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dentemple · 10 days ago
Don't worry, once the Wall Street tap runs dry, the U.S. government will be more than happy to step in and bail out the AI corps. at the taxpayer's expense.
dataviz1000 · 10 days ago
> Don't worry, once the Wall Street tap runs dry, the U.S. government will be more than happy to step in and bail out the AI corps. at the taxpayer's expense.

I have a brilliant idea. Why not start this now?

The US government will give every child born $1000 in money in order to hand it to the small number of families who own 70% of equities in order to purchase equities the child can't touch for 18 years. That is US Government -> child -> rich person who currently owns the equity, although the rich person gets the cash in hand the child has to wait 18 years to sell the equity.

Where does the US Government get this $1000 per child from? Borrow it, adding to the $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt.

Here is the interesting part of my brilliant plan. That child will inherit, calculated per capita, $111,000 in debt the moment she is born. That child will be responsible, calculated per capita, for ~$3,000 a year in interest on that debt.

In order to sell the idea, every time the US Government gives $1000 to a child to purchase stocks I own, I will give $250 to another child to purchase stocks I own. Let's do the math: $1000 profit - $250 loss + $250 profit = $1000 profit. Best part is the media will run this as the leading news story for 3 days making me look like God.

It is a brilliant idea.

Retric · 10 days ago
Subtract GDP growth and it’s slightly negative, meaning simply borrowing more money and the at current rates the debt to GDP ratio decreases over time. Massive spending sprees are why it’s gotten so huge, kicking it down the road turns it into a smaller problem soon as politicians stop actively making the issue worse it goes away.

We could argue about the risk if things start to fail, but in an emergency the US could change its constitution and abandon its debt.

glitchc · 10 days ago
I love it, except there's no point in providing debt to a party with no ability to pay for ~18 years.
daedrdev · 10 days ago
With what money? US debt is owned by mostly US residents. US defecit is already absurdly high. Not to mention the looming social security failure
stvltvs · 10 days ago
You print more money. The only limit is the inflation you create.
Nasrudith · 10 days ago
History reminder to everyone: The dot com companies were not bailed out. Only the Detroit auto industry. What is with this rage-bait assumption that a bailout is guaranteed?
robocat · 10 days ago
Make America Bankrupt Again!?
boh · 10 days ago
That's why they're hedging. US government regulation has liquidity requirements so it doesn't occur.
roadside_picnic · 10 days ago
It's national defense! Imagine if China had more slop than us!
seanmcdirmid · 10 days ago
China is focusing heavily on AI applications. They have basically decided already to deal with their coming demographic bust with robuts/AI rather than immigration. Its not even about military applications, the US is just afraid that China will shoot so far ahead of us economically that they won't have any leverage over it in the future at all.
HPsquared · 10 days ago
We cannot allow a slop gap!
vondur · 10 days ago
I said the same thing on a different post and people downvoted it. The current administration believes that the US can't fall behind China in this AI arms race. So don't expect anything too drastic to happen to the large players in the game.
malka1986 · 10 days ago
China made the us fall in kinda the same trap that the us madeade ussr fall into with the moon race.
zerosizedweasle · 10 days ago
Maybe, but a clear Republican bailout of AI might wipe them out for several election cycles / foreseeable future. Big tech isn’t popular, AI isn’t popular and bail outs aren’t popular
jgalt212 · 10 days ago
You're being downvoted, but a number of AI actors certainly taking actions to become "too big to fail".
lambdaone · 10 days ago
This makes the hair rise up on the back of my neck; it reminds me the sub-prime crisis - "they can't all default at once!"
thewebguyd · 10 days ago
> "they can't all default at once!"

Narrator: As it turns out, they can.

The difference now is instead of banks holding the risk, they are now the safest portion of the loans. The risk is now moved to private credit, so if this bubble bursts, they will panic sell other assets to cover the AI losses, which will crash unrelated sectors as well.

Since the now bad AI loans can't be sold, they need liquidity form elsewhere to cover. AI bursting means other S&P 500 stocks, treasuries, gold, crypto, commercial real estate will all go down with it.

Ekaros · 10 days ago
I wonder how much other bad private credit there is. If you want liquid funds, rolling it all over time and time again might stop working... Maybe it is really time to clean it all up.
marcosdumay · 10 days ago
Yes. And they always start trying to diversify only after they work years forcing everything to be correlated to it...

The .com bubble wasn't like this, but it was a minority between bubbles.

JohnMakin · 10 days ago
It does look and feel very similar - particularly the risk shedding and assumptions made there
encyclopedism · 10 days ago
What bubble? Where is it? I haven't seen it! Here, try my SOTA AI toothbrush.
red-iron-pine · 10 days ago
presumably it data mines plaque locations while providing no actual hygiene benefit whatsoever
jbverschoor · 10 days ago
In the meantime, people who are actually working with it only become more bullish, and see a world where most people are first willing, and later basically required to pay 20-200 per month
alpha_squared · 10 days ago
Someone "actually working with it" checking in, if that matters at all to this conversation. I'm very bearish on the industry even if I think the tech is going to stick around.

If we separate the tech from the industry, it's clear one has some value (albeit very hard to say just how much) and the other is a lot of smoke and mirrors. This is not a healthy space.

spwa4 · 10 days ago
One might point out that this is the story of AI since at least the 1930's. Impressive technology demo's ... wild investment, crash, bankruptcy ... but the tech remains and in fact has useful applications all around.

AI Winters. I finished school in 2008 and have seen it happen twice.

Convnets. LSTM (and various RNNs).

Both are in wide use today.

roadside_picnic · 10 days ago
> who are actually working with it only become more bullish

I have a feeling the word "actually" is doing a lot of work with this. I shipped AI facing user products a few years ago, then worked in more research focused AI work for awhile (spending a lot of time working with internals of these models). Then seeing where this was all headed (hype was more important than real work) decided to go back to good ol' statistical modeling.

Needless to say, while I think AI is absolutely useful, I'm bearish on the industry because current promises and expectations are completely out of touch with reality.

But I have a feeling because I'm not currently deploying a fleet of what people are calling "agents" (real agents are still quite cool imho), you would describe me as not "actually" using AI.

thatguy0900 · 10 days ago
This really doesn't make sense to me. I see no world where Ai is so useful that the common man is willing to pay 100+ a month for it, but it's also a world where the common man has a job. There's too many people for everyone to have some niche job the Ai can't do.
bojan · 10 days ago
And if such a job would carry a work week of, say, 5 or 10 hours?
xorcist · 10 days ago
With OpenAI, the most bullish analysts calculate that 40% of the world's population will be users in three years time, and they would still lose money on every sale. That's a bold bet.
websiteapi · 10 days ago
would you bet $10,000 that the super majority (80% or greater) of current users of free APIs will be using a paid (20-200) one per month? if so let's set something up. we can set the time limit at January 1st, 2028.
maplethorpe · 10 days ago
Can I ask what you do? I suspect there is a type of job that AI excels at, and it makes everyone in that job unreasonably bullish on AI.
lm28469 · 10 days ago
Well the problem is that even at $200 a month they're bleeding MONEY. FYI for every well intentioned skilled engineer using llms you have 100 lazy code monkeys shipping mountains of tech debt faster than ever before, 1000 people generating bullshit emails/tickets that could have been summed up in 5 bullet points, 1000 people role-playing with virtual friends/partners, &c.

You're in your own little bubble and completely oblivious to the thousands of man hour wasted every day to unfuck AI slop

And as it turns out 80% of users aren't willing to pay a cent and will abandon ship as soon as there is an alternative

mhog_hn · 10 days ago
Imagine throwing orders of magnitude more of compute at things - we may have things like a monte carlo tree search for LLM outputs using an LLMJudge that prunes the tree.
LaurensBER · 10 days ago
+ we can continuously let a LLM monitor our log files and alert/propose/fix issues 24/7. If intelligence becomes cheap enough this would be an enormous market.

Having a LLM run as "fact checker" /coach for everything that you write also would be a great addition.

boh · 10 days ago
Banks hedge investments-it's pretty standard and lowers their risk-weighted assets. If their investments are big, their hedges are big. If banks have a net negative view towards their AI investments, this article fails to articulate that (regardless of how many exciting adjectives they choose to use).
spwa4 · 10 days ago
$5 trillion dollars in loans? Pretty standard?
boh · 9 days ago
I think you're filling in the blanks for a pretty detail light-broad brush-click baity article. The $5 trillion that it cites is by its own words what they're "expected to spend". Also the global bond market is trillions of dollars worth and yes it is typically hedged.
alecco · 10 days ago
https://archive.ph/kwD1t

> Banks are lending unprecedented sums to technology giants building artificial intelligence infrastructure while quietly using derivatives to shield themselves from potential losses.

And who is their counterparty? Aliens? What a dumb click-bait article.

jesuslop · 10 days ago
Is there a web that calculates implicit credit ratings of the hyperscaler companies?
voxleone · 10 days ago
Looks like we might be witnessing a textbook cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy in the making. As the article suggests, once large investors and institutions start calling this an “AI bubble,” the narrative alone can drive more capital, inflating valuations further just because everyone expects growth. When price → expectation → price becomes the dominant feedback loop, fundamentals matter less.

That kind of reflexivity has powered past bubbles. George Soros’ reflexivity thesis applies: rising prices attract more investment, which inflates prices further, until reality forces a reset. If many AI-related companies can’t quickly deliver expected growth, the eventual correction could be sharp.

In short: hype begets cash, cash begets price, price begets more hype, and at that point, we’re no longer betting on value, we’re betting on the belief itself.