{"id":86003,"date":"2025-08-21T22:27:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T22:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/86003\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T22:27:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T22:27:13","slug":"is-this-the-moment-when-the-generative-ai-bubble-finally-deflates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/86003\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this the moment when the Generative AI bubble finally deflates?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last few years, I have been warning you that the mania for LLMs would break eventually. <\/p>\n

The technical foundation was, as I argued all the way back to the early days of GPT-2,<\/a> never strong enough to support the hype. Since August 2023 (in essays like What if generative AI turns out to be a dud?<\/a>, and What exactly are the economics of AI?<\/a>), I have been repeatedly warning that the economics don\u2019t make much sense either. <\/p>\n

But until recently enthusiasm kept rising and rising, no matter what I said.<\/p>\n

But then we all say what happened with GPT-5; Altman spent years promising the moon, and in the end, long overdue, didn\u2019t even come close to delivering. A lot of people took note.<\/p>\n

Could things be changing? Is reality at least settling in? One never knows, but here are a few potentially significant signs from just the last few days:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Even influencers who have nothing to do with tech are starting to see it. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And for that matter, even Sam Altman himself seems to see it:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ok that\u2018s a faked image that someone sent me, which was too funny not to share.<\/p>\n

But \u2026. this (which inspired the faked photo) is actually real:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a7<\/p>\n

Not that Sam is deterred; in his mind, a fuckup is just an excuse to ask for money:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a7<\/p>\n

Without saying for sure that I know what will happen next \u2014 after all things like stock prices and the valuations AI startups are as much a matter of unpredictable crowd psychology as they are of (in this case, shaky) technical and economic fundamentals \u2014 I will leave this here, a cartoon I made (with ChatGPT\u2019s help!) in mid-July.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once the markets really understand this, enthusiasm may indeed collapse fairly quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the last few years, I have been warning you that the mania for LLMs would break eventually.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-86003","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}