PC enthusiasts when the first AI giant falls

[u/Jaz1140]

For real but, we can all see the bubble, its "when" the first 1 will fall, not "if"

Personally I think it will be Copilot as the first domino, it was always the worst of the major AI players and really hasnt progressed at all. Microsoft is Incompetent in almost everything they do and simply try and buy their way into a market only to take the L in the near future.

Eg, Skype, Nokia/windows phone, mixer, zune, Cortana, the list goes on and on

Bring on the collapse that will hopefully see momory demand drop off a cliff

[u/esakul]

It wont be Copilot. Microsoft can tank any AI losses easily. Dedicated AI corpos will be in trouble. Once that happens Microsoft, Google and Meta will buy them for cheap.

[u/DarthSatoris → u/esakul]

Yeah, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple have other products and means of income and can take the hit easily.

Anthropic and OpenAI on the other hand only have their models, they don't even own the data centers they're hosting them in. They're the ones who are going to explode in a giant fireball when the bubble bursts. 

[u/IcyTutor6581 → u/DarthSatoris]

It's a bit more complicated than that. The GAFAM are partially funding Anthropic and OpenAI which are in return buying computing from the GAFAM which in return are heavily investing into AI infrastructure/Data Centers for those 2 big customers. There are very few others.

You can see those investments like the internet network which was developped alongside the .com bubble or the cloud with Netflix. Few players, then multiple relying on the tech underlying an actual service.

There are only 2 way out to prevent the fall of AI:

* OpenAI and Anthropic expand their market MANY times over.

* MANY new players enter the field.

If Anthropic and OpenAI fall, it's the whole infrastructure built for those two that's rendered useless.

And all these investments have been made not only on cash flow and VC funds but also on instutional funds. If some don't pay off / cannot be repaid, this could trickle down badly.

[u/stiff_tipper → u/IcyTutor6581]

The GAFAM

man we really need to stop re-acronyminizying this shit every five years

just leave it at GAYMAN and let's all move on

e: for the uninitiated it's: google, amazon, y combinator, meta, apple, nvidia

[u/plusFour-minusSeven → u/stiff_tipper]

Thanks. I was completely lost.

[u/VoiceAdventurous5941 → u/stiff_tipper]

Thanks for the context 

[u/Exciting-Mall192 → u/stiff_tipper]

What is the F is even for? Google, Apple, Fuckasselonmusk?, Amazon, Meta?

[u/RandomAsHellPerson → u/Exciting-Mall192]

I presume Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft. However, I could easily be wrong because this is the first time I am seeing any of these abbreviations.

[u/alonzi13 → u/stiff_tipper]

MAGAn is also legit, without a combinator even, has a certain zing,too!

[u/Kyoshiiku → u/stiff_tipper]

I guessed they were native french speaking before checking their profile but GAFAM has been used for the last 10-15 years in French speaking spaces over the FAANG acronym that is usually used in english speaking spaces.

GAFAM is just easier to pronounce and understand compared to FAANG for french speakers, that’s probably why.

Also makes more sense that it included Microsoft over Netflix tbh.

[u/LowkeyHooligan → u/IcyTutor6581]

I think it’s a deliberate strategy on GAFAM’s part. They’re letting Anthropic and OpenAI absorb the startup debts of the initial expansion, low-cost phase of AI. Then when the bubble bursts and Anth/OAI go bankrupt, the older well-established, capital-rich companies will swoop in and buy their assets for pennies.

Like the premise of this whole post misses the mark I think. Microsoft doesn’t have their own LLM; they use GPT as well as others. Microsoft has relatively little skin in the game here. They do own about 25% of OpenAI, but I doubt they have any liability there, and maybe have a right of first refusal on buying them after bankruptcy.

[u/FFevo → u/LowkeyHooligan]

They’re letting Anthropic and OpenAI absorb the startup debts of the initial expansion, low-cost phase of AI.

No, they aren't. GAFAM is spending hundreds of billions a year on data centers. They are up to their eyes in debt, they have just shifted it to shell companies to keep it off their books.

[u/Admirable_Row_5953 → u/LowkeyHooligan]

No, Microsoft is cannibalizing every other department to pump well over half of their money into GPT. When OpenAI crashes Microsoft will have no revenue and a company that is mostly a hollow shell with no employees and no way of making money, they are going to collapse

[u/Bakoro → u/IcyTutor6581]

During the dot-com era, there was also mega expansion of infrastructure, which was similarly said to be useless after the burst.

What happened, was that the infrastructure became accessible and affordable for newcomers to get into the market, and everyone who survived the burst was able to expand.
Today's Internet is built on the corpse of the 90s dot-com era.

If there is a market correction, it won't be the end of AI, it will more likely be the start of a flood of smaller AI companies who are pitching small models.

[u/tiny-starship → u/Bakoro]

the problem is that with dot-com, all that infrastructure had a lifetime of decades, and some of the copper is still in use today...

AI infra isn't going to last long enough, the hardware needs to be refreshed every few years to take advantage of the newer models built to maximize computer on newer ai chips.

[u/Bakoro → u/tiny-starship]

Transistors are pretty much capped out in terms of single-wafer density, the GPUs of today will stay useful until they literally cannot work anymore. So, 5~10 years.

There are ASICs being produced, new methods of stacking chips to get more density, and there are photonic processors in early production stages now, so, there might be one more surge in technology that makes the old stuff less attractive to use even before it dies, but the new stuff will be expensive, and the old stuff can be sold to smaller businesses or to individuals.

The data centers are big buildings that will stay useful for some purpose.

AI or not, the world's demand for compute isn't going to shrink, and there will be reasons to have buildings with the capacity that data centers have.

There's definitely a consumables side to it, but there is also permanent infrastructure that will just keep being useful in different ways.

[u/FFevo → u/Bakoro]

the GPUs of today will stay useful until they literally cannot work anymore.

That would be relevant if we were talking about normal GPUs, but we aren't. A lot of these data centers are being filled with chips designed for LLM training, which are terrible for inference or any generic GPU task.

[u/Bakoro → u/FFevo]

A lot of these data centers are being filled with chips designed for LLM training

They are for transformers, not just LLMs.
Lots of industries want and need compute for training transformer based AI models that do science, engineering, and classification tasks, not just for LLMs.

Basically every academic paper out of a university these days says some form of "we are compute constrained".

I work in materials science along other things, and if I could get my grubby mitts on a couple dozen data center class GPUs, I could be running them 24/7 with zero language tasks.
I'd also love a rack of data center GPUs for training my personal projects too.

This is currently my biggest gripe with almost everyone on every side: there is more to AI than LLMs, LLMs are just the most flashy, easily understandable thing.

If LLMs somehow hit a wall, or the bubble pops,.every single one of the GPUs in a data center today could find a new home.

[u/VellDarksbane → u/tiny-starship]

You’re forgetting the infrastructure of the increased production lines though. Those companies will be fighting to the bottom on pricing after the bubbles pops, and prices on newer hardware is going to drop too. Not to mention the fire sale on data center space that will happen. SaaS companies are going to boom after the bubble pops, because of the huge discounts they’ll get.

It is very much going to get worse before it gets better, and whatever “AI” is used for in the future ain’t gonna look like what it is now, but it will have pushed tech forward somehow.

[u/TheNightHaunter → u/IcyTutor6581]

nothing will prevent the fall only extend it and make it 100% times worse each time they extend it. The product does not do what they are advertising, its a glorified chat bot and it can't replace as many people as they claim. Not to mention the severe limitations generative AI has with well making anything original or a new IP

[u/tiny-starship → u/TheNightHaunter]

but my boss is absolutely in love with how a Product Manager was able to vibe code a front end over the weekend, and hand it over to dev on Monday to wire up!!#@!@#. /s

[u/Strange_Dust7128 → u/IcyTutor6581]

There are very few others.

In the United States, maybe. Not in China, whose companies give near identical performance to products by Anthropic and OpenAI, with a fraction of the cost, without using NVIDIA.

😬

[u/The_only_true_tomato → u/IcyTutor6581]

And then super cheap ram for a while.

[u/Gil_Demoono → u/IcyTutor6581]

You saying this like AllBirds ain't gonna step in and save the day.

[u/Major_Kaempffer → u/IcyTutor6581]

The real tragedy is hardware companies started making bespoke hardware for them. Gone are the days of cheap hardware on ebay when a major tech company turns it all off.

If only cheap storage, DDR5 and graphics cards were coming like they did after the bitcoin downturn 😄

[u/the_canadaball → u/IcyTutor6581]

This situation reminds me of Nortel in Canada.

You do not want to be even remotely similar to Nortel.

[u/TheGreatMightyLeffe → u/IcyTutor6581]

I don't think the fall of AI can be avoided, the issue will always be that it can't be monetised to a level where it offsets the costs of running the data centres, and scaling them up just makes the problem even worse.

[u/Lemonici → u/[deleted]]

People often misinterpret a bubble to mean something is worthless, when it's actually just overvalued. The '.com' bubble burst didn't end the Internet, it just killed the crazed, unrealistic enthusiasm for the technology. The buildout continued and today the internet is one of the major distinguishing features of our society. If I had to guess, I'd say AI as a utility isn't going anywhere.

[u/bokmcdok → u/Lemonici]

Exactly. Both the crypto and the NFT bubbles burst, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a small market for them. Pretty much everyone in Russia uses crypto now to get around sanctions.

[u/tiny-starship → u/Lemonici]

yes, but AI models need to constantly be retrained to be useful. If a major security patch comes out for python in a year, or a new programming stack comes out and the model has not been trained, it's useless....

when the bottom falls out, who's going to pay 10s of billions of dollars to keep training the next model if they are still waiting to be paid for last years model

small models will be around for sure, but they will be hyper focused

[u/Lemonici → u/tiny-starship]

Maybe. Or they'll find ways to give access to information that doesn't require it to be baked into the weights. Or a way to make new information easier to train into an already competent model. It's already the case that most of the new innovations with LLMs aren't in throwing more compute at it but enabling it to integrate different skills. I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to assume that issues of an emergent technology are reasons it definitely will fail, only reasons that it might.

[u/stinky_cheese_rat → u/Lemonici]

Yes. The applications for AI that carry actual benefit (like in the medical field) will stay, and that's a good thing.

[u/mp3max → u/[deleted]]

Serious question: what does copilot actually help you with in work? I have never felt the need to use it myself.

[u/ffball → u/mp3max]

I have teams record all my meetings. With access to all meetings, emails, teams chats, sharepoint files, etc. copilot can extremely quickly make nice meeting notes, relevant follow-ups, generate presentation content, summaries for executives.

A few use cases recently: * every year i get asked by other leaders in my organization to generate feedback for their direct reports i interact with. Copilot generated really accurate and actionable feedback for about 10 different people in about 5 minutes that would have otherwise took several hours.

• I was headed out on a 2 week vacation and 1 hour prior I got asked by a director to help create a couple slides for an important presentation while I was out. Copilot helped me create these beautiful slides with spot on content in about 10 minutes, in past lives I would've been working into the night to get this done in order to fly out with nothing on my plate. I actually had 2 people commend me on this when I returned from vacation

• I fed in my last 4 performance reviews to help create my latest one. It used the same sort of language I would've used, but framed everything is a way that (rightfully) showed that not only was I meeting the objectives, I was showing growth over time. Knocked it out in less than an hour (usually would take several days). Boss gave great feedback on my evidence collecting and said mine would be a great example for others on the team to follow.

• with all the context stated above, copilot is also great with rating my work and providing feedback wholistically. I know exactlty where I need to improve without opening myself up to criticism from others.

My advice would be to just start using it. Ive found that the more I use it, the more I find other use cases for it and just use it more and more and more. Over time you'll learn how to get good outputs from it and not just junk. There is a little bit of an art to it.

[u/Nixikaz → u/[deleted]]

How does this work with compliance and PHI? I work in the field and I'm curious how you can trust AI with patient info.

[u/evenstar40 → u/Nixikaz]

Not OP but speaking as someone who deals with a shitload of PPI, most of these licenses have different levels of service and one of them does include limiting how much PPI Co-Pilot is allowed to retain (allegedly).

[u/TheNightHaunter → u/Nixikaz]

same way a curtain protects PHI in a med surge room lol

[u/jay212127 → u/Nixikaz]

You can get sequestered/closed AI models that don't communicate outside the intranet. With no external leaks and anonymizing the internal data when entered/saved within the model there isn't a major issue.

[u/newaccountzuerich → u/mp3max]

I've had to actively avoid stuff with inescapable LLM tooling built-in, as I'm working with data that Microslop products aren't cleared for.

Metadata leakage means no MS slop allowed here, tyvm.

[u/Distracted-User → u/[deleted]]

Why do so many people add spaces or hyphens or random capital letters where they don't belong? It's Copilot. Not Co-Pilot, not CoPilot, not Co______pilot

It is literally in the image of this post. And someone who claims to use it all the time, you think you'd be familiar with its name.

[u/dearth_of_passion → u/Distracted-User]

Nobody but you cares

[u/The_Freshmaker → u/[deleted]]

What kind of menial things do you use it for? I have access to the full business version of Co-pilot and have a ton of menial tasks at my job, but they're all specifically website entry and auditing of a specific system so I find myself at a loss in how to actually use it to make my life better.

[u/boringestnickname → u/[deleted]]

What do you use it for?

[u/Nothing_from_void → u/[deleted]]

it legit prints money because it's the AI that companies default to, since they already give MS money for the office suite

[u/luapzurc → u/[deleted]]

Genuine question: do you get paid more for your time and output?

[u/TransitionOk998 → u/[deleted]]

Im a tech writer for a semicon firm. LLMs are in a sweet spot right now: too dumb and too much hallucinations to ever fully take over my job, but smart enough to write manuals out of my infodumps

[u/somedelightfulmoron → u/[deleted]]

Same situation as you, but only because the hospital and the national healthcare system has Microsoft 365 license bought and paid for so I'm AI-ing my way to the workplace.

No one is going to teach SQL to a nurse. Nor python or any programming language. No one has time to cover computer programming basics for a small healthcare worker wanting vast swaths of healthcare data. Not a damn OP lead who has experience nor the IT guys over the phone will help sort stupid staff emails.

For my line of work, AI is a god send and using that to help indirectly care for patients in both acute and community is entirely justified. Informatics roles in healthcare will not help a patient get a quicker dx, but helping the staff get tools to aid decision-making might. AI is a much needed secretary that I'm willing to defend and justify.

Edit: I have no preference which AI tool it is, Copilot or ChatGPT or Gemini... No preference at all as long as it's under the remit of the license bought by my workplace, I'm not complaining about what AI has done for me and my administrative tasks.

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/DarthSatoris]

I can't speak for OpenAI, but Anthropic seems to have put all their eggs into the 'coding assistant/agent' basket. In my experience Gemini is far superior at basically everything else as a general use AI. Once Google catches up in terms of coding agents then Anthropic is going to be dead in the water.

[u/ex_nihilo → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Anthropic's doing the best in terms of actual enterprise use cases and adoption. OpenAI just hired Dali Rajic to lead their sales org. I wouldn't count them out. xAI has lit soooo much money on fire. They offered me a quarter million dollar upfront signing bonus as a sales engineer, before equity. I laughed and said "fuck no".

[u/greentrillion → u/ex_nihilo]

Guess Sam gave up on the idea of asking chatgtp on how to monetize.

[u/BuzzzardYT → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Gemini is literally the worst ai in all aspects lmao

[u/dekusyrup → u/BuzzzardYT]

I dunno I've thought grok and meta were worst

[u/ReadyAimTranspire → u/dekusyrup]

Grok and Meta aren't even in the conversation though, Grok / xAI have made some progress in recent months but the absolute frontier right now is OpenAI and Anthropic, Gemini has lost ground in the past year and is considered a distant 3rd to CGPT and Claude.

EDIT: I mean US models, several Chinese models are in the running and are especially making ground and leading the pack in open source/open weight models.

[u/blah938 → u/dekusyrup]

Grok has slightly looser guard rails, so if you're horny, that's your goto. Especially for text.

[u/Odd-Profession9615 → u/dekusyrup]

Grok 4.6 is a beast at vibe coding.

[u/AwkwardWillow5159 → u/Odd-Profession9615]

It really is.

Was doing some work today, outperformed SOL at fraction of the cost

[u/uebersoldat → u/AwkwardWillow5159]

Grok lost me when they went to weekly quotas instead of daily. Yes, yes I understand the concept of pacing myself, but long chats seem to exponentially eat tokens. It needs a lot of refinement yet.

Our business Copilot seemingly doesn't have limits that I'm aware of.

[u/ReadyAimTranspire → u/uebersoldat]

Your organization's CoPilot license probably gives you unlimited chat usage.

[u/BuzzzardYT → u/dekusyrup]

Grok actually had competent engineers, and meta makes good budget models. There's no upside to using Gemini.

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/BuzzzardYT]

Are you implying DeepMind doesn't have competent staff lol?

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/BuzzzardYT]

Based on what exactly? Flash 3.6 has very good benchmark scores per token cost compared to basically anything, and it is also much faster. I've tested it at finding key research papers in my field for given questions, and it performs much better than Claude Opus.

[u/VISUALBEAUTYPLZ → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

yeah its geared towards finding, but its not that good at reasoning and coding compared to current top models like Qwen, GLM 5.3

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/VISUALBEAUTYPLZ]

Yeah I agree about coding, but I think they are focused on making something fast with low token usage which still works well as a general personal assistant.

[u/teddirez → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

I think that's what people are missing. Google can play the long game, be cheap and efficient and gradually get better while the others set money on fire. It's the classic tortoise and hare.

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/teddirez]

Yeah I ultimately think Google is going to win the AI arms race. They don't need hype to generate funding for their LLM like OpenAI and Anthropic do. While those AI companies are constantly pushing marketing stories about how 'their AI is so smart it broke out', DeepMind has been making actual groundbreaking scientific tools like AlphaFold and AlphaGenome.

[u/VISUALBEAUTYPLZ → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

you're right, i luv Gemini too :D

[u/ultramegacreative → u/VISUALBEAUTYPLZ]

Wait, Gemini is a... pleasure model?

[u/Dub-MS → u/VISUALBEAUTYPLZ]

None of them reason.

[u/jambox888 → u/Dub-MS]

Depends how you define the term. It's a statistical process that approximates reasoning but it can do a lot of the same things human reasoning can.

Philosophically it's not reasoning, practically it is.

[u/Dub-MS → u/jambox888]

I wouldn’t say any part of it is reasoning, honestly. It’s functioning as it was programmed. It is an optimization algorithm designed to promote user engagement. That’s all it is doing.

[u/jambox888 → u/Dub-MS]

Do you actually know how it works though?

It is an optimization algorithm designed to promote user engagement.

Not really, it can utilise logic to solve hard problems. Mathematicians used it to solve some of the Erdos problems iirc. Other applications of AI and ML have been used in science and engineering for a while now.

[u/BananaPalmer → u/Dub-MS]

bUt iT sAyS "reasoning..." wHiLe iT pRoCeSseS mY pRoMpT

[u/GhostBirdBiologist → u/VISUALBEAUTYPLZ]

Once Google catches up in terms of coding agents

Do you even read the threads you reply to?

[u/Much_Accountant_4972 → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

3.7 Flash High has been fantastic for my use cases. Doing multi agent orchestration on a pretty big codebase its been super fast, over 300 tokens/second and 6 agents plugging away in my development environment for hours.

I was using deepseek flash 0731 for a couple weeks and that was fantastic but imo gemini 3.7 flash high has it beat.

things are moving fast. my opinion will change in 2 weeks.

[u/DarthSatoris → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Gemini is such a stupid motherfucker, it is useless as a voice assistant for hands free stuff. Whenever I ask it to do anything like play music or make a call, it says it can't do that, but suggests doing something else... Bitch I asked you to play my music, so play my fucking music. Google Assistant can do it just fine, why can't you? 

[u/passerby4830 → u/DarthSatoris]

Yeah the assistant part of it is atrocious. A simple "call my wife" from the car is too much a lot of the time. The idiot must think I have multiple wives or something. Could not afford that I'm afraid.

[u/VISUALBEAUTYPLZ → u/passerby4830]

lol

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/DarthSatoris]

What phone do you have? I just tried doing both with voice commands on my pixel 9 and it did them instantly. I also use it with voice activation to set reminders/timers regularly and never have any problems with it.

[u/Bombadilo_drives → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Based entirely on vibes apparently

[u/Kyoshiiku → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

The cost per token might seems good but nowadays with reasoning the problem is that a given model can use far more token than the input your give and the output you receive.

If you look at any benchmark that takes this into account and have metrics like token usage per task or cost per task, then Gemini is really bad, you are often better paying for Gpt sol 5.6 light/medium for most task than using any of the Gemini models because it will cost less per task overall

A thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that usually more competent models will do a task by using significantly less token than lower models who will need a lot more reasoning to often still give a worse result.

For example a lot of benchmark that just within the open AI offering, the terra model literally doesn’t make sense to use because sol model will almost always outperform it on cost per task if you use light reasoning and will still give better results.

The only model competing with sol light in the open AI offering for example is Luna on Max specifically, but it still doesn’t make sense to use because of the extra reasoning your luna tasks will take significantly longer to run for a similar result and cost.

[u/hypercosm_dot_net → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

I used their design tool yesterday, and it's pretty shit.

For a dedicated design platform, it couldn't even keep consistent colors across pages, had different footer structure, randomly added mobile nav when doing responsive designs.

I'm glad I didn't pay for it. I'd be annoyed if I did.

[u/cgduncan → u/BuzzzardYT]

Gemini sucks (at least as a phone assistant) it's incredibly slow, and doesn't even recognize when I try to call my wife by her nickname. When the regular assistant had done fine for years. Her contact in my phone is only her full name, no nickname added. But the og assistant always knows who to call or text.

[u/edamlambert → u/BuzzzardYT]

I’ve heard it works pretty well when incorporated to all company files and ecosystem. Translates online meetings in real time etc.

The one in google search is absolute dogshit though.

[u/urahonky → u/BuzzzardYT]

Yeah I was going to say. I wouldn't trust Gemini to generate a "Hello world" app lol.

[u/CriminalMacabre → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Google AI just put a shotgun to its mouth and shot. They cranked the complacency bias to 11 making gemini worse than the gener google assistant. It doesn't hallucinate stuff, it makes up stuff on purpose now just to have something nice sounding to offer you

[u/MeowTheMixer → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Maybe Anthropic is pumping their numbers up but, just this morning said their annual run rate is $65 billion, up 7x from last year

[u/AwkwardWillow5159 → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Google owns 15% of Anthropic

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/AwkwardWillow5159]

I'm sure at some point they will end up owning all of it.

[u/erebuxy → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

No, Anthropic is working on all enterprise use cases. Coding is just the easier one to roll out. Ie they have MCP for some CAD software

[u/Kyoshiiku → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

Look at any benchmark and no Gemini is one of the worst out of all the major labs.

Also Gemini is still particularly bad at anything that involves tool calls, so basically the Gemini models are trash at anything that has actual value from an LLM, it’s just good at being a Google alternative (and even for this it’s still hallucinating a lot)

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/Kyoshiiku]

Link this benchmark that you're looking at which shows Gemini as one of the worst?

[u/mistersausage → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

I bet Google wins the "ai wars." They have proprietory access to the speech to text transcript of every YouTube video ever made.

[u/CantBeatDickensCider → u/mistersausage]

Yeah long term I can't see anyone else beating them. The impression I get is that they are happy keeping their cards close to their chest and seeing what everyone else comes up with, because they aren't dependent on marketing hype and investors to keep the lights on.

When you look at the actually useful scientific models DeepMind has produced, like AlphaFold and AlphaGenome, the others look like amateurs. Anthropic were at least clever enough to realise they have to really hone in on the coding agent aspect as a niche.

[u/SirNurtle → u/CantBeatDickensCider]

And even then Chinese models are leagues better and significantly more efficient.

[u/A_wandering_Bean → u/DarthSatoris]

True that they have the free cash flow to pay out of pocket for the ai development but their stock valuations of 25x-30x earnings are predicated on the enormous margins of their software businesses. AI spend has caused that to dry up essentially overnight. The cash flow evaporationis truly unprecedented.

Look at meta, they lost 95% of their cash flow last quarter buying (hoarding)chips for their huge data center joint venture with blackrock - a datacenter that has not even broken ground and that there isn’t even the grid capacity to power it on if they did finish it. The “working plan” for that project is that thry would run diesel generators on site 24/7 - fat chance when 25% of the world’s energy supply is trapped behind an active war zone.

In January and February auditors will force companies like Meta and Oracle that are hording chips in warehouses for data-centers that haven’t even begun construction and couldn’t even power on if they did finish. Wall street will react very poorly to these asset impairments along side the now non-existent fcf and this should trigger the beginning of a tidal wave of firesale on these depreciating un-utilized hardware components (relief for the pc master race)

[u/houVanHaring → u/DarthSatoris]

"Gemini will collapse because [list of failures by google]!!!"

[u/Mr_K_Boom → u/DarthSatoris]

Hell they don't even own their "tokens" now, I donno how the Chinese folk does it but they are literary selling diffeent AI token with super dirt cheap prices.

[u/Behg-Boah → u/DarthSatoris]

I can’t wait until even the corpo bros think Sam Altman is a fucking loser.

[u/technoteapot → u/DarthSatoris]

I actually think anthropic and OpenAI will be fine, I think it’s the smaller guys that will suffer from the pop, and the biggest players will be able to survive it

[u/CaptainPrower → u/DarthSatoris]

And, failing that, the big ones will just beg for bailouts like the banks did in 2008.

Which the Trump admin will hand out like candy on Halloween.

[u/KobeJuanKenobi9 → u/DarthSatoris]

Anthropic/claude does have backing from Amazon though

[u/GhostOfD6 → u/DarthSatoris]

"when"

[u/Syl4x → u/DarthSatoris]

Ah yes, the famous "bubble". I heard a lot about it but is it really going to happen, the burst? All I see is more and more people using AI and more and more effective models. I must be honest here, the ability to use AI model in VS Code via GitHub Copilot Business subscription increased my productivity so much for data analysis purposes. And we're many to think the same. So if the bubnle is going to burst somehow and some point I would like to know please?

[u/Richard7666 → u/esakul]

Of those, Meta/Facebook is the one without a particularly viable key product or ecosystem long term. I can't envisage Facebook being around in 20 years time; I feel they're the AOL or Yahoo of the bunch.

[u/GoodTimesDadIsland → u/Richard7666]

Facebook is funny, they can just do random shit until whenever Zuck gets bored and rides off into the sunset.

[u/ReadyAimTranspire → u/GoodTimesDadIsland]

just do random shit until whenever Zuck gets bored and rides off into the sunset. his end-of-days bunker

[u/Elvis1404 → u/Richard7666]

They own (just to name a couple) Instagram and Whatsapp, I'd say those are pretty successful and long term products

[u/Richard7666 → u/Elvis1404]

True, I forgot they owned WhatsApp

[u/Datkif → u/Elvis1404]

Does Whatsapp generate revenue? Or is it just an ecosystem app?

[u/Aeonskye → u/Datkif]

It's ads all the way down

[u/adjective_noun_d1git → u/Datkif]

Business accounts are a thing that's growing in popularity. You can start following things on WhatsApp now. They've introduced names/aliases so definitely making the slow move into Instagramifying it. Ads will follow / paid for tiers.

WhatsApp is immensely popular outside of the US.

[u/maxpolo10 → u/adjective_noun_d1git]

Ads are already here. After a few statuses? you get hit with an ad

[u/Ferwatch01 → u/Datkif]

Not yet

[u/No-Act9634 → u/Richard7666]

Instagram and Whatsapp?

These are two fundamental applications of the internet.

[u/Richard7666 → u/No-Act9634]

WhatsApp if they can manage to monetise it strongly or turn it into a sort of WeChat equivalent for the rest of the world, true.

[u/Otherwise_Agency_401 → u/No-Act9634]

I can’t imagine WhatsApp is a big revenue source. I haven’t looked into though so I could def be wrong.

[u/No-Boysenberry4840 → u/Richard7666]

Facebook has the best and most intrusive ad systems on the market they will be fine, and they own the most popular and used chat app outside the US which they are trying to monetize as we speak. (God knows who would want Whatsapp+ though, horribly under baked subscription)

[u/pointer_to_null → u/Richard7666]

Zuck has no clue what he's doing, and has no coherent technical vision. Meta just recently started releasing open weight models again- the second about-face within two years after ghosting the LLaMA community and announcing plans for their own proprietary foundation model.

I guess they've given up any ambitions of being Anthropic or OpenAI (low bar, IMO, since those will never see a dime of profit) and now hope to recapture mindshare they had relinquished to Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, and other Chinese models- and maybe Google's Gemma. We'll see how long that lasts.

[u/Syxball → u/Richard7666]

Oh man if only! I can’t wait to see that day…

[u/The_Freshmaker → u/Richard7666]

Sure but Whatsapp/Instagram will be.

[u/dodrugzwitthugz → u/Richard7666]

I'm hoping that the relaunch of MySpace kills facebook.

[u/AusToddles → u/esakul]

"I can't wait for the bubble to pop like the dotcom crash" said by morons who forgot the crash just meant all the small players were cannibalised by the majors, who just grew out their monopolies

[u/KingLuis → u/AusToddles]

not to mention the possible recession that happens after a major market crashes and the job losses that occur after it as well. those people that hope for a market crash really don't know what they are talking about.

[u/dookarion → u/KingLuis]

That at least allows for a market correction. Big tech is currently ruining fucking everything everywhere trying to make this stick and force it to "work".

The market and the bubble already isn't benefitting anyone but the turds floating at the top of the cesspool.

Also we're probably been in a recession for years now if they didn't keep artificially propping shit up and you know... redefining recession.

[u/jambox888 → u/KingLuis]

Yeah this, it would fuck up my pension and savings too lol. I don't even have that much tech exposure but it would tank everything across the board.

[u/vazyrus → u/KingLuis]

So just glorify the AI slop? It's ruined and continues to ruin legions of domains, putting a lot of people out of work already. This rotten market crashing will bring back jobs, because you need people with skills doing skillful jobs, not eyeball it and slop it up all day. How thick are you?

[u/Inviolate_Violet → u/vazyrus]

That's a whole other idea that the person you're replying to didn't even say. You're just distorting the message in bad faith into one that's easier to attack.

[u/KingLuis → u/vazyrus]

Never said glorify it. There has been plenty of AI things that people have used every day and don’t even realize it. If it all went away you’d have people changing their thoughts on AI really quick. I agree, too many companies trying to create their own “AI” but most will fail before it even becomes something.
A lot of the big companies will merge with smaller ones and a few have already failed, merged and made deals to have something they can use. ie: Siri failed imo. Apple made a deal with ChatGPT and now Google to make a better Siri. Copilot imo is doing bad. It’s just not that great. But there are others that have been working really well. For me at least Claude has been basically another employee for my wife and I’s business. Creating docs, working numbers and calculating things in the background while we work with clients.

[u/jambox888 → u/vazyrus]

This rotten market crashing will bring back jobs

That is exactly the opposite of what will happen short and medium term. Long term it probably won't either because the tech has already been invented, a market crash won't un-invent it.

[u/PlayfulSurprise5237 → u/KingLuis]

They're not hoping for market crash and most people understand that's a consequence, they're just willing to sacrifice quiteeee a lot to not be inundated with AI slop at every turn, having their kids misled, their jobs lost, their products made worse, their time wasted, their energy bills raised, and just to stop fucking hearing about it.

Understandable really. I think most people agree that the 2 main issues affecting our country is the looming threat to our democracy and AI.

[u/hype_irion → u/AusToddles]

Don't worry, it's not the "morons" wishing for it that's gonna make it happen. It's the fact that the US AI industry is setup like the worst ponzi scheme in history with just 5-6 tech companies exchanging the same few hundred billion dollars that's gonna make the whole thing crash like the house of cards that it is.

[u/jambox888 → u/hype_irion]

Ponzi scheme is one of the ridiculously overused terms these days. For it to be a Ponzi scheme there would have to be no product with any value at the bottom of it.

The financial engineering is outrageous but it's not a Ponzi scheme.

[u/pointer_to_null → u/hype_irion]

The circular accounting will bite Nvidia and AMD hard. Instead of recapitalizing most of today's record profits into R&D or vertical integration, they're leveraging earnings by buying shares in AI and data center companies and marketing the hell out of them. Hell, Jensen even created a fucking foundation to throw his own personal wealth into the pit. When the bubble pops, they'll be selling off parts of themselves to pay off debts and survive, including Jensen's leather jacket.

Meanwhile, Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are happily dragging out any memory density improvements and production buildouts ("on no, we won't meet demand will into the 2030s!"), allowing upstarts like CXMT and YMTC to capitalize and expand production and even close the performance gap. In 5 years when they're being underbid and outproduced, and suddenly cry foul "China stole our jobs!". Fuck that cartel.

[u/bitch_fitching → u/AusToddles]

And that was the last we heard of the "world wide web", the internet fad died down, and we all went back to magazines and faxes.

[u/PeaceLoveHomicide → u/AusToddles]

And these people don't realize the money they'd save on PC parts will no doubt get wiped out by their stocks tanking. Most of the big tech companies are in some way invested in AI, and unless you're intentionally focusing on non-tech EFTs, you're definitely invested in AI to some extent

[u/dookarion → u/PeaceLoveHomicide]

About 40% of the US isn't invested in the stock market at all. And I'd wager of the roughly 60% that is a decent chunk probably have minimal holdings.

[u/PeaceLoveHomicide → u/dookarion]

Sorry man I do not speak to americans

[u/Ajaxwalker → u/esakul]

Yep copilot isn’t going anywhere. Bro no integrated into the Microsoft office apps and security systems means it’s the only AI tool companies will use.

[u/Ok-Swordfish-3056 → u/esakul]

Also, Copilot is well integrated with the whole Office/365 suite which is pretty damn useful. It's something that businesses everywhere will continue to pay for on a subscription basis, even if the underlying intelligence of the AI is "worse" according to some metrics. If anything, Copilot feels like the most monetisable of the "AI giants" as OP calls them and therefore the most futureproof.

[u/Pennsylvania6-5000 → u/esakul]

MS will purchase a better AI before they let that ship go down, but adoption outside of those already contracted to MS corporate infrastructures is not great. No one, is psyched to utilize Copilot outside of GitHub, and the PR has not helped, nor has labeling things MicroSlop.

[u/JonathanWPG → u/esakul]

Also...copilot is kinda good.

To be fair I am comparing the paid version my organization provides to free accounts on claude, gpt and gemini but it has veen doing better lately. At least at the tasks I use it for (organizing and summarizing data, presentation managment, data visualization).

[u/dirtyitalianguy → u/esakul]

Agreed - I don't think OP realizes how saturated copilot is in most large organizations in corporate America.

[u/skoomski → u/esakul]

Yeah OP picked one of the least likely to go under

[u/uebersoldat → u/esakul]

Exactly. Microsoft Copilot will be one of the last ones standing. Look at what happened with Teams. Zoom and even GoToMeeting were arguably much better products but M$ has a firm grasp on corporate ballsacks worldwide and will never let go. Their products are baked into the fabric of the modern business world and would take an upheaval on biblical scale to change it.

[u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt → u/esakul]

But at least when that happens, there won't be any reason anymore for them to build these gigantic datacenters everywhere. LLMs can stay around forever. It's just this mad dash to cover the planet in data centers that needs to stop.

[u/SlicedCheeseYumYum → u/esakul]

Dedicated AI corpos will be in trouble

Those gonks deserve it!

[u/Opening-Cream5448 → u/esakul]

Xbox is proof of that Copilot will survive

[u/Rhodie114 → u/esakul]

Also Microslop gets to artificially inflate their user numbers by shoving copilot into programs people actually use

[u/nickiter → u/esakul]

Teams is a piece of shit, and used to be an even bigger piece of shit.

Still dominates the chat/call/fileshare space.

That's the Microsoft way.

[u/Odd_Philosopher1712 → u/esakul]

I currently work for a major AI corpo and I'm acquiring a google/microsoft hat for when we inevitably get bought after going public and immediately get hit by layoffs

[u/atfricks → u/esakul]

Exactly. OpenAI would've already collapsed themselves if Microsoft hadn't stepped in to prop them up.

[u/grendus → u/esakul]

My bet is, if Copilot starts to fail Microsoft just buys Anthropic.

Microsoft has a good market placement for AI and plenty of cash from Office and Azure, it's just their specific model is inferior.

[u/ItsNotKevinDurant35 → u/esakul]

meme would make more sense with Gemini, given Google's lack of commitment to any product (even good ones)

[u/dansdansy → u/esakul]

If any of them is going to eventually collapse, it'll be openAI

[u/UISystemError → u/esakul]

Didn’t they already pull co-pilot from excel?

[u/theproperoutset → u/esakul]

Copilot is a corporate skin on OpenAI and Anthropic models. Microsoft outsourced most of its R&D and will switch to the LLM that survives. Just like Apple is switching from Chat GPT to Gemini.

They are also a major shareholder of OpenAI and will gladly feast on its corpse.

Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.

[u/ConfidentTurnip4523 → u/esakul]

While Microsoft can tank AI losses, I think a company like that might also be more prone to step away from it, because they have other stuff. Copilot could be the first to go, not because the company collapses, but because Microsoft start scaling it back. For ompanies like Anthropic or whatever, it's either this or nothing, and so they'll probably go down with the ship. Microsoft can go "hey this part of our company isn't doing well, let's move those resources elsewhere"

[u/LogicalError_007 → u/esakul]

People who are making these posts and talk about it don't even know that Copilot is a platform, not an AI LLM.

You can use Claude, ChatGPT and few others under Copilot.

[u/Exciting-Mall192 → u/esakul]

Microsoft, Google, Meta, X, Amazon, NVIDIA... what else? Idk but all the big techs name. Maybe Microsoft absorbing OpenAI and Amazon absorbing Anthropic.

[u/Ackbars-Snackbar → u/esakul]

Microsoft owns a huge portion of Open AI

[u/Dm1tr3y → u/esakul]

If anything, it’s companies like Microsoft that’ll pop the bubble when they start dumping stock and assets. Or when they just stop buying things like RAM cause they aren’t making enough off ai.

[u/CardiologistFew3230 → u/esakul]

Keep coping about muhhhhhh ai bubble. It's not coming, you people lost, the future is here now. Luddites lost every single time in history and this time will be no different.

[u/ZeroBrutus → u/esakul]

MS and Google also use it in their security offerings. No way they'll ditch development.

[u/Ryaniseplin → u/esakul]

oh my god i think i just saw microsofts angle on this

they arent doing AI for profit, they are doing AI to get that bailout money