AI won’t crash—it will burn. Like every tech cycle, the fire will clear the brush, redistribute talent, and leave infrastructure to power what comes next. The question is: what kind of plant are you?
I really do love the analogy and an impact-focused write up, distinct from most exaggerated takes from AI doomers just yelling about two studies that show little ROI from AI.
However, I implore all writers on substack to please NOT use chatGPT for writing the actual sentence structures of the text. I really do not enjoy reading a post (otherwise very intelligent and nuanced) and feeling like i’m reading the chat interface with my ChatGPT. There are plenty of ways to collaborate with an AI editor and AI research partner without relying on it to actually write for you.
The types of writing markers that overuse em dashes and constantly say “this isn’t x, it’s y!” is now just repeated everywhere. I am not calling it slop, because the content is quite decent, but I really do want to hear your voice as an author. AI generated articles are so wordy and lose the audience.
The famous quote “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one” couldn’t be more true nowadays.
Got to say I agree here. It was a good read until I realized it was written by ChatGPT using very well informed prompts. At that point I skipped to the end.
Just incredible. An entire article built around an environment metaphor for the tech industry without once critically detailing the multifarious ways that industry - and the boom and bust logic that governs it - is destroying the actual environment. Tech bros are so totally disassociated from the material reality most of us live in, they see the environment as an abstracted concept to use as yet another self-mythologising tool rather than the essential substrate for life that it is relentlessly obliterating. Who honestly gives a fuck about ‘who survives and who dies’ in this culture that’s ruining the future for the rest of us at this stage? They do not give a fuck about us.
If this is just a repeat of previous cycles that gave us Amazon and the rest, allowing individuals to have more global power than any one country’s government, then one thing’s for sure: everyone - outside of the tech industry - will lose.
These guys never learn. And it’s going to come back to bite them eventually. It’ll be the environment we rely on for life that’ll do it.
WADR, hating on groups of people and dulling leaning on the f-bomb, etc. to whine without providing any practical solution amounts to self-disqualifying pap. My advice: Be better.
Wow. Yeah, you hit the hammer on the head that hit the nail on the head. God, I really appreciate you bringing a little bit of actual truth to all of that slush.
Yes! I just left a similar comment above, comparing all this not to “healthy wildfires” but to the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, which is also coming and will be catastrophic (along with environmental collapse, coastal flooding, and open warfare due to obscene inequality).
This is so obviously LLM-written as to be basically unreadable. Don't be lazy! You can make the same point from an interesting idea using your own words.
And the elephant that you missed - China, and it's plethora of AI companies. All the US investment assumes that the competition that matters is for the US market, and that the period of innovative research is finished. Meanwhile the Chinese economy has at least equalled that of the US, and is still growing, whilst they also continue to invest in research that undercuts the IP that the US is relying on. Oh - and their energy costs are going down whilst the US government tries to prop up the most expensive source of supply.
Thank you Gustav for mentioning that coal and nuclear are the most expensive forms of energy production, even before accounting for external environmental costs.(Lazard has been tracking the levelized cost of energy for decades, so this is not opinion.) Why, at this time, are we throwing money at the most expensive, and in the case of coal very dirty, forms of energy? How does that fit into our understanding of this AI bubble that can easily be served by renewable energy and storage? The article's argument that it takes 3 years to build a solar farm is not true, it can take 3 years but it doesn't have to take 3 years, not even close. You factor in the time it takes to build the server plant and any extra time it takes to build solar quickly disappears. Requiring that all future server farms be situated on property that can accommodate 100% of the necessary power supply seems like a no-brainer. Planners will always make the right choice because pv and storage is the least expensive option with the shortest build time. I suspect the rest of this conversation about energy is just noise created by the energy suppliers, of which there are none in the case of renewable energy.
Arsonists are typically not the victims in wildfires. The people gathered at your dinner are playing a very different game than investors who are seeking real value and growth. The person who threw down their card and paid for the meal could have made $100M being part of an enterprise that never created a viable product nor a penny of profit. Lighting wildfires is great for some. Living in their path, not great for others.
Exactly. The number of millionaires that came out of the dot com bubble, simply by convincing people to throw money at some vague concept with no provable value…left a lot of investors screwed.
Another way to describe the dot com bubble…..the dot com con bubble.
No bubble in human history has acted as AI will act. Thus, no natural metaphor works. This story feels very off.
The over-supply of fiber in the dot com bust 25 years ago did crush jobs and capital - but invented new jobs and exponential capital.
AI + Robotics (catching up) won’t just scorch the forest floor - they will SALT THE EARTH. Their economic destruction will be structural and permanent. Not accretive and accelerating. Coding jobs - gone everywhere and never returning. With AGI - every knowledge job will be shifted to this “new, low paid illegal immigrant in the cloud” - first the low end ones. Then all of them. And AI controlled robots will rapidly drive our trucks, Ubers, trains, planes, drones, factories, restaurants, and retailers.
This isn’t a forest fire. This is a wholesale destruction of the forest.
Not for investors. You’re right. Capital will revel in the breathtaking returns. Trillionaires will be announced. All while double digit unemployment and an unprepared society, filled with seething young populists, hunt the bringers of this apocalypse. Little wonder they each have billion dollar New Zealand resort bunkers, Versace go-bags, and gassed up Lear jets idling on the side yard runway.
We need to tell the truth about this moment and how our already riven society (and nihilistic young) will simply not abide this. Nor should they. When prosperity is so unevenly divided + hope gone - the great equalizer has always been blood. This is exactly why revolutions happen. They will not be told to just eat cake.
Lest we forget, today’s wildfires, real or metaphors, exist in climate change. We’ve just passed another tipping point. The oceans coral systems will eventually be extinct. People who spend too much time in a virtual world of screens forget that we live in a physical world. The proponents of the Abundance Economy choose to ignore the consequences in the physical world. You may think the metaphor of wildfires is fine, but I have fought real wildfires and can tell you these are not your grandfather’s wildfires. A better metaphor would be the USFS prescribed burn in New Mexico that escaped and burned a vast scale of forest that will likely not recover in the climate change environment of record heatwaves and extended drought. Chip fabs and data centers are haphazardly and irresponsibly being built-out in areas where fresh-water supplies are threatened. Where is the common sense, science, and responsibility?
Altman and the rest know all this and are rushing to build the infrastructure and thereby become too big to fail, in the expectation the US will save them just as the bankers were saved in the GFC and--here's the key--allow them to maintain control of it just as the bankers weren't touched.
Nvidia and the entire fraudulent gen AI sector needs to be destroyed and regrown, and these data centers need to be canceled. The power grab is astounding and Trump is corrupt enough to allow it.
Altman needs to be disassociated from the industry.
I read lovely allegories and descriptions of what AI will bring in terms based in a view from high altitude, however, I see almost no commentary about the nuts and bolts of what AI will produce. What exactly does it do better. It’s clear AI can produce text faster, yet its inherent practice of hallucination keeps it from contributing in practices which require rigor such as law, engineering, and the medical arts. Its use there will lead to death and tyranny.
I watched some initial rollout of this in the petroleum industry where management was strongly behind its deployment yet no one could articulate what the hell it was going to do. I retired before that was resolved. So, please, put up or shut up.
Complete Corporate Speak! I spent 25+ years in corporate America and I see through your babble. It’s clear you are just one more arrogant and vapid manager who is unable to articulate what real impact these new technologies will have on Main Street America. You really just don’t know. You pretend to have vision but you are as blind as you are vain.
So to paraphrase Professor Thomas Lehr, if a person can’t communicate the least they can do is to shut up.
Yes, a good analogy, but also incredibly egocentric… No surprise.
When, not if, the wildfire hits, it will not simply affect the industry. Lots of average people just going about their lives are going to bear the brunt.
But don’t worry! I’m sure the government will bail out the companies that are “too big to fail.”
But as I'm sure the (former) residents of LA's Palisades would say, fires cause horrific devastation - destroying communities, ecologies, livelihoods and lives.
Whenever the bubble bursts, or the fire ignites - just like in all previous cycles of hysteria - it will be ordinary people who will pick up the bill; whose lives will never get rebuilt.
One other point - you mention the depreciation, but also the energy cost of running GPUs makes them very different to glass fiber cables - in the other side of this bubble, no-one will be able to justify the immense cost of running them. my guess is they'll be mothballed.
at lest we won't have to produce any more compute for at least another 50 years...
Annoyingly AI, interesting ideas, ironic metaphor. When does humanity come into play? People’s lives are just collateral underbrush burnt away so Bezos can get a yacht for his yacht? Something is missing. Progress is being measured by dollars, compute, energy… We need to add people back into the equation.
The trouble with LLMs are that they are non-deterministic programs designed to be plausible enough—in whatever vernacular they were trained with—to be interpreted as intelligent. They cannot be relied upon to give accurate solutions to deterministic questions. There is no “if a then b else c,” only “b” and every so often, “c.”
As others have observed, this article “sounds” like it was written by an LLM, even to the point of hedging its own bets like LLMs frequently do. It completely ignores basic facts like Altman/OAI and others still haven’t delivered on promises and are overextended on debt, that many/most LLMs were trained unethically and/or are running out of fresh training material (and already beginning to show signs of training on LLM output “generational loss”), that they are leveraging unaware communities to deliver infrastructure (water/power—we just threw out two PSC commissioners here in Georgia for that), and still haven’t figured out use cases and value propositions except for stuff like search and doing homework.
I’ll throw programming in there as well, which is where the vast majority of Anthropic’s income is. Somewhat of a special case since the code works or doesn’t, so you have feedback against hallucinations.
Yes, I didn’t get all the cases. For a very good discussion on this use case, check out Ez Zitron’s discussion with Charlie Meyer on the subject of vibe coding from last week.
I really do love the analogy and an impact-focused write up, distinct from most exaggerated takes from AI doomers just yelling about two studies that show little ROI from AI.
However, I implore all writers on substack to please NOT use chatGPT for writing the actual sentence structures of the text. I really do not enjoy reading a post (otherwise very intelligent and nuanced) and feeling like i’m reading the chat interface with my ChatGPT. There are plenty of ways to collaborate with an AI editor and AI research partner without relying on it to actually write for you.
The types of writing markers that overuse em dashes and constantly say “this isn’t x, it’s y!” is now just repeated everywhere. I am not calling it slop, because the content is quite decent, but I really do want to hear your voice as an author. AI generated articles are so wordy and lose the audience.
The famous quote “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one” couldn’t be more true nowadays.
Got to say I agree here. It was a good read until I realized it was written by ChatGPT using very well informed prompts. At that point I skipped to the end.
Agreed as well. I started reading it but to be honest just started skipping - A.I. needless verbosity was driving me nuts.
Yes this was way too long but good article overall
Totally agree, this reads as copy-pasted from GPT. Good insights but I would never share it for this reason
Same feeling here . Its good read in general but some parts of it is repeated and I just skip it.
Just incredible. An entire article built around an environment metaphor for the tech industry without once critically detailing the multifarious ways that industry - and the boom and bust logic that governs it - is destroying the actual environment. Tech bros are so totally disassociated from the material reality most of us live in, they see the environment as an abstracted concept to use as yet another self-mythologising tool rather than the essential substrate for life that it is relentlessly obliterating. Who honestly gives a fuck about ‘who survives and who dies’ in this culture that’s ruining the future for the rest of us at this stage? They do not give a fuck about us.
If this is just a repeat of previous cycles that gave us Amazon and the rest, allowing individuals to have more global power than any one country’s government, then one thing’s for sure: everyone - outside of the tech industry - will lose.
These guys never learn. And it’s going to come back to bite them eventually. It’ll be the environment we rely on for life that’ll do it.
Exactly my thoughts as I was reading this.
WADR, hating on groups of people and dulling leaning on the f-bomb, etc. to whine without providing any practical solution amounts to self-disqualifying pap. My advice: Be better.
Wow. Yeah, you hit the hammer on the head that hit the nail on the head. God, I really appreciate you bringing a little bit of actual truth to all of that slush.
Yes! I just left a similar comment above, comparing all this not to “healthy wildfires” but to the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, which is also coming and will be catastrophic (along with environmental collapse, coastal flooding, and open warfare due to obscene inequality).
Well said!!!
Precisely this.
This is so obviously LLM-written as to be basically unreadable. Don't be lazy! You can make the same point from an interesting idea using your own words.
I had to use an LLM to summarise this LLM article down to to point so I can get on with my life.
The amount of paragraphs ending with "this is not X — it is Y" was astounding. That was the clear giveaway for me.
Maybe it's just me but I really wasn't able to tell this was written by AI until I came to the comments section.
And the elephant that you missed - China, and it's plethora of AI companies. All the US investment assumes that the competition that matters is for the US market, and that the period of innovative research is finished. Meanwhile the Chinese economy has at least equalled that of the US, and is still growing, whilst they also continue to invest in research that undercuts the IP that the US is relying on. Oh - and their energy costs are going down whilst the US government tries to prop up the most expensive source of supply.
Thank you Gustav for mentioning that coal and nuclear are the most expensive forms of energy production, even before accounting for external environmental costs.(Lazard has been tracking the levelized cost of energy for decades, so this is not opinion.) Why, at this time, are we throwing money at the most expensive, and in the case of coal very dirty, forms of energy? How does that fit into our understanding of this AI bubble that can easily be served by renewable energy and storage? The article's argument that it takes 3 years to build a solar farm is not true, it can take 3 years but it doesn't have to take 3 years, not even close. You factor in the time it takes to build the server plant and any extra time it takes to build solar quickly disappears. Requiring that all future server farms be situated on property that can accommodate 100% of the necessary power supply seems like a no-brainer. Planners will always make the right choice because pv and storage is the least expensive option with the shortest build time. I suspect the rest of this conversation about energy is just noise created by the energy suppliers, of which there are none in the case of renewable energy.
Arsonists are typically not the victims in wildfires. The people gathered at your dinner are playing a very different game than investors who are seeking real value and growth. The person who threw down their card and paid for the meal could have made $100M being part of an enterprise that never created a viable product nor a penny of profit. Lighting wildfires is great for some. Living in their path, not great for others.
Exactly. The number of millionaires that came out of the dot com bubble, simply by convincing people to throw money at some vague concept with no provable value…left a lot of investors screwed.
Another way to describe the dot com bubble…..the dot com con bubble.
Great metaphor with zero humanity. Equating monopolies to the wisdom of nature is the hubristic idiocracy that led to a fascist government.
Damn well said
No bubble in human history has acted as AI will act. Thus, no natural metaphor works. This story feels very off.
The over-supply of fiber in the dot com bust 25 years ago did crush jobs and capital - but invented new jobs and exponential capital.
AI + Robotics (catching up) won’t just scorch the forest floor - they will SALT THE EARTH. Their economic destruction will be structural and permanent. Not accretive and accelerating. Coding jobs - gone everywhere and never returning. With AGI - every knowledge job will be shifted to this “new, low paid illegal immigrant in the cloud” - first the low end ones. Then all of them. And AI controlled robots will rapidly drive our trucks, Ubers, trains, planes, drones, factories, restaurants, and retailers.
This isn’t a forest fire. This is a wholesale destruction of the forest.
Not for investors. You’re right. Capital will revel in the breathtaking returns. Trillionaires will be announced. All while double digit unemployment and an unprepared society, filled with seething young populists, hunt the bringers of this apocalypse. Little wonder they each have billion dollar New Zealand resort bunkers, Versace go-bags, and gassed up Lear jets idling on the side yard runway.
We need to tell the truth about this moment and how our already riven society (and nihilistic young) will simply not abide this. Nor should they. When prosperity is so unevenly divided + hope gone - the great equalizer has always been blood. This is exactly why revolutions happen. They will not be told to just eat cake.
Yes. Tristan says on his podcast what these guys say privately. That even if AI destroys humanity - they were the ones who delivered it.
Lest we forget, today’s wildfires, real or metaphors, exist in climate change. We’ve just passed another tipping point. The oceans coral systems will eventually be extinct. People who spend too much time in a virtual world of screens forget that we live in a physical world. The proponents of the Abundance Economy choose to ignore the consequences in the physical world. You may think the metaphor of wildfires is fine, but I have fought real wildfires and can tell you these are not your grandfather’s wildfires. A better metaphor would be the USFS prescribed burn in New Mexico that escaped and burned a vast scale of forest that will likely not recover in the climate change environment of record heatwaves and extended drought. Chip fabs and data centers are haphazardly and irresponsibly being built-out in areas where fresh-water supplies are threatened. Where is the common sense, science, and responsibility?
So, people who breathe and exhale contribute to air pollution?
Altman and the rest know all this and are rushing to build the infrastructure and thereby become too big to fail, in the expectation the US will save them just as the bankers were saved in the GFC and--here's the key--allow them to maintain control of it just as the bankers weren't touched.
Nvidia and the entire fraudulent gen AI sector needs to be destroyed and regrown, and these data centers need to be canceled. The power grab is astounding and Trump is corrupt enough to allow it.
Altman needs to be disassociated from the industry.
This is written by ChatGPT, I can recognize its style. Nevertheless, interesting topic.
I read lovely allegories and descriptions of what AI will bring in terms based in a view from high altitude, however, I see almost no commentary about the nuts and bolts of what AI will produce. What exactly does it do better. It’s clear AI can produce text faster, yet its inherent practice of hallucination keeps it from contributing in practices which require rigor such as law, engineering, and the medical arts. Its use there will lead to death and tyranny.
I watched some initial rollout of this in the petroleum industry where management was strongly behind its deployment yet no one could articulate what the hell it was going to do. I retired before that was resolved. So, please, put up or shut up.
Complete Corporate Speak! I spent 25+ years in corporate America and I see through your babble. It’s clear you are just one more arrogant and vapid manager who is unable to articulate what real impact these new technologies will have on Main Street America. You really just don’t know. You pretend to have vision but you are as blind as you are vain.
So to paraphrase Professor Thomas Lehr, if a person can’t communicate the least they can do is to shut up.
Yes, a good analogy, but also incredibly egocentric… No surprise.
When, not if, the wildfire hits, it will not simply affect the industry. Lots of average people just going about their lives are going to bear the brunt.
But don’t worry! I’m sure the government will bail out the companies that are “too big to fail.”
But as I'm sure the (former) residents of LA's Palisades would say, fires cause horrific devastation - destroying communities, ecologies, livelihoods and lives.
Whenever the bubble bursts, or the fire ignites - just like in all previous cycles of hysteria - it will be ordinary people who will pick up the bill; whose lives will never get rebuilt.
One other point - you mention the depreciation, but also the energy cost of running GPUs makes them very different to glass fiber cables - in the other side of this bubble, no-one will be able to justify the immense cost of running them. my guess is they'll be mothballed.
at lest we won't have to produce any more compute for at least another 50 years...
Annoyingly AI, interesting ideas, ironic metaphor. When does humanity come into play? People’s lives are just collateral underbrush burnt away so Bezos can get a yacht for his yacht? Something is missing. Progress is being measured by dollars, compute, energy… We need to add people back into the equation.
The trouble with LLMs are that they are non-deterministic programs designed to be plausible enough—in whatever vernacular they were trained with—to be interpreted as intelligent. They cannot be relied upon to give accurate solutions to deterministic questions. There is no “if a then b else c,” only “b” and every so often, “c.”
As others have observed, this article “sounds” like it was written by an LLM, even to the point of hedging its own bets like LLMs frequently do. It completely ignores basic facts like Altman/OAI and others still haven’t delivered on promises and are overextended on debt, that many/most LLMs were trained unethically and/or are running out of fresh training material (and already beginning to show signs of training on LLM output “generational loss”), that they are leveraging unaware communities to deliver infrastructure (water/power—we just threw out two PSC commissioners here in Georgia for that), and still haven’t figured out use cases and value propositions except for stuff like search and doing homework.
I’ll throw programming in there as well, which is where the vast majority of Anthropic’s income is. Somewhat of a special case since the code works or doesn’t, so you have feedback against hallucinations.
Yes, I didn’t get all the cases. For a very good discussion on this use case, check out Ez Zitron’s discussion with Charlie Meyer on the subject of vibe coding from last week.
And China after the fire? Will it emerge as the unburned exogenous species taking over large regions of the ecosystem?