crash basically every quarter since the '08 crash recovered. If you shorted every time he suggested something was going to burst "sooner than later", you would already be bankrupt.
Yeah, but if the bubble lasts longer it'll hurt us more when it does collapse.
Plus we'll have to deal with more clanker bullshit in more of our daily lives for longer if it takes a long time for it to collapse.
Are you talking about the collapse of the AI bubble hurting us? I mean, sure, but what's the alternative? There isn't one. The sooner it pops, the more money that will be available to develop businesses that can grow the economy. Right AI is gobbling up investment capital and driving up the interest rates and inflation of the price of tech hw is stunting consumer and business tech, contributing to overall inflation, and making actual products people want to buy more expensive, ie less sold...
I'd like to say that this economic collapse could not have come at a worse time, but I think bubbles like this are only possible when markets are no longer competitive, everyone is broke as shit, and people have to invent fantasies to make investors think line will go up.
Edit: Oh, and I just thought of a REALLY big benefit of an early pop: people's retirements will be less exposed to AI-first and AI-only companies which are almost guaranteed to fail. If OpenAI raises 2 trillion, it's going to be getting a lot of that from institutional investors investing other people's money.
The thing is the collapse is like a random chance every week/day. At some point some human being will decide fuckem im not working all weekend to bail them out again and that's when the crash will happen. That's literally what happened in 2008, bear sterns and Lehman brothers for decades just rolled over their debt until one day the banks were just like yeah nah we had enough go ask the govt for help and that was the crash. It easily could have happened months earlier or months later, some bank execs were just in a room and finally decided they wanted to get off the ride one and that was the day it crashed. Just human emotion at that point if it would have happened the prior month or following month instead.
Exactly this. The entire market is held together by people who are willing to bend over backwards to keep it working. And all it takes is two or three of those to decide āenough is enoughā at the same time, and suddenly all of the marketās sins are laid bare. And at that point, the investors panic and everything snowballs.
He's predicted around sixteen market crashes so far by my count. The dude got lucky once and has been riding the fame ever since. I'm not necessarily disagreeing that this whole thing will crash, but timing is the important part and he keeps missing it. I'll not be making any financial decisions on his recommended timeline anytime soon. He may as well be Dave Ramsay imo.
Trump will make sure it doesn't crash by avoiding all regulations and anything that would make shareholders sweat.
"AI investment" is the reason why we're not in a full blown "official" recession. He doesn't want a recession for "his" economy while he is president. When the AI bubble bursts the GOP will be blaming the Democrats and will ask to be put back on power again
The question is can he float the problem for that long, the current pace of AI investment simply requires more returns than are possible, something like 1/5 of the entire GDP of the united states at a minimum yearly. At some point the emperors lack of clothes will become impossible to hide no matter how much they try.
Not to mention US debt is currently in a precarious position right now. I don't understand how one can even possibly bailout these companies while the USA is sitting on a dicey position itself.
I once saw an old political gadfly (Lyndon LaRouche) described as having predicted 15 of the last 3 economic downturns. Sounds like this guy.
Soapy* tiddies
Unemployment benefits in the USA? LOL! It's gonna be a real shitshow when the bubble bursts.
Unemployment benefits in California are $450/week max. The average rent for a one bedroom apartment in California ranges between $2,100 and $2,460 per month, depending on the source and specific metro market.
He may not be far off.
These bubbles usually last approximately five years. (Or at least that's been the case historically.) We're in year four. I'm actually keeping a portion of my portfolio in cash so when the crash comes I can take advantage, though I may move my whole retirement account into bonds and money market funds after the new year.
Trump just said in a response to a question about our $40 trillion debt (jesus, that's a lot of zeroes), āYou know, inflation, certain levels of inflation, will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly.ā https://www.msn.com/...
So I hope that cash isn't USD. Honestly, all currencies look pretty bad right now. And if Trump triggers Iran into destroying the Middle East (and maybe triggering Israel to nuke, if Trump hasn't already), the only thing that's going to be worth a damn is cigarettes and penicillin.
Astonishing really.
This is the guy running the US like a business.
Don't worry about debt, just stoke up inflation so it does t seem like so much money.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
The "he's a businessman and he's going to run the government like he runs a business" argument is as stupid as it was prescient.
Apparently this was covered in an article in Fortune magazine. in it they state trump called it a āsoft defaultā on usa debt.
This is basically not paying debts. itās consistent with trump practices. Afterall, didnt he bankrupt 40 companies including 6 casinos? heās just moving on to bigger fish by bankrupting the usa now.
Who could have possibly seen this coming??
The AI bubble is propping up the American bond market too (countering all of the other crap Trump had been doing to undermine the economy). When the bubble pops, the bond market is going to suffer massively as well.
You're not wrong. I'm thinking of buying in post-bubble potentially, but I'm not 100% sure what I'll do yet. I do know that, by the day, it feels more and more like a good time to take the profit that's there and wait.
Do you mean long term bonds or do you think short term will be affected as well? If it is a rising rate environment then t-bills or MMFs probably have more to gain from the rising rates than risks from a drop in value of held bonds
T-bills and MMFs sound like something from different communities...
Is there something I can do with my work 401k?
You could reallocate into bonds if you believe that it will tank the equity market as a whole. Most available options to allocate into a pretty broad so itās not totally exposed, just expect lower returns in the mean time and be prepared to reallocate into more growth exposure if/when the broader crash happens. Difficult to time so beware.
Bonds are a bad call as well, as the US government is screwed on interest and will be inflating.
Gold is a better call, this looks like stagflation coming.
Not sure if I can do that with restrictions
So do I. We had our financial person take steps to limit our exposure. Still, I expect we'll take a major hit regardless. Hopefully, we can ride it out with no major financial emergency forcing us to sell while the market is down.
If it does, it needs to pop so hard that EVERYONE involved with it can't even afford to be heard of anymore.
Same, Michael Burry. Same
I certainly hope so as I may have sold all of my (meagre) investments in anticipation.
Yeah but how do we PROFIT off of it?! Fuck capitalism because this is a valid question
It's too complicated to try to figure out which stocks to short and when. Rather, the play is to invest in solid companies that produce non-bubble goods and services and will still be producing that after AI economy crashes. UPS, Kraft-Heinz, Edison International, etc. These companies pay out 5%+ dividend yield and sell massive amounts of real world services and goods that will still be necessary to households and businesses no matter how badly the AI economy craters.
An investment that would pay off if the tech industry went to hell would be Put options on QQQ (an ETF that tracks the NASDAQ-100). You have to get both the timing and the drop correct, and better funded groups with much faster computers AND the ability to make trades to prop up the market while they unload their shit will be competing against you (every options trade has an opposite side and most of them expire worthless). Watch the movies Margin Call and The Big Short for research as much as playing the lottery can be researched (they're good movies so it's time well spent anyway). Make a movie night out of it and watch The Other Guys which was directed by the same guy who directed The Big Short. Watch through the end credits.
I didn't read the article because gizmodo, but as other people here have said, Dr. Burry (he's played by Christian Bale in The Big Short) often thinks things are going to go south, and there's usually reason to think so, but in general as Warren Buffett could easily have said, "stonks only go up." NVDA, AAPL, and MSFT make around 15% or so of the entire world stock market and around 20% of the US market. Nobody's going to let them collapse and even without the AI craze they still have all the other stuff to fall back on. Thumbs will go on the scale to an extent even greater than the 2008 collapse.
Theyāve been saying the ābubble is going to burstā for a while now. If they keep saying it eventually they might be right. Then everyone will jump up and down trying to claim they were the ones who rightly predicted it. A quick search by date shows plenty of articles discussing the AI bubble from 2025, 2024, and even a rare few from 2023. Three years of doomsayers waters it down to meaninglessnes even if theyāre eventually right.
it has all the markers, unless the corporations drastically restructure their debt or the product suddenly finds an actual demonstrable use, then it's going to continue being a bubble. all that requires for it to burst is a large swath of people vested in the bubble to get itchy enough to pull enough money out for the value to be questioned or need to be proved, and AI currently is wildly expensive incuring huge amounts of debt, which is being passed around in a very quick and difficult to account for manner, and has no proven value that can be demonstrated as of yet. to be clear, by demonstrated value I mean you can pull out the paperwork and show where is currently profitable. so here's the ad revenue, or here's the government contracts, here the subscription payments, something. they are all operating at a loss and betting their entire companies that those avenues will be profitable eventually, but they aren't currently and that's with a VERY heavy hand on the scale, we already have the cost of data center power and water being charged to average people, total failure in providing value to military and police efforts, and people rejecting AI content as acceptable entertainment, it's all a bust no matter how much they insist, and the application as a digital creative tool is unlikely, it's jarring and can't be consistent from one shot to the next causing the exact problems you train to avoid in serial art and animation. digital creative tools generally require a large effort and testing from actual artists in development to be even marginally useful in a production pipeline and AI tried to be useful without any input also with the hope it could simply bypass the people who do the creating, the problem is, it can't, it can only look at what it sees, fail to identify basic fundamental art principals, and try and remix the art it can look at. look at any AI attempt to recreate cubism, it can't, it's totally confused by the concept of incorporating movement and primitive shapes into complex work.
I bought a house in 2016 from a couple moving to Texas saying the housing market was going to crash. I sold it for a 400k profit 5 years later. Everyone says it and theyāll be right when it happens but when you keep saying for many years, you will be right eventually
A broken clock is right once a decade.
Id like to think that people are more aware of the circumstances that lead up to a bubble forming and popping.
The big short.
Mr. Money Mustache's latest post is about this and I hope is right. Basically he thinks it will not destroy retirement, viewing market panic as a recurring historical pattern driven by fear rather than fundamental economic ruin. Instead of reacting to macroeconomic anxiety, he emphasizes that true wealth stems from human productivity and resilience, suggesting individuals ignore the news cycle and focus on personal financial habits. Also recaps the basics so a great reatd. We can do it one step at a time to increase freedom!
We had a meeting with my mom's broker and my brother and I brought up the AI bubble. The broker responded with the most ridiculous nonsense. He basically said that corporate CEOs are smart people with a legal responsibility to keep their companies financially healthy and so they wouldn't be using AI if it weren't viable. It sounded like something handed down to him from Raymond James HQ which I'm sure it was, and it was surely written by AI in the first place.
SCHD FTW
Itās a fund which invests in the highest-dividend stocks which, coincidentally, has almost no āaiā exposure. Basically old blue chips that are more tried and tested. Of course nothing is immune from the coming implosion, but it hopefully mitigates the risk.
I am not a financial advisor, and this is not financial advice.
Maybe you should check how much of your pension is invested where.
It can shock you how much of your money is invested in just 5 stocks.
Then talk to an advisor
Oh boy, its going to fuck us especially hard.
Tax payers paid for 2008, their going to indebt our kids once again.
AI works. But China already won the race.
These prices are absolute peak and from now one will only be falling and that's not what openai and anthropic expected.
I can just use glm 5.3or depseek 4.1 and 20$ will go the distance.
Even running Qwen 3.8 locally can do 90% of what I want.
I have been using the Strata backend with Next-Flash. It has been putting together a Vampire Survivors golden egg manager for me, and I do the QA testing. I am looking forward to Qwen4-Flash, it should open up more possibilities and take off some rough edges. Maybe I can finally do a recompilation of Stars!, and other obscure games?
I literally just learned about Strata. Between that and FreeToken the LLM serving side has become so much better.
How does one get to use deepseek? Alibaba Cloud is always out if subscriptions.
I use deepseek via openrouter and deepseek direct. many american providers offer deepseek.
also from deepseek directly - works great with opencode / openchamber
Isnāt that kinda expensive as fck? I tend to use all the weekly usage of ChatGPT 20x within 1-2 days, and I already work with different gpt models, with different reasoning levels. So I am not sure if I can afford OpenRouter to be honest.
Not expensive with those models. Glm and deepseek. Problem with chatgpt they train you your data, basically siphon what you have and someone else could build your product faster than you. There is a recent case theybstole some scientific breakthrough.
Openrouter has zero data retention and zero training. Which is why I use it.
Chatgpt can't be used by companies
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I had a boomer normie ask me how to use AI to develop his new "business" website telling me that he didn't want to hire a developer if the developer would just use AI anyway.
This guy doesn't know what a router is, and was asking me for help trying to understand what the AI was telling him, and it was the most basic shit.
When the normies are trying to invest in AI, they're the last to invest and know to throw money at it. That was a big signal to me that the bubble is about to pop. Money is running out and the boomers are trying to get in on it.
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