this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
359 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
83929 readers
2881 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Depends on when the AI bubble pops.
I've been researching this a bit... I've come to the conclusion that there is no AI bubble. In fact, we're only just getting started down this road. Unless there's some massive 100x efficiency breakthrough in training AI and inference, the entire world is going to be building seemingly endless AI data centers (and the normal compute kind, e.g. for stuff like AWS, Google/YouTube, Meta, banks) for at least a decade. Probably a little longer (12-15 years before demand levels out).
Everyone thinks that "AI data center" means ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc but there's 10,000x more demand for AI than those services. Think: Pharmaceutical companies trying to find proteins, scientists (and big agriculture!) trying to model the weather, and other businesses trying to automate stuff. Not just software; robots and things like conveyor belts.
Another example: Ever use one of those self-checkouts that's mostly just a camera pointing down, where you place the stuff you're purchasing? That uses AI too.
Having said that, there is a great big bubble in AI: OpenAI, specifically. That will definitely pop one day. And hopefully, the DRAM bullshit will go along with it.
Yeah, the LLM and picture generation bubble will burst but that isn't 'AI', it's a tiny subset of tasks that happen to be easy to train because the companies involved have helped themselves to all of the text and images created by humanity.
The other uses of AI are harder to train, because we don't have centuries worth of robotic motion data or a YouTube of folded protein data. Those are the uses that will have the most impact in the future, as they are developed.
LLMs are a bubble, AI is not.
LLMs are the only thing that is hyped. The other models and applications have existed already back when ChatGPT first hit the public and they have not had any special break through that would explain exponential growth in investment or a need for compute power. Language models had that with the transformer structure, everything else just develops iteratively.
The bubble we see now is because of language models and we can try and conflate it with other deep models and call it all AI, but it doesn't change the fact that the generative models are the only ones requiring these resources and are looking for a problem to solve.