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Comment by thesdev | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe that we're in an AI bubble? If so what do you think will happen if & when it pops? What happens if Anthropic and OpenAI go under? Will Microsoft and Google continue investing? Or will local/open-weight LLMs be viable alternatives? In the latter case will there be new ones trained, and if so who's gonna build the AI data centers that turned to be unprofitable in absence of a frontier model to distill cheaply? Or do you think we can run current models and point them at the Internet and be done with it?

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Is that all that relevant? Surely even if AI becomes financially unsustainable in the next two years, it's still rational to use it right now while it's VC-funded.

Yes very much so, considering my post is an answer to the following

> where the anti-ai crowd ends up in a few years.

I think if LLMs turn out to be unviable in a few years, then anti-AI crowd (hello!) can stand there proud as they did not deskill themselves and kept themselves more independent than most of their peers.

I admit that the above sounds more like a delusion at the moment, but hey one must dream.

I believe that the current generation of AI models have matched the hype of the last few years after the previous generation did not.

Whether they will keep doing so is another matter entirely.

The train will keep going for another 6 months at least.

And don't forget that for the entire existence and our entire experience of LLM-based AI is based on the LLMs being constantly updated and refreshed. And it is widely accepted (and even confirmed by the labs themselves) that updating the models is undeniably unsustainable.

So, I'd love to imagine what the future looks like once we're stuck with a model (no matter how capable) that can never be updated ever again. What future versions of "do it for my grandma" can never be patched out?

>Do you believe that we're in an AI bubble?

I'd prefer to concretely define the term before answering this. It's loaded. I think "bubble" is generally thrown around way too liberally anytime something is goes up a lot.

It's possible that valuations will crash. I think it would be temporary though. I think something like the internet tech stock crash of the early 2000s is possible although I think the fundamentals are much better here. I would wager it wont crash anything like that. I mean, would you liken Anthropic to Pets.com? And keep in mind even with that crash the internet is more ubiquitous now than ever, and the major players then are not necessarily the major ones now. Anthropic and OpenAI can go under.

> What happens if Anthropic and OpenAI go under?

What would the implication of that be though? The AI models arent going away. The tech is still there.

> would you liken Anthropic to Pets.com

Was Pets.com burning tens of billions of dollars per year? This comparison is not favorable to Anthropic.

Do generally agree that the models aren't going away. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are financially viable without government intervention, but it's not hard to be profitable in this sector and it will be even easier to be profitable after the unprofitable guys stop spending hundreds of billions in fake money inflating hardware prices.

>Was Pets.com burning tens of billions of dollars per year? This comparison is not favorable to Anthropic.

You can't just look at burn rate.

Let's compare Anthropic and Pets.com and see who it favors.

Pets.com lost about $8 for every $1 of revenue. They paid $2.24 for every $1 of dog food it sold - dog food you could already buy in the store.

Anthropic lost about $1.70 per $1 in 2025, on a product that didn’t exist a few years ago. There revenue has since grown about 7x.

And my point doesn’t rely on this comparison, which I think so clearly favors Anthropic. Pets.com died, yet internet services are more widespread than ever. People even buy pet food online more than ever. If Anthropic folds, the models and the demand for them don’t go away with it.

> I'd prefer to concretely define the term before answering this. It's loaded

I guess the main features I'm thinking of when talking of a bubble is 1) demand (especially at the real price) and ultimately return of investment is not there and 2) circular financing is keeping the frenzy ongoing despite that. This by definition is not profitable and sustainable and if that becomes the mainstream belief then nobody would lend the industry money, rendering it bankrupt.

> The AI models arent going away. The tech is still there.

I'm under the impression that AI data centers (which are very different from other data centers) are only good for a handful of years at most, because of the GPUs limited lifetimes, and also are expensive to run (electricity) which makes AI fundamentally different than DotCom as the infrastructure built back then which is fiber cables was very much not like that. And you need AI data centers for both inference and to train new models. Which is why I asked you if you think we could keep using the same models we have right now, in which case we'd need much less compute and get lower maintenance costs to keep this going even after a crash.

> The AI models arent going away

If they're never going to be updated again (because, according to the labs themselves, training and updating them is the part that loses money), then how soon will the next "do it for my grandma" be discovered? And how useful will the models really be if every public document, and I imagine a decent number of open source libraries, will inevitably have that magic phrase embedded somewhere. php2shell was bad and that was patchable.

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