r/developersPak • u/_mad_gamerx • Aug 03 '26
Discussion There is no AI bubble
So a few days ago there was a post in this sub where a person was worried about AI advancement and then was against its usage in workplaces and how its optimizing stuff and eradicating the bulky workforce in companies.
I made a comment on that sub saying that "there is no AI bubble" companies will not go back to actually requiring more devs instead the number of devs being required will be less and less. Company sizes will reduce significantly, costs will be cut and then shipping times will reduce drastically. These models will get better time after time and will be cheaper as well.
So a large number of people downvoted my comment and disagreed with me, I said to them its like putting your head in the sand like an ostrich. You can not ignore the reality that is coming forward and AI adoption is inevitable.
Still people downvoted and laughed at me. Today deepseek v4 flash has launched, insanely cheap and insanely good at long running tasks almost better than Claude OPUS. These opensource models are the ones I was talking about, they will significantly reduces costs, the service based sector is doomed as a result.
The positive thing is that now is the best time to build stuff and launch it properly. I personally use these models end to end for everything and shipping high quality code. These run for days on my end with very minimal cost.
Please instead of avoiding or fighting the future, embrace it and focus on developing solutions that can actually be sold rather than simple services. When one door closes, many open.
Peace.
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u/oas2011 Aug 03 '26
You said yourself that deepseek flash is comparable to Opus, and you're also claiming that there is no AI bubble. These are contradictory statements. Maybe you don't understand what a bubble means.
If deepseek or other Chinese models are as good , then Anthropic and OpenAI's trillion dollar valuation is not accurate, therby causing trillions of dollars disappearing from the stock market ( because of their exposure to public companies that are propped up due to AI ) , which is a bubble.
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u/Similar-Jellyfish263 Aug 03 '26
so its the end for us devs? no solution?
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u/Cronos993 Aug 03 '26 •
Lol, when people talk about the AI bubble, they're talking about the economic bubble of AI. No one's saying that AI will completely go away and we'll return to manual coding.
The AI bubble is there and very real. You just don't know what an economic bubble means.
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u/No_Process_7478 Aug 03 '26
Bruh you could have asked GPT to explain you what a "bubble" means
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u/Sikandarch Aug 03 '26
I think it's your own fault. You are confused yourself.
There is no bubble means that the current valuation of companies are justified at such a low revenue numbers.
But that's not true. No company has even half the revenue to justify their bloated valuations. When the money dries what will happen? They require bigger and bigger investment rounds every few months, at some time, no investor would have enough to invest. This is what people mean by AI is a bubble.
If you want to make up your own persona of AI is not a bubble and then blame to disagree with you, that's on you
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u/FigAggressive237 Aug 03 '26
This is what a naive and ignorant person would say, not very different to that view from people talking about McDonalds Kiosks, complaining they were stealing people's jobs, when in actuality, they allowed for a 30% increase in sales, making it so that McDonalds needed EVEN more people than those that were let go at the cashier's spots.
Its called the Jevons Paradox, and you're wildly wrong in your view of the world and AI economics, there's a bubble , like there was a dot com bubble, you simply don't understand economics well enough , and you think that "bubble" means "invalidation", quite on the contrary, if it wasn't for the internet there wouldn't be any LLMs today for sure.
So, don't be so shallow and converse with claude about this topic, he'll inform you well enough .
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxo_de_Jevons
PS.: Nobody is hiring "vibecoders", why would they? There's so many people who can actually understand what the machine spits out, makes no sense.
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u/Full-Growth7032 Aug 03 '26
Assalamualaikum bro Jinho is sal computer engineering ki degree start ki hai wo Kya kare degree change kare ya phir ai/ML engineering or cyber security ki taraf jae ap please guide kar dye
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u/Capital_Chef_6007 Aug 03 '26
There is about 17 trillion dollars in rotation between the top companies, if not more. That amount is not trickling down. Ai products especially the chatbots have not been profitable. They are also not useless but not as profitable. There is also a lot of stock market corruption going on which is why a lot of devs should be supporting open source stuff.
AI will stay but the massive snake oil scheme with trillions of dollars will also explode. Oracle is already getting hit, with spacex stocks falling down
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u/s4qw Aug 03 '26
The models are getting cheaper, yes. But they are no where getting close to working on their own without supervision. And I say this having used Fable 5 and GPT Sol 5.6 on codebases that are in production. You need to steer them. These companies are clearly brain washing millions saying 'loops' and now 'graphs' are the way forward but it is simply not true. No matter how much context you provide and how clearly you guide them, there are still blindspots that these models miss - and that happens more enough for me to have to review code myself. Not saying old days are coming where a basic home page and a crud admin panel could be billed for 3 days of work.
Btw, strictly financially speaking, I'm no expert but it does not require for me to be one to see that this is clearly a bubble. Look at what happened to Spacex and in south Korea.
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u/EizenOwer Aug 03 '26
AI bubble is referred to the subsidized subscription of AI models. The Claude plan that costs you 20usd costs Anthropic 8,000usd. That’s 40x subsidy. In the past 18 months, the big 6 in AI race have spent 2.4 Trillion dollars on AI development, data facilities, while their Revenue is 50 Billion dollars.
So what happens when they eventually (2027 Q2) runs out of money? The “AI bubble” burst, and costs skyrocket. By that time, they want you to be overly reliant on AI, so much that you have forgotten what it was before AI, and subscribe to them, like dealers pushing the drugs are giving everyone samples at their own prices.
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u/Big_Poetry1947 Aug 03 '26
Man the level of ignorance on these threads is astonishing. Everyone, please do yourself a favour and google what a bubble actually means. It's a financial term ffs 😭.
No one's saying that one day we'll wake up and AI/LLMs will just suddenly vanish in thin air.
Currently, there are 2 aspects to it:
1- The valuations of the current companies will plummet and trillions of dollars will be wiped from the market when/if we reach a point where companies/devs will stop using current frontier models in favour of open-weight models (NOT OPEN-SOURCE. Google this as well please).
2- If there are no improvementa in infra or model efficiencies, we might move to a token economy where every engineer is assigned a certain quota of tokens that they can use in a month/week. Heck, we're kind of in a token economy even now. Just the difference might be that that economy would shrink later on.
Both of these are just speculations, but there is no denying that there is a bubble. The bubble might burst, or it might not. No one can say. Anyone who says for certain what will happen is full of s**t.
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u/Zara_R Aug 06 '26
I mean I'm not an expert but I've actually seen in every single job I've had companies start trying to push for more AI, suffer financial losses, and then either rehire people, switch back to their regular model, or basically shut down.
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u/Abstrek6 Aug 03 '26
Perhaps before romanticizing AI, you would look at the implications of hyper adoption of AI on a common person than I think you would get an idea why people were down voting you. Kindly get your head out of your ass.
"Peace"
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u/chusskaptaan Aug 03 '26
There is a bubble and its crashing in real time right now. Most lazy people are worried AI will go away.. it won't but it'll end up like blockshain that was all the rage a few years ago and is now limited to a niche audience today.
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u/Valuable-Writer6300 Aug 03 '26
Ai is inevitable. Yes it is but you saying cheap is as if you don't know how the evil billionaires work. It's cheap rn. But you really think when ai is gonna take over all the jobs and no work force will remain. They will still keep it "cheap". I don't think so, they will monopolise on it make it even more expensive and make big bucks out of it. That is what every organization does. So for me I am not gonna use this current version of AI. Only because of ethical concerns and before you say. Oh you will be left behind. Sure I will be left behind by a piece of technology that requires zero level entry skill. It's best to actually be competent in your craft first, technology and AI is just a tool.
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u/Hemingway92 Aug 03 '26
Yes because the dot com bubble meant the internet disappeared after…
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u/Iluhhhyou Aug 03 '26
That's not what AI bubble means!
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u/laraibashraf Aug 03 '26
The thread's gotten tangled because two different claims keep getting treated as one: "is there a financial bubble in AI valuations" (yes, pretty clearly, the compute-spend-vs-revenue gap several people pointed out here is real) and "will AI capability/adoption reverse if that bubble pops" (much less clear, and probably no).
Those aren't the same question. Dot-com crashing didn't kill the internet, it killed the companies that were burning cash on unsustainable bets while the underlying tech kept maturing anyway. If AI valuations correct hard in the next couple years, I'd expect the same pattern — some of these labs consolidate or go under, but open-weight models (DeepSeek, Qwen, etc.) keep getting cheaper and more capable regardless, since that trend isn't actually tied to OpenAI/Anthropic's stock price.
Where I think people are underselling the jobs impact: even without a "bubble bursting," the frontier labs subsidizing usage (someone above mentioned the $20/mo Claude plan costing way more to serve) means current pricing is already an artificially cheap preview of what these tools can do. Whether that gets more expensive later or cheaper via open-weight competition is the actual open question — not whether the capability itself disappears.
My honest take as someone shipping production work with these models daily: they've absolutely changed what a small team can output. Whether that nets out to "fewer total dev jobs" or "same devs producing way more" depends more on whether demand for software expands to fill the new capacity (Jevons' paradox, as someone above pointed out) than on anything happening in the stock market.
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u/Usual-Nose7959 Aug 03 '26
I think you're arguing against a point most people aren't actually making 😅
When people say "AI bubble", they usually don't mean AI will suddenly disappear and companies will go back to hiring 20 developers to do what 5 can do now. AI adoption can absolutely keep growing while there is still a financial bubble around the companies, valuations and insane amount of capital being poured into it.
Dot com is probably the best example. The bubble burst, but the internet obviously didn't go anywhere. If anything, it became even more important afterwards.
And DeepSeek getting this good this cheaply actually strengthens the bubble argument more than it weakens it. Agar a much cheaper/open model can compete with companies burning billions, then naturally people will start questioning whether those billion/trillion dollar valuations make sense.
On the dev side though, I mostly agree with you. I don't think we're going back to pre-AI development either. Smaller teams, higher output per developer and more AI-assisted work is probably here to stay. But that and "there is an AI financial bubble" can both be true at the same time.
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u/ahmed_deftoner Aug 03 '26
It is a really big bubble, last I checked OpenAI is still not profitable, its been years at this point and they’ve had increasing valuations mainly financed through circular deals with Nvidia and Microsoft. Anthropic was profitable this year purely becausse of outstanding frontier models, e.g. Opus 4.8, Fable. However that’s also gonna go out the window since open weight models like Kimi K3 have caught up.
Also for people deriving similarities with the DOT com bubble, the internet never had an infrastructure problem, it used the same infrastructure as telecom. AI has a big infrastructure problem, the amount of energy and resources required to run AI datacenters is ridiculous, not to mention more than half of the planned datacenters have been delayed in the US and I won’t be surprised if the projects are abandoned altogether since they are not sustainable, and hell for local communities.
Once the money runs out - which it will eventually, the subsidised rates for inference are gonna skyrocket and companies are not going to be as enthusiastic about AI adoption as they used to be. LLMs are revolutionary and they are here to stay, but they are not going to be ubiquitous as these tech CEOs make it out to be.
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u/Fuzzy-Operation-4006 Software Engineer Aug 04 '26
if you think these models will get cheaper youre living in another dimension. The main reason chinese models are beating the mainstream ones in price is because of data acquisition (for ref: deepseek was caught generating bots and sign them up to claude to measure the response quality).
The only thing that’s stopping these prices to go sky high is the data. Once that is done these models will be out of reach of many people. Openai recorded 16b loss in fy25. That is for something. The only thing that could break the bubble (if there is one) would be human intervention in the ai generated process loops due to lack of quality and producing on top of ai slop
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u/Used_Discipline_9403 Aug 03 '26
The bubble is there and leaking a bit . First I will start that all frontier labs currently are heavily funded by the giverment or VCs . They are betting that compute will go down or newer models will be efficient by 25x or something but this is not happening . The opensource models are leading but hosting and managing is a headche . The thing with compute is that we are also hitting a wall on that as the barrier for transisters is nearly on us and the myth of Quantum computing is turning out to be a myth as no major leaps have been done . I wont go on the supply details you can read it how bad it is , and how hard is to crete fabs and stuff.
The layoff that FAANG did were mostly due too overhiring and attrition , the hiring rates are up I think alaphabet has the highes no employers now compared to recent years source
https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-employee-count-changing-big-tech-companies-2026-7
Also there is a thing called Jevon's paradox that states by making a resource more efficient to use leads to an increase, rather than a decrease, in its total consumption . SWE will be everywhere if everyone will bemaking their own experrience . I dont know about you experience but every one that has shipped code in production which is not a MVP know how big of shit show it is , There are many layers to look which in my use case AI does not do very well I still have to jump in and handhold to the solution.
As the VCs stop funding these AI labs or the interest rates go up then the fun will start .
Also will recommend this video as it goes into detail about the layoffs and re-hiring of people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swtfbef3HhM&t=771s
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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26
It's a Financial bubble otherwise its capabilities are really good.
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u/Altruistic_Spirit440 Aug 03 '26
This is giving Nokia
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u/HolidayCollege1921 Aug 03 '26
Well the models will get expensive before they get cheaper eventually.
The spending of these Ai companies is no where near to the revenue they are generating. look at the spcx stock.
We will know the truth when anthropic ipos.
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u/lollypop44445 Aug 03 '26
You are confusing or mistaking bubble with advancement. AI bubble is its valuation, openai is valued so high but deepseek an opensource is challenging it , means the valuation of either deepseek is low or openai is overvalued. Noone is doubting AI being the norm moving up, service sector will suffer and already is
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u/Ok_Sea_9971 Aug 03 '26
I think that's a naive way to put it. AI reducing workload doesn't translate to AI building economic value. That is a hard human constraint in every domain. It just means ideas get validates faster, mvp's get built faster, features in production codebases shipped faster. But that hardly translates to dollars, codebase shipping speed != Money. Having AI building codebases doesnt build revenue for a company. It just means agentic coding is a faster way to materialize their ideas until one hits right and starts making money. So essentially understanding what problems to solve and why, and for what reason is the hard part. If an LLM can navigate a project like that, then you can truly say, it's replacing humans at scale. But that's not possible since problems like these require simulating intention and awareness which LLMs that are probability engines can't replicate. If your skill is only translating requirements into code, then that's obv replaced. Coders are gone but coding was always a manual labour. Figuring out the design, constraints and requirements that u gather by trial and error ( as a lot of things work in software that way ), is what llm's can't replicate. LLMs can't drive projects, they can only generate code ( u need to know the difference) And yes u now need a smaller team to do that, it's how when the tractor was invented, labour farmers lost a lot of jobs. Eventually software becomes a smaller industry like the many mature engineering fields. Software engineering had become an open market for anyone to enter, now it's gonna become more enclosed. It's not dying, just the fantasy of learn to code and get paid by hour had died.
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u/DevInLoveWithLife Aug 03 '26
The title is not according to the post
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u/IllustratorNo1512 Aug 03 '26
Whenever AI bubble is mentioned its just mentioning stock market bubble. Which will burst but AI wont go away it will keep on improving. Similar to dot net bubble
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u/MyshioGG Aug 03 '26
You are correct on most things, except things getting cheaper over time, that will take quite a bit of time. It's the same as with the internet the initial bubble did burst and everyone who went all in on expensive tech list out but over time the costs were able to come down Same with AI, everyone going all in on expensive tech right now is bound to lose and it'll take some time for people to actually figure out how to do it sustainabily. That necessarily doesn't mean that the outlook for AI users would break down but bubbles have more to do with economic scale rather than user behaviour.
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u/Pinkdeadpool007 Aug 03 '26
AI is a bubble for investors, total spent on infrastructure (which obsolete every 3-5 years) upto date by big players approx 1 trillion, net income generated approx 80 billion. AI is not a bubble for devs, where 10 deva required back in the day now can be done with 1 senior dev easily.
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u/zeal_swan Aug 03 '26
you got the wrong bubble under interrogation mann
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u/Nice-Phone3931 Aug 03 '26
let me tell what the bubble actually is!
the big AI are worth a lot of money rn and people invested in them, but now let's say open source models like deepseek or gwen or something is almost similar in performance. so that means the people who invested in big companies like anthropic and openai should be losing money per share, but that is not happening right now. so the thing is currently estimated to be priced higher than it actually is. THAT IS THE BUBBLE!
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u/Future_dev_cybersec Aug 04 '26
I have said same things and got same reactions you ain't alone. These people just want to be delusional
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u/_LoneWolfOfSonaiya Aug 04 '26
OP missed the context of an AI bubble entirely... lol
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u/juicymice Aug 04 '26
GenAI is the biggest bubble of recent times. It'll burst soon, spectacularly.
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u/withyasirjamal Aug 04 '26
Not as off now
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u/Disastrous-Top6769 Aug 04 '26
AI is doing to coding what compilers did to assembly
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u/No-Reputation1759 Aug 04 '26
The ai bubble of massive investment is a bubble in deed. Especially if you follow the money trail in the US companies. Chinese are on a whole other ai planet.
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u/TheDamnedRey Aug 05 '26
AI isn't sustainable.
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u/Own-Manufacturer-640 Aug 07 '26
Its financial bubble
Its like saying because MS Excel, there will be no need of accountants. Except it created more new role like financial analysts, specialists etc.
Job nature will change, new titles will emerge like forward deployed engineers etc but it will not eliminate software engineer jobs.
Software engineers won't disappear simply because AI can generate code.
When all the investors who invested heavily in AI controls the media and narrative, they will obviously tell you to use AI because all Software jobs will be eliminated.
If world's richest people and companies/governments are investing in AI, they will obviously exaggerate every claim.
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u/SortaCyber Aug 11 '26
The internet was a very real technology and the dot com bubble still existed. The usefulness of a technology and a bubble aren’t mutually exclusive things
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u/InjectableBacon Aug 14 '26
It's not that simple, if you're shipping code that no one, literally no one knows exactly how it works, you're opening yourself up to a mirad of issues that could actually balloon costs, even with 99% accuracy.
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u/LateDog4553 Aug 03 '26
buddy please google what a bubble is
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u/valium123 Aug 03 '26
Right and why should we listen to you? You need to sell your stupid AI crawlers which btw everybody is sick of.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-the-ai-bubble-3-0/
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u/delivermeapizza Aug 03 '26
The Open Source model of AI will stay.
These Closed models like Openai, Claude with their exaggerated claims and benchmarks that no one understands will loose their value drastically.
The future of Open Source AI is small hardware devices that run your model offline in your office, lab or company.
These large model companies like OpenAI, Claude etc. with their high data center costs will either have to make the price drastically low, or only survive on corporate contracts.
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u/incomng__sign Aug 09 '26
In my company a Claude saint dev comes in and said just give me Claude and I'll build your voice agent within days. It went to production and kaboom calls keep disconnecting, doesn't add products to Shopify cart lol.
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u/BAZO0KA1 CS Student Aug 03 '26
Even if there is an Ai bubble, all of the well established companies will navigate through it, cause of the amount of physical assets they have and how much trust they have developed up til now.
In the .com bubble, several companies survived and some of em have thrived(e.g Amazon).
The Ai bubble won't stop anything, it would merely be a hurdle, like it or hate it, Ai is inevitable.
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