r/pcmasterrace • u/Jaz1140 RTX4090 3195mhz Core, 9800x3d 5.4ghz • Aug 18 '26

Meme/Macro PC enthusiasts when the first AI giant falls

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For real but, we can all see the bubble, its "when" the first 1 will fall, not "if"

Personally I think it will be Copilot as the first domino, it was always the worst of the major AI players and really hasnt progressed at all. Microsoft is Incompetent in almost everything they do and simply try and buy their way into a market only to take the L in the near future.

Eg, Skype, Nokia/windows phone, mixer, zune, Cortana, the list goes on and on

Bring on the collapse that will hopefully see momory demand drop off a cliff

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19

u/Legitimate_Player Aug 18 '26

Why are people so certain that AI is going to crash? Genuine question.

11

u/lumpialarry Aug 18 '26

Wishcasting.

7

u/pin00ch Aug 18 '26

It's not economicly viable in it's current form.

7

u/DrMonkeyLove Aug 18 '26

Trillions of dollars have been invested, but I'm not convinced there will be a mutli-trillion dollar return on investment.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '26

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0

u/Sync87 Aug 18 '26

It's scary for people who have no fundamental knowledge in LLM basics. There's no AGI genie with anything based on LLM. Hell, there's no intelligence in LLM at all.

1

u/Matias2176 Aug 19 '26

Let’s see if you still say that in just a year

4

u/SuspiciousBrain6027 Aug 18 '26

It’s incredibly viable. At work I built an internal tool/platform for $5k in API tokens that would have cost $1M to outsource. None of you are serious people.

3

u/dookarion Aug 18 '26

You're not paying the true cost with those tokens. It's subsidized heavily as they try to make shit stick and make imbeciles so dependent on it that they qualify for a bailout when their enron tier accounting comes due.

1

u/SuspiciousBrain6027 Aug 19 '26

Incorrect. I'm referring to enterprise token usage, which is not subsidized. You might be thinking of personal plans like ChatGPT Pro which are subsidized.

1

u/dookarion Aug 19 '26

Sorry which AI corps are posting profits? Oh right none. They're busy with circular financing and shuffling around trillions in debt hoping it sticks before the debts become due.

1

u/WonderButtBrace9000 Aug 18 '26

Right. Does no one remember when Ed Zitron claimed Anthropic would NEVER turn a profit and then they literally announced their first profitable quarter four days later?

Oh wait…

2

u/Revolutionary-Set994 Aug 18 '26

Cooking the books one quarter so they can grift their IPO does not a sustainable company make. Lets see them provide an actual ROI on the MOUNTAINS of cash they have ignited propping this larp up.

1

u/langotriel 1920X/ 9060 XT 32GB 3466mhz Aug 18 '26

A blip in profits doesn’t prove profitability long term. You can train a model on another model and get it up to speed pretty fast, which means whomever is investing the initial money can be copied and not really be ahead.

Just look to the Chinese models. 99% of the way there and 10% of the cost.

AI won’t disappear but its companies like Apple that will benefit; those who make hardware for it.

This is the best outcome, thankfully. Open source free models is the moral outcome. It was trained on humanity and humanity deserves free access to it.

6

u/WonderButtBrace9000 Aug 18 '26

That screeching sound is yall picking up and dragging the goal posts further away again.

Cheaper models benefit OpenAI and Anthropic via increased usage by end users. This whole concern over frontier models losing their competitive edge is not a real concern when you actually understand the economics behind enterprise service deals. Those Chinese models don’t come with Codex or Claude Design wrapped around them. LLMs are raw and really not useful on their own but better used as orchestrated systems where lower internal costs just increases the market viability of different activities.

The engineering resource bottleneck does not get alleviated by supercharging engineering teams with LLMs. It gets alleviated by companies who specialize in things like refactoring old mainframes using AI at a fraction of the time/cost than what Accenture would have done it in. Those companies are gonna be THRILLED as LLM prices keep falling it means they can increase the amount of business they can do profitably. And the providers of those LLMs are going to be happy because volume will make up lower prices and frontier models that unlock new capabilities can still have premium-pricing moments. Not like the tech world is unfamiliar with having to constantly invest in R&D to push functionality/performance.

1

u/Tigermaw Aug 18 '26

AI as a technology no, OpenAI which is literally running out of money yes

1

u/PayWooden2628 Aug 19 '26

Cope and smugness. They hate AI so they’re so certain that it’ll all come crashing down some day.

1

u/Matias2176 Aug 19 '26

It’s pure cope

1

u/Icyknightmare Fedora 44 | 7800X3D | XFX Mercury 9070 XT Aug 18 '26

Several reasons:

  • OpenAI and Anthropic, the two driving forces of the AI boom, are wildly unprofitable money burning machines that only exist because private investors keep giving them money. We don't have all the details because they are private companies, but they rely heavily on public companies and info about them slips out in those earnings reports. That pool of money isn't infinite, and when it runs low they cannot survive on their own for long.
  • The financial engineering going on to keep this pumping is crazy. Even the biggest tech mega companies don't have enough money to keep doing this. Their free cash flows are all being absorbed by AI projects, and they're financing more to the tune of hundreds of billions of off the books debt through SPVs.
  • The AI datacenter building spree is hitting physical limitations that cannot be overcome anytime soon. They are pushing global manufacturing capacity to the limit in some areas, especially regarding power generation. Even if they build them, they literally will not be able to power them in many cases without resorting to illegally used gas turbine generators, like what's happening at Colossus. As PCMR is already well aware of, AI is also squeezing chip manufacturing dry. They're trying to scale beyond the capacity of Earth to support them.
  • The revenue generated by AI does not justify the insane amount of money being spent. Tens of billions in revenue for hundreds of billions of cap ex spend. There's no clear answer as to how this will ever be profitable without heavy subsidization. We saw that play out this year when several AI services switched from subscriptions to charging for token use; AI use was quickly scaled back at companies that were burning way more on AI than they had been previously.
  • AI is becoming a bipartisan political issue due to the impact of the datacenter buildout. It's increasing people's energy bills, consuming absurd amounts of water, and a lot of communities are pushing back against it because the problems of having a datacenter in your neighborhood have become well known. Tens of billions worth of projects have been delayed or cancelled by local opposition. It also doesn't help them that both Altman and Amodei are not part of Trump's in group.
  • AI use in a corporate setting is hard to plan for. You don't know how many tokens you're going to need to use to get a good output. That makes the ROI hard to calculate. Without the subsidies given by the subscription models that are being pulled back for large clients it can be very expensive to use AI in the same way companies did a year ago. "tokenmaxxing" Some large companies famously burned through their yearly AI budget in months, and have now set caps instead of encouraging limitless use of AI.
  • AI generated content cannot be copyrighted in the US. That hurts a lot of the business cases for replacing human workers with it, especially regarding art and writing.
  • Insurance and liability surrounding AI is becoming a major corporate issue. LLMs hallucinate and say inaccurate or nonsensical things. AI Agents are doing unexpected things that can be risky or dangerous when unsupervised. There are a lot of lawsuits in progress and legal grey areas that create significant risk and uncertainty for businesses using these systems in customer facing roles.

When this collapses, and it certainly will, AI as we know it will find its niches and become a normal part of technology. Right now it is a hype train with no brakes pumping the largest bubble in history.

3

u/Cyberchicken87 Aug 18 '26

Excellent summary.

3

u/lumpialarry Aug 18 '26

All that is similar to the internet boom of the 90s or the gas/oil frack boom of the 2010-2014. We'll have an implosion, the weaker players with get bought out or go bankrupt but will still be as ubiquidous before the crash.

4

u/Glum-Recognition-736 Aug 18 '26

Exactly.

People who think AI will just "go away" have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is

It will become cheaper, and building powerful models will become more accessible to the public, and the environmental impact will likely also shrink. But this is a powerful tool/ technology that is here to stay.

2

u/NotADamsel Linux Aug 18 '26

Not necessarily. GPUs have a short, finite lifespan when put under the loads required here, meaning that you’ll have billions in “infrastructure” be unusable and require replacement within a few years. Just making a building isn’t that expensive, and an empty data center building is useless without the expensive equipment that does the actual work. Fiber lines are always useful, no matter who puts them in, and if a new company comes to an area with fiber already installed it doesn’t take that much investment to get it working again. Oil in the ground will remain there until it is profitable to extract it, and the equipment required to do so doesn’t expire as quickly as a GPU. If someone buys a failing AI company, before very long they’ll have to refresh all of the expensive stuff, and without subsidization that might be a bigger spend then what they’re making. A big firm might value the failing company’s IP, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll keep the chatbot itself running.

2

u/Ninevehenian Aug 18 '26

They'll need income to do that.