Can't wait to buy some god damn HDDs for my NAS when this is all over. Let the prices crash baby.

Will be interesting to see what the community does to the over-abundant vector matrizes calculators. Probably run DOOM on.

At this point, I'm not sure it will crash anymore. Reasonably it should have crashed months ago! Why didn't it?

I bought RAM just in the cusp of the jump. September I put it in the cart waiting for Black Friday and October came by and it was up 50% and I jumped on.

But I’m deleting stuff on my NAS. I neeeed some big drives.

Starting to look like the nuclear fusion energy thing. "It's going to be ready in 20 years!", they said for 50 years.

AI is good at a few things that have real world value. It recently dropped 200+ mathematical proofs that are real and genuine but are the lowest hanging fruit - they're the least creative unsolved problems in maths (now solved), ones that could be solved with enough time and work. Not a proof of intelligence, just a proof of computational power/duration.

That sort of large "solution space" exploration is stuff mathematicians might not have the time/patience for, but LLMs can do.

Likewise, producing content faster than humans can is another thing LLMs are really good at, with some reports already saying upwards of 50% of new content posted to the Internet is now LLM generated (dead internet theory).

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/08/20/how-much-of-the-internet-is-written-with-ai/

LLMs have also recently taken over game development, and gotten to the point that they're making full 3D scenes, and even videogames.

...and if you haven't heard, a team recently duplicated the Adobe Creative Suite of programs in about a week. Vibe coding in Rust with lots of Claude Opus.

Yep, it looks like "AI" is here to stay.

The biggest concerns are probably: it being able to "flood the zone" of content pushing certain ideas/narratives. Either from tech billionaire fascists, or foreign influnce campaigns.

So determining, monitoring, and countering any biases from that is probably going to be a huge challenge.

Everybody knows it will crash.

Some very powerful people are going to lose a lot of money when it crashes.

They are doing everything they can to postpone the crash, or scam others into taking the fall.

I doubt that we will get much better prices when the bubble crashes.

Amen

Cons: Will probably lose my job and 401k.

Pros: Might be able to afford a video card by picking up a few extra shifts giving handjobs behind the Wendy's dumpster.

I had a Beelink Me Mini and a half dozen NVMEs in my cart around that time, but didn't pull the trigger when the price started rising and now I'm kicking myself for it.

2 of the 6 drives in one of my pools is 7.5 years old. I found that out last week and had to bite the bullet to buy a spare and swap it in. Doing a resilver with those makes me cringe

I finally bit the bullet months ago and invested into LTO8 for my cold storage, I still need to buy drives at some point, but at least I've got a decent path to put shit in the mean time so I don't gotta delete anything lolol

Which Wendy's specifically? You know, so I can avoid it.

If you bring a 5090, it can be whatever Wendy's you want.

The bubble popping will take out a huge chunk of the economy with it. We might not be able to afford more drives even if they come down in price.

@cm0002 No good answer for RAM right now but with respect to GPUs, consider Intel Arc. I purchased a B50 Pro for a whole of $300, it's turned out to be a reasonably solid performer. I have SR-IOV working on it now a vf for a windows vm, and one for LLAMA inference, I'm using a mamba model so unlike the big boys my LLM learns on the fly. And this thing draws a whole of 50 watts so you don't need your own nuclear power plant to run it.

How long is this going* to take?

Remember how the housing bubble never popped?

The question is, can i defend having billions in data center hardware that i can't turn on and might not be in demand when i can? Will people be running efficient local models instead of paying for my spyware riddled software as a service?

Uh are you ignoring the huge financial crises, and how banks had to be bailed out?

People have been cautiously pointing toward mid-to-late 2027 for a while now, as that's when a lot of the huge loans are coming due.

A lot of the DCs have to be built, before they can go bankrupt. It is that stupid.

I remember housing costs NEVER going down.

Yeah... :(

I think companies like Oracle are on the hook whether those DCs get built or not.

Oracle is cooked already for sure.

I don't wanna rent the hardware for my instance forever :(

Wouldn't people sell out like a bit before that then?

And wouldn't people sell out before that then?

Etc.

For the AI bubble it doesn't really matter if AI is good at a few things as long as they are bleeding money at an unprecedented rate.

Expenditure is still over ten times industry revenue and it doesn't seem to change in the near future. The only one making any money is nvidia with their chips.

As for the supposed things they are good at, that's a whole other story:

Half these mathematical proofs are pretty much stolen from different researchers. Ive seen an article were the ai copied the intro of a draft one for one and now openAI tries to claim ownership. The other half could be utter bullshitt since they aren't verified right now. That whole thing is essentially a publicity stunt without much substance until everything is cleared up.

While AI is much faster at producing content than humans, purely ai generated contend is still shit. It probably is great for radio pop/country music and Hollywood films since they follow a very predictive standard, but everything that isn't hot garbage from the get go needs human input. The main use of the created content right now seems yo be deception and missinfromation, which is great for some people but a really bad thing to base an entire industry on.

As for all the "decompilation" projects going on right now, they essentially copy past the UI and then vibe code the rest. That's neither reverse engeering nor decompiling, that's just a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen. Instead of putting effort into open source projects these projects try to steal everything (as AIs do) and end up with a somewhat functional product that has questionable stability, unknown security holes and a codebase that can never be expanded on cause no one understands it while simultaneously being a legal nightmare to work with since its a copyright infringement and has no applicable license.

I agree that its sadly here to stay, but none of its current capabilities could reasonably support the AI bubble.

Not sure what you mean. If you mean "cashing out", that's what the IPOs are for.

Counterpoint: All that shit expensive as fuck. Why rush math proofs with AI rather than doing it 100x cheaper by paying a young mathematician over a few years? This isn't paying AI 100 million dollars to cure cancer, that might actually be worth it.

Even if some problems can be solved cost-efficiently, most of the proofs so far is showing off, ignoring costs.

Is the time limit not up on those? (I really don't have the foggiest about how big a part they play in the total valuation of it all).

But yes I meant selling off/cashing out.

Not sure what you mean by time limit, but the challenge they're facing is to IPO at just the right time to get the highest valuation and keep it up long enough for the private investors to cash out. Things like Anthropic/OpenAI financials leaking put a dent in this plan, as it could tank the valuation, but AFAIK it's all financial black magic mixed with regular guesswork and playing chicken with each other in terms of if/when.

Even if the AI bubble collapses tomorrow (it won't), to see lower consumer prices you would either need old stock to be marked down or the fabs that are currently making AI cards to switch to making gaming cards and those cards to be manufactured and come through the market. That will take months. Not only does the bubble need to pop, but everyone involved needs to believe and accept that it has popped, otherwise they will continue to keep prices high and AI production high in the hope that their plans remain correct.

Remember that it's psychologically much harder to accept making a less money than you thought, which happens when you mark down prices, compared to making more money than you thought, which happens when you mark up prices! This is why prices tend to be "downwards sticky" and so, instead of going down when demand drops/supply improves, they instead tend to stagnate while other prices continue to rise gradually with inflation.

The bubble popping probably won't help since they've stopped making consumer hardware altogether.

The countries that pay human mathematicians will fall behind because the ones that do not give a fuck will use AI anyway and dominate the future of global economics because they can do it faster and not have human-centric morality like yours in the way.

Federal Reserve hasn't raised the interbank lending rate yet. So speculation over values 60 year domination schemes over actual consumer value vs cost now.

As long as you give banks artificially cheap loans with money printed on demand, the bubble can keep going and they can fund R&D we will regret later. Regret it because it doesn't need to satisfy a customer or use only a reasonable amount of resources. It just has to attract investors with the promise that it will attract investors with the promise that it will attract investors. It doesn't need a customer when you've messed with interest rates.

Your econ class only told you lowering interest rates increases jobs in the short term. It didn't tell you why. It adds jobs doing less strictly productive things. Long term all economies tend to the same employment level anyway. And long term lowered interest rates tend a market toward bullshit. We get more work but less consumer satisfaction. That's really to say the cost of living goes up with respect to an hour of work. And you have to compete as a consumer for resources with firms that have access to infinite cheap money.

Oh no, months. That makes solving a problem implausible if the benefits can't come till months.

That'll start to turn around in a few months once manufacturers lose that easy AI money.

Don't get my hopes up like that.

You won't get the GPUs. Most of the AI hardware is not usable to you. They didn't just sell all the desktop RAM and GPUs to AI companies, they dedicated most of the production to data center hardware that you can't use. Relief isn't coming, what you need doesn't exist.

They'll lose a lot of potential money, but I can guarantee the ringleaders will end up much wealthier. Just like every time before, the taxpayers will foot the bill for fixing this.

Artificial propping up, as usual. Which will continue to happen as long as blatant corruption continues to occur, and uh...narrows eyes at current admin

Most people can't imagine the technology continuing to progress. They don't want to even consider the possibility that it might not be a bubble at all. They'll continue to move the goal posts and dig their heads further into the sand. "AI can't do math", "AI can't do image recognition", "AI can't create videos that are on par with the real thing", "AI is just a fad", "AI will only take the artist's jobs", "AI is worthless and the bubble is going to pop any second now!".

And they're not going to switch production back to consumer hardware either. Those data centers will be used to sell virtual desktop subscriptions.

Ah might have mixed it up with elons ipo, which had some time limit before you could sell, IIRC.

Why the fuck would anyone buy this. Come on.

Because people are fucking idiots.

I'm sure with all these AI startups there's plenty that used consumer grade stuff because that's what they could get

Either way though, I run enterprise servers in my homelab so I stand to benefit even if mostly enterprise server RAM and data center class GPUs hit the market

Who said anything about wanting gaming GPUs?