Last week, Apple added about $50 billion in market cap after Bloomberg reported that it was working on its own ChatGPT gizmo. Every ad on Marketplace is for stuff like AI-powered recruiting by Robert Half. If it's only brewing so far, I don't think I'm ready for what comes next. An AI beverage company[1] or something?
Apple often gains (or loses) more than $50B in a day. It also happens to be slightly down about 0.15% since July 19th, compared to a total market fund that would be up about 0.15%.
I honestly don't pay much attention to Apple stock (hello, availability bias!), so I'm curious how often it does that. Assuming that day's move was just noise, though, should we conclude that it's unrelated to the AI bubble? That there is no AI bubble? Something else?
The random walk is an emergent phenomenon, though. It arises from the individual movements, but doesn't explain them. That's a bit like saying "Traffic" when someone asks, "Why are all these people out driving today?"
Financial media doesn't write for us, it writes for Big Money. It helps keeping prices down just as much as it helps pumping.
When dumb money (that's an actual term used) starts to FOMO into cryptos, it's always because it got hyped by the media ... and when that happened, smart money cashes out, crashing the price. The FOMO is always caused by media and this must be true, because otherwise these people would have already known to invest.
One can not ever trust a source that doesn't actually write for its audience.
There are enough lemmings out there, who do as some perceived authority tells them to, that it's legitimate to say that mainstream financial media controls the flow of money of millions. This isn't even restricted to financial media. Regular newspapers have the same effect. Sometimes it just takes a simple oneliner:
"Bitcoin crushed its AllTimeHigh!"
Tangentially related: Jim Cramer, a Big Money shill.
There will be winners and losers. Bubble sounds like everything just pops, but in this case, some groups will deliver additional value using this new technology. Obviously transformer model technology has future value. What is this relative to the bubble size?
For instance, the dot com crash may have happened, but it was just expecting too much too soon. The actual technical developments are worth much more now than they were at the time of that crash. You could say, people got cold feet and invested in the wrong companies (and sold valuable companies).
The problem is investment in random AI things, but we know the technology is valuable.
Concentration in large companies feels much less risky than investment in small companies that don't have established business models.
Just another tech bubble and people fall for that every time. NFT, Cryptocurrency, AR/VR, Metaverse, now it's AI. The formula for a tech bubble is always the same, and the result is also the same: The sharks take all the money and FOMO people lose their life savings
Would you say the people fell for the Metaverse? I saw Zuck pushing it and everybody making fun of it throughout it's existence.
NFT bubbled up, even if only short-lived. Crypto is still bubbling sometimes I guess. Metaverse...? Crickets from what I've seen.
AI is a bit different in that it already provides tangible value. E.g. automatic translation is now better than most amateur translators, but still can't beat professional translators. However this was enough to kill my friend's technical translation business. Since most foreign companies don't care that much about the nuance of what's written in their user manuals.
I think AI is already disappointing people on other fronts though. So we'll see how much value can be derived from it. But it's not 0.
You forgot about full self driving cars. Last time I've checked truckers were still moving goods and ride hailing vehicles were still ooerated by a human.
Any good ai scientist knows that research on ai is not sufficient and spent yield interesting results, so probably very little to no innovation will come out.
Meanwhile, the climate is getting worse and all this brainpower could be used on nuclear power, agriculture, construction, building trains... It's the same problem when people would go work on wall street instead of studying physics, it's a huge waste.
> all this brainpower could be used on nuclear power, agriculture, construction, building trains
Humans are not fungible. The ways humans are paid are not fungible.
The vast majority of people have no idea what kind of company they'll work for when they get an education. Incidentally, the physicists need engineers to design and build the computers that crunch their numbers, and write the software that orchestrates all that. And those engineers need business folks counting beans so they can get paid and enjoy company benefits.
My dad used to say that it takes all kinds of people to make the world go round. Make no mistake that "all this brainpower" is for the people who have the brains to decide what to do with, and there's enough billions of us that it mostly works out.
If you want to get upset about wasted brainpower, think about all the intelligent folks who are caught in a cycle of poverty, or do not have opportunities because of their disabilities or family obligations, or even social status in some places.
I’ve never found a use for crypto. But I have found dozens of uses for LLM and SD AI that materially improve my life and productivity directly and appreciably. I also have applied uses of generative techniques in highly dimensional time series optimization that’s very promising. I’ve never found a use for crypto.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp