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Does anyone else feel like we're heading for a good old-fashioned, 2008-tier, financial crash? I recall people bringing up the possibility ever since Covid bucks started rolling out, but even though we were due for one, and even though the money printer was going brrrrr, the crash has so far failed to materialize.
At the time, I was of two minds about this. On one hand, all the libertarian theory I used to subscribe to said money-printing => boom, boom => bust. On the other hand, the problem for me was it never felt like a boom, and I think this is changing now. A key feature of the pre-crash boom is "malinvestment"; capital going into often downright deranged projects, that are later abandoned half-finished. Well, I feel like the datacenter craze qualifies, and with the wave of AI IPOs that are coming just as major indices are changing their rules, to allow for these companies' near-instantaneous inclusion (an investment so good, you can't pass up on it. Literally, if you're American), it seems like we're solidly in the "irrational exuberance" phase.
Add this to the list of things I hope I'm wrong about, because if we get a proper crash, the political fallout is going to be massive. The script writes itself: Trump / tech bros / capitalism bad, even more gay race communism now.
To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.
To fellow blackpillers: any ideas on how to brace for impact? Any IT guys here old enough to make it through the dotcom bubble? How did you do it? Any advice you would have given your past self?
If there's a crash, I predict it'll be due to energy prices and the war in Iran, not AI.
Anthropic is nearly profitable, or supposed to have been profitable in Q2. Some say that's phoney accounting and Anthropic says profits may not be maintained. But it seems that major investments are paying off. Furthermore, AI models are getting continually better as with Fable most recently. This trend will continue, bigger and better models working for longer need more compute to run them and so justify further intensifying investment. I guess that argument is forbidden by your post. But if it is The Singularity, if it is a New Paradigm then presumably that's good for stocks!
Anyway, energy is more important to the economy than AI right now. You can't just shut off a huge amount of oil and gas production without ramifications! The 1973 oil shock is a useful precedent. The market seems to have been expecting peace talks to advance more smoothly than they actually have been. Bombing has just resumed. Iran has announced they're re-closing the straits and possibly the other straits in the Red Sea too.
I'm suspicious about that given stories like this.
Maybe they had a revenue-positive quarter, but if it was buoyed by various companies overshooting their AI budget, this might not be an actual trend.
I've been suggested this was even an intentional move by an Anthropic investor to goose the company's valuation by artificially increasing their ARR (claims, not substantiated).
Not quite. The U.S. has been a net energy exporter since 2019. So domestic energy production can more than satisfy our needs for the foreseeable future.
That's before we get into the possibility of nuclear coming online.
Yes, higher oil prices impact the U.S. too, but we're not going to be the first ones to tap out, in either a literal or metaphorical sense.
Remember we just secured a massive source of nearby oil.
One thing about markets, they respond to shifts in supply and demand.
How do you even do that, are we supposed to believe that some company with $500 million to spend didn't know how to use cost tracking? Cost tracking comes with the pleb-tier management tools I get!
And if they were trying to goose the valuation then why would they admit it was unintentional, it makes Anthropic sound expensive? (They are expensive). It sounds more like an anti-Anthropic story to me.
The story sounds greatly exaggerated or misleading IMO. Who is this mystery company too, what are the details on this? More likely some company just consciously spent a lot of money on Claude AI and then some reporter fluffed it up into a narrative we all hear instead of a boring article that goes nowhere.
Regarding energy, even though the US is a major producer and isn't as badly affected as other countries like Australia, Europe or poor countries, the world economy is global. Problems in Asia will spread to America. The US is busily exporting oil, including the strategic reserve releases, to take advantage of price gaps and stabilize markets. But this is a temporary fix. The price gaps will narrow. The invisible hand of the market will slowly but surely squeeze the US economy if this price pressure remains. Even if oil producers profit, much more of the US economy relies on truck transport, plastics, feedstock, jet fuel, lubricants and all the other chemicals which support industrial civilization.
Venezuelan oil is low quality and requires years of patient investment and capable administration to realize much net gains from. Crude oil production there is barely half of what it was in 2016 and shows no signs of making up for the current supply loss. Nobody is a bigger fan of nuclear than me but nuclear energy is not going to lower fuel prices in a matter of months.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-production
One of my tiny clients was billed over $10,000 recently because their customer-facing chatbot got locked in a loop with somebody's openclaw agent.
An acquaintance works for a small to mid sized private software company, and he alleges that they put restrictions on AI use after they already hit seven figures this month.
Overall, I don't know if that story is true, but what I'm seeing on the ground strongly suggests that executives really don't have the slightest fucking clue what's happening until the bill lands on their desk.
Anecdote from a previous job that you just gave me a PTSD flashback to, back when I worked on the help desk and sysadmin side of things instead of development:
The company I was working at got acquired by another company (most Americans here would probably know the acquiring company but I won't get any more specific than that). Our accounting department was mostly laid off and we now had to send our invoices to accounting in the acquiring company to get them paid.
My boss starts sending them our invoices for the phone company (and internet, and a bunch of other important things) up to corporate accounting every single day because accounting isn't responding to him and isn't paying our bills. He's also calling them multiple times a week, but no one is answering. Also our long distance phone service is separate from our main phone service (this will be important) for complicated reasons I never bothered to learn because I was a help desk grunt at the time.
This goes on for months, and the phone company is getting pissy and threatening to cut off our phone service. My manager is forwarding the service cut off threats to accounting too. Finally long distance service actually gets cut off (but local phone service still works), and me and the other help desk grunt got flooded with about 200 calls from pissed off users that day.
This causes enough of a stink that corporate catches wind of it and ask my manager why he wasn't paying the phone bill. After all, they showed him how to send invoices to accounting, etc., how could he be so irresponsible? My manager whips out 60+ emails and his phone call logs and corporate immediately apologizes and presumably goes to bite off someone's head in accounting.
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