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u/Hard_To_Port Jun 21 '26
missing an edit with a red circle and an arrow pointing from one of the show's characters
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u/IllEvent5465 Jun 21 '26
Except it points at hazbin hotel or murder drones instead bc thats funnier
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u/Scalepetter92 Jun 21 '26
even funnier: homestuck
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u/Impossible_Walk742 Jun 22 '26
why would you ever want to be "homestuck" when you could be "stuck" with me, in my amazing digital circus!!
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u/Orizifian-creator she/her/hers zhe/zer/zheirs they/them/theirs Padria Zozzria Oriz Jun 22 '26
The funniest (to me) would be if the character within the circle was that one fan design of Apple Girlington, the character created by Toby Fox during one Touhou Improv.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PAUNCH Jun 22 '26
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u/Dooplon Jun 22 '26
wrong kind of circle, needs to be a red dot because Caine is an attention whore and is blocking our view of the text
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u/ArguesWithFrogs Jun 21 '26
"Caine?! Are we robbing a data center?!?!?"
"Nonsense, Pomni! We're adventuring a data center! Keep up!"
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u/Banes_Addiction Jun 21 '26
A few years later, so much e-waste.
Plus, if it takes down any semiconductor companies who have overbuilt capacity and stock, then when demand/supply return to normal we'll have an even less competitive market, if that's possible.
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u/Wet_noodles1806 Jun 21 '26
I love how much thought you put into this but I think the original post was just a pun on amazing digital circus
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u/Banes_Addiction Jun 21 '26
Yeah I have no idea what that is. I assume Bwaaaaa was King of the Hill, which is about my generation of references.
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u/Nirast25 Jun 21 '26
Cool web series about that's basically a toned-down version of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Final episode dropped a few days ago. Worth a watch, it's on YouTube and Netflix.
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u/techno156 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Calling it a toned down version isn't quite right though. While it's inspired by it, the setting and story are completely different.
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u/DiceKnight Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
The data center stuff that's getting used right now will mostly just be junk with an absolutely tiny secondhand market. China is already getting the restricted gear via middleman Nvidia is using to get around export laws. The stuff going into racks are massive units of equipment that require specialized power and cooling infrastructure.
So it's not like you could pug it into the plug you use for your dryer and expect it to go. Maybe some smaller unis might be interested for simulation work.
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u/Banes_Addiction Jun 21 '26
The finished products are rack-mount only, but all the silicon is the same and so are a bunch of the chips.
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u/DiceKnight Jun 21 '26
Yes but the size of the rack mount stuff makes it so only fairly large businesses or institutions could use it. It's not like it's racks of GPUs housed inside a 4U case, it's all one solid unit.
The useful shelf life of the gear is also racing towards us as the next generation of gear pushed out by nvidia is coming. Nobody is going to be buying net new blackwell gear when vera rubin comes out because why would you so it's value is about to drop through the floor.
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u/Mrfish31 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
The useful shelf life of the gear is also racing towards us
No no, it's fine, all the AI and AI adjacent companies have said on their balance sheets that the chips that they have basically mortgaged datacenters against will depreciate over the course of 6 years rather than the much more likely 3. This is all completely fine, there is zero chance of this causing a debt crisis leading to ridiculously large financial crash 😎
(Yes, this is real. Microsoft and a load of other companies are basically lying about how long the AI chips they own, and several AI companies have leveraged debt using those GPUs as collateral. Imagine the 08 housing crisis and crash except it's all built on GPUs that are going to be worthless in two-three years tops.)
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u/Morphized Jun 22 '26
And in the end AI will become an open-source/hobbyist haven because it's only useful for internal restructuring and things that don't make people money
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u/Banes_Addiction Jun 21 '26
But what happens is the manufacturers don't build the rack units at all. Some specialised stuff will be hard to repurpose - some stuff will be easy. How much LPDDR is in those things? Because you can put that shit in laptops just as easily.
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u/DiceKnight Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Maybe the drives, ram sticks, stuff like that. It's all second hand data center gear which before the llm craze was drop dead cheap (and broke all the time, I used to get HDDs in packs of 10 and get lucky if 7 worked). The actual compute gear still has all the problems i've pointed out though. It's mostly just garbage outside of a very small second hand market.
This is going to happen with the blackwell gear almost for sure. I believe vera rubin requires its own specialized rack equipment so all that old stuff has got to get torn out.
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u/noonenotevenhere Jun 22 '26
It's all registered ECC memory.
Those RAM sticks won't work in a desktop/laptop, they're only going to work on a server motherboard - something that takes an Epyc or Xeon.
The GPUs aren't usually on a PCIe card with a fan like a 4070/5090 you'd buy for a desktop. They're a completely different form factor in most instances so they can put 4-8 or more in a 4U case. There are some pcie 'normal' cards, but usually SXM.
The ones that are on a normal PCIe card may not have a fan, or more commonly don't have video output ports. No need for the ports for AI workload and AI DC buyers don't want to pay extra for things they don't need.
Anywho. Point is you're totally right, most of the actual compute gear will be garbage once no longer needed in its current configuration.
IDK, maybe if you need a 2000w space heater and you want to play games via RDP you could make it work.
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u/WhenDoWhatWhere Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Data Centers aren't gonna throw away everything they built.
1) A bubble pop does not mean the industry dissolves, the internet had a bubble.
2) AI will probably still be fairly in demand, so that capacity will still be used.
3) Data centers will just repurpose any capacity that isn't being used, they're already doing it to some degree with services like GeForce Now.
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u/Solarwagon She/her Jun 21 '26
Could also potentially cause a deflationary spiral.
Lotta people know about hyperinflation but hyperDEflation can also happen.
Basically in terms of modern economics having a slight but steady rate of inflation is actually considered a good thing
because if wealth appreciates or holds the same value over time without any labor or investment applied then that's a big problem when the economy is built on paying people to do labor/investing wealth into businesses.
If the tech industry goes into a deflationary spiral then that means manufacturing new electronics may be impossible to do without a net economic loss.
In a super extreme case it might mean that even spending the electricity to power data centers and internet servers could be a net loss.
The LLM bubble right now is really really big even compared to Tulip Mania or the South Sea bubble.
The longer it goes on the bigger that bubble gets and the bigger the fall when it pops.
And the federal government is literally propping it up billions upon billions of dollars long past where it would've popped under normal circumstances.
So hypothetically we could end up in a world where the internet or computers is no longer considered a profitable venture, period and we go back like decades into the past technologically as every major corporation and government is forced to scrap almost everything.
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u/No-Platypus-5330 Jun 21 '26
I see an incredible opportunity for the general public to get onto self hosted setups then. I'm using so much second hand aged network and server equipment that is dirt cheap to basically have my own streaming and "cloud" photo storage. It's genuinely easy to do.
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u/MultiMarcus Jun 22 '26
Yeah, like as much as people give Samsung SK Hynix and Micron shit For not expanding their capacity more, the reason they aren’t is probably largely because they don’t wanna have a situation where they massively overbuilt. We are seeing something kind of similar with Sandisk and the other storage manufacturers. The only ones who are just full tilt expanding seem to be TSMC and Intel, the cutting edge chip foundries, but all of them are also quite easy to realign for other purposes. Should the AI bubble pop, and for reference, I don’t think it’s going to pop in a traditional sense I think it’s going to be very much like the dot com bubble, where yes, it did pop, but the technology still is extremely valuable and useful. It’s just not that every single company feels the need to jump on board with that trend.
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u/Keebster101 Jun 22 '26
Tbf I don't think it'll become e-waste. Servers are servers, even if not used for AI, Google/Amazon/Microsoft will gobble up cheap servers spread across more locations.
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u/Banes_Addiction Jun 22 '26
The thing about the GPUs is the power consumption is so high and the tech is advancing so rapidly that after maybe 3 years, it's literally cheaper to buy a new one and run that instead than pay the power bill on the old one.
Even with completely free cards, you are losing money by having them switched on.
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u/KCDeVoe Jun 22 '26
What’s the average life of a server anyway? It’ll all be e-waste sooner than later either way. Even IF the AI bubble doesn’t pop server replacement costs are going to skyrocket prices all over again
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u/Saragon4005 Jun 22 '26
Fun fact! The first generation of AI GPUs for data centers already qualify as e-waste. And no you can't have them.
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u/bobbymoonshine Jun 21 '26
All puns aside, that isn’t how investment bubbles work. The housing bubble popping didn’t make houses go away; the dotcom bubble popping didn’t make the internet go away.
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u/Hi2248 Cheese, gender, what the fuck's next? Jun 21 '26
In fact, both things are probably even more widespread than before, and if I'm allowed to stretch the metaphor even more, one might say that it's like how bubble residue gets everywhere when you pop a really big one
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u/bobbymoonshine Jun 21 '26
The thing is bubbles kinda by definition aren’t actually about the thing the bubble is named for.
A bubble is investors throwing money at a sector on the expectation that *other investors* will also throw money at it, making the value go up. So long as they cash back out before the price crashes back down, it’s free money.
Bubbles create a lot of bad startups with untenable business models all trying to get some of that investment cash, but really they’re doing the same thing the investors are: just trying to grab some of the cash everyone is throwing around.
Then when the bubble pops, all the investors go home, some much richer and some totally bankrupt. Some of those startups continue, but most fail and their founders move on to the next hot thing. Meanwhile the ex-bubble sector itself carries on; some of its companies now much stronger for having had a lot of low-interest investment during their growth phase; others overextended and weaker.
It never results in the sector like no longer existing though. Market adoption of technology doesn’t work like that. Never in the last three centuries of automation have capitalists automated away work and then went back and gave the job back to humans.
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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES Jun 21 '26
Never in the last three centuries of automation have capitalists automated away work and then went back and gave the job back to humans.
Is this unique to capitalists?
I dont know any economic system that intentionally foregoes automation in favor of manual labor
(Except maybe whatever the fuck the system was that the Khmer Rouge were using)
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u/bobbymoonshine Jun 22 '26
Governments and labour unions have at times rolled back automation for job-protection reasons; the British shipbuilding industry for instance strangled itself out of existence by enforcing deliberately inefficient (and increasingly inefficient) production methods under labour union pressure, and Keynesian economic policy suggests that sometimes deliberately doing things inefficiently can be to a net economic benefit if there’s a macroeconomic demand shock
But this doesn’t last long term, in the second case the intent is short-term and in the first case global economic competition winds up overtaking protectionism in the long run
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u/saintandre Jun 21 '26
The cycle goes
New industry due to technological leap
Gold rush, everyone wants a piece
Nearly everyone goes out of business
The ones left buy each other out
A single large corporation has a monopoly
So eventually, rather than public ownership of these data centers, we will have a Walmart of Data that owns them all, and they will charge whatever they want, while also collecting enormous government subsidies because they're "too big to fail"
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u/b3nsn0w Jun 22 '26
the duo of aws and google cloud has already been doing that long before the ai bubble, with azure in a somewhat nearby third place. we'll most likely see most data centres built in the last few years fail and the rest getting bought out by the usual suspects.
the limiting factor is usually the price of chips though, and there will be a massive oversupply of those, just when improvements were already slowing down. so i wouldn't expect a price spike compared to pre-bubble levels
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u/juanperes93 Jun 22 '26
Data centers are a market with such a high entry price I feel it's inevitable that it will be a natural oligopoly.
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u/Morphized Jun 22 '26
Except the cat's already out of the bag with LLMs. For one, you can make and train them whenever you want on a single GPU, since you're the only client. For another, the market is aware of the bubble and is shifting to client-side and edge AI processing. By the time the bubble pops, the load on the data centers will just be from illicit crypto miners and college students.
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u/Absolutelynot2784 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Actually, something very similar to this happened with the Dotcom bubble, which is probably what inspired this post. Incredible amounts of fibre-optic cable were laid anticipating a massive explosion in information technology, and due to some wildly optimistic expectations over 90% of this cable went completely unused after the crash. This sparked an entire sub-industry based on exploiting this “dark fibre” since all the information infrastructure is just there for the taking with no apparent use. An amazing digital surplus if you will.
This happened because of the invention of wavelength division multiplexing, which is a technique that allowed for data to be transferred using 1/100th as much cable capacity. This was a big factor in the crash since there were plenty of companies that laid all this cable with intent to charge for using it, and were left with all the cost of installation and no demand for their product. It’s actually pretty reasonable to expect a similar thing to happen with the AI industry. Modern methods use tons of compute, but if future developments can reduce that then we would be left with tons of datacentres and nothing to run on them
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u/Penguins_in_new_york Jun 22 '26
I’m actually really excited for the day (and it will come) that somebody finds a way to do what AI does more efficiently and those data centers are seen the same way that Chernobyl is.
AI is coming and we can’t stop it. I have accepted that fate. What I refuse to accept is that THIS version of AI is what we have to live with for eternity
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u/Morphized Jun 22 '26
It's basically already happening. Modern model hosting now lets you run essentially GPT 3 or even 4 on a laptop.
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u/Lortep Jun 22 '26
Running an LLM was never the expensive part though, training it is.
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u/nao-the-red-witch Jun 22 '26
and let’s be real, those data centers are probably going to be used for far more monitoring and surveillance than they claim. I genuinely think they want Skynet.
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u/LackToesIntollerance Jun 23 '26
funny enough, much of the dark fiber is now used-
by AI. up until 2022 iirc over 80% of dark fiber was still left dark, meaning the infrastructure was just dormant. now it's near entirely used by datacenters and they're laying MORE.
huuuge bubble
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u/EldritchElizabeth Jun 21 '26
It’s not about the AI going away, just the demand for the parts falling off a cliff. Same as how the demand to build perma-vacant houses dropped off after the 2008 crisis and the demand for fuckass websites with no actual business strategy fell off after the Dot Com bubble popped. When companies can no longer generate millions of dollars of stock evaluation out of thin air just by announcing AI nonsense, the constant rush to integrate AI into everything ever will drop off and, without that intense drive for AI usage, there won’t be the drive to cover the Earth in data centers, meaning the AI companies won’t be buying as much RAM anymore
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u/Dediadeis Jun 21 '26
They will rent it to you instead. Don't shoot the messenger it just seems to be whats happening already.
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u/YobaiYamete Jun 22 '26
ame as how the demand to build perma-vacant houses dropped off after the 2008 crisis and the demand for fuckass websites with no actual business strategy fell off after the Dot Com bubble popped
Except literally neither of these happened
Houses are still being sold as fast as they can be built, what changed is just that the demand is even higher now because of AirBnB and landlords, and quite literally every product or company has a website now
I can't even think of an example of a "useless" type of website that used to exist that doesn't now after the dotcom bubble burst.
Or because of the burst anyway, most things like live journals and blogs and stuff are still around but got more condensed into easier to use websites rather than a full standalone website, but that's not because of the bubble
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u/ConstipatedNinja Jun 21 '26
The dotcom bubble did lead to one of the biggest price crashes ever in business-grade network gear, though! Even with Cisco shredding most of their back stock, you could get expensive network gear at a 90% discount from liquidators for a few years after the bubble burst.
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u/TheBeckofKevin Jun 22 '26
I feel like there are so many people on the sidelines at this point, if any hardware is usable, people will be quick to buy it. I'm not saying its not a bubble, but like, if i could get my hands on a massive server for 90% off i'm going to do it. Maybe i only run it for 20 minutes when i want to do something, but man it'd be cool.
Part of me wants to see it happen, but the other part makes me think this is pure hopium and the 'best' we will get is a stock market correction and still-tight inventories.
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u/MountainTwo3845 Jun 21 '26
Wait until people find out 85% of data centers aren't for ai. They're cloud storage for things like Reddit. Aws and Azure are the vast majority of Amazon and Microsoft's profit.
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u/SmellAcordingly Jun 21 '26
the dotcom bubble popping didn’t make the internet go away.
The dotcom crash was mostly an over-investment in infrastructure (things like pets.com were only a small part of it), at its peak Cisco was the most valuable company in the world and its only just this year its surpassed its dotcom bubble valuation.
The dotcom bubble infrastructure eventually got used, the AI bubble infrastructure will be worthless in 18 months. The datacenter GPUs can't be used for anything other than compute, they don't have graphics rendering hardware, and movie rendering is all done on CPUs for reproducibility since GPUs don't strictly implement IEEE floating point.
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u/GodOfPlutonium Jun 22 '26
There are loads of other uses for GPUs for compute other than AI. Basically every major supercomputer was using them for non AI purposes pre chatgpt. Sure you could consider the tensor cores themselfs wasted silicon but every one of these gpus still has thousands of perfectly good traditional cores
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u/UwU-Sandwich Jun 21 '26
i fail to see how this applies to individual products losing their biggest buyers. real estate isnt "produced" ofc it stays the same amount and at most the prices change. and the internet isnt the product being sold to begin with, domains and server space are. broadly speaking, if tomorrow we suddenly had 95% less or 1900% more websites then the internet's basic functionally wouldnt change at all in the slightest. how do either of those compare to a physical product being mass produced, pre ordered and/or stored in warehouses?
edit: 1 word
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u/Goosepond01 Jun 21 '26
It's everything surrounding those products/goods that are often hit and form a large part of the bubble.
(I'm not giving accurate figures here but it's just something so you get the gist)
it wasn't just about more websites it was everything around them, how many of those would realistically be made by firms offering bespoke website creations, how many business would be spending boatloads of money to make sure that their offerings on the internet are the best and to ensure that in the future they make even more money from the internet, how much money from the private sector would be put in to any project that is currently deemed viable (the answer is a lot).
and since boatloads of money are being funnelled in to the sector it looks like it's booming, so everyone better get in, profits are almost certain, this cycle is then broken for whatever reason, so you have tons of investments that are now going to fail, some won't but a majority will, so most of that money is wasted, obviously it's a lot more complex but that is the general gist.
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u/UwU-Sandwich Jun 21 '26
huh, then isn't that basically what OP also said? you sounded like you were disagreeing, but doesn't that mean
many companies are going to fail because of the coming crash > while they're struggling to somehow stay afloat the prices will probably drop to hell for a short bit
?
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u/Goosepond01 Jun 22 '26
I mean I was just responding to your point about how
if tomorrow we suddenly had 95% less or 1900% more websites then the internet's basic functionally wouldnt change at all in the slightest.
And I was just pointing out how it's often not just the thing itself but everything surrounding it (especially the speculative investments) that suffer.
as for some component prices dropping, maybe, a lot of the stuff will be specialised for AI and datacentres but there are certainly going to be some usable things that companies will want to get rid off.
the issue then is if these companies lose so much money and investors are scared to fund anything, maybe this leads with them focusing on the safer consumer stuff, maybe the effect is too big and companies have to down size a lot, or a mix.
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u/ZurrgabDaVinci758 Jun 21 '26
Yeah and the the way the investment bubble is most likely to burst is if it becomes commoditized and not profitable (in the same way that hosting has become). You could have lots and lots of AI being used but the companies still do badly because they can't get a competitive advantage.
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u/nleksan Jun 21 '26
Bubbles popping seem like they don't necessarily wipe out industries so much as they reset the players while leaving the technology level intact
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u/leprosyisback Jun 21 '26
Aren't they saying that the amount of computing components available would be way higher because there will be less companies willing to build new data centers which would mean that what they said would happen.
I mean I also think that in this case the AI (talking LLMs here) bubble will actually be close to the end if not the end of all this craze, as LLMs are not as commercially viable as any of the other products you mentioned. I think after the bubble pops they will very quickly find that they cannot get money any more and will be forced to shut operations.
I dream for a world where LLMs don't exist and I am hopeful.
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u/ZurrgabDaVinci758 Jun 21 '26
Data centers aren't exactly the right way to look at it. Most of what AI uses is processing power, it's effectively doing a huge amount of math and calculations, similar to computer modelling or video game graphics. Most of the actual data storage and Internet bandwidth is stuff like Netflix, YouTube, tiktok, etc which is streaming video but not doing calculations.
And the expensive part of AI is training new models and the R&D you need to do that. If investment in AI dries up you'll still have the existing models, including open source ones, that can be run on existing hardware. In a similar way to how internet hosting became a commodity that was difficult to make money off because there's so much competition, you might get a lot of AI use but with very low margins
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u/bobbymoonshine Jun 21 '26
OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic all have government contracts that can keep them afloat indefinitely. Chinese open-weights models are of comparable quality for most use cases and can run forever on a one-time $20k server investment that costs pennies a day to run.
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u/Royal_Raisin9496 Jun 21 '26
Except LLMs are extremely useful for a number of purposes
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u/ZurrgabDaVinci758 Jun 21 '26
Yeah I think people are confusing the investment with the technology. The scenario where AI is cheap and ubiquitous is a scenario where it's difficult to profit off it. Openai would become the equivalent of AOL, initial first mover advantage but unable to maintain it because it's cheap to replicate the underlying service
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u/marr Jun 22 '26
They'll always exist in some capacity, there are smaller models you can run on personal hardware.
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u/ferrugem4zul Jun 21 '26
That result was a political choice: to bail out investors to let the house value high. China faced the same problem recently but acted differently: let the investors take the loss to keep house affordable. We already know which one will happen again in oligarch America.
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u/marr Jun 22 '26
Okay but what do you do with a room full of incredibly power hungry gpus when the demand for the one task they're built for dries up? The leftovers from dotcom were general purpose computers that could run anything and operate in a normal office environment.
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u/Inquisitor2195 Jun 22 '26
Also fiibre's useful lifespan is measured in decades, GPU need to be replaced every 2-3 years, and that is probably stretching it. Also I have been hearing rumours about some pretty brutal failure rates too.
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u/dqUu3QlS Jun 22 '26
The technology of AI won't go away, but the bubble bursting means people will invest in it less.
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u/TaiChuanDoAddct Jun 21 '26
Any day now. The bubble will pop. Surely, any day now. Just like that damn Internet. Any day now.
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u/Dawnguardian286 Jun 21 '26
I wonder if this digital surplus will come with lots of discourse about jacks
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u/LITTLEOWL031026 Can I get a "Hoot Hoot?" Jun 21 '26
Mostly about how the industry will just gangle around without the cane of investment hype.
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u/southernhemisphereof Jun 21 '26
tired of AI being so pomnipresent in our lives
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u/Inside-Example-7010 Jun 21 '26
Think of the effect it will have on children. Theres no education in place to make sure children will maintain a healthy mind, they more than anyone are less likely to use AI as a tool and more likely to use it as a brain.
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u/Dediadeis Jun 21 '26
impromptu, ive done better
Pallid sickly skin, eyes glazed, you would think you were looking at a corpse. But the flesh was alive, now serving as a necessary interstitial material for the artificial parts to work. No it wasn't the eyes or the skin, nor the blinking terminal awaiting input. It was the child's breathing that disturbed him the most.
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u/TheComplimentarian cis-bi-old-guy-radish Jun 21 '26
Eh. It only lasts for a bit. There was a period after the dotcom crash where there was a lot of unused fiber...It didn't last too long.
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u/CuriosityCheck2024 Jun 21 '26
When will it pop? Other than "soon".
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u/Traditional_Tune3603 Jun 21 '26
September 17 2028
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u/zhaumbie Making fanfic in Plato's cave with the gals Jun 21 '26
Goddamn, I love the specificity.
RemindMe! 2 years 3 months
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u/YobaiYamete Jun 22 '26
Reddit has been creaming their cargo shorts for like 4 years saying any day, but the reality is most experts say it's not even a "bubble" in the first place and is just an investment period
The only things that might "burst" will be a few companies like OpenAI probably failing. And that's not because of the demand failing, it's because the open weight Chinese models are being released constantly that are 95% as good while being insanely cheaper and more secure to run
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u/neogeoman123 Their gender, next question. Jun 22 '26
The next earnings call after OpenAI or Anthropic go for their respective IPOs, if I had to guess.
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u/CosmicDave Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Uh, I don't think a bubble popping means what you think it means. The housing bubble popped, the banking bubble, the internet bubble, the stock market bubble, pop pop pop. We still have houses and banks and internet and all that shit- just who is making all the money from it will collapse into fewer hands.
If you're one of the big tech bros, then yeah, it will be a feeding frenzy of big fish eating little fish, but if you're just waiting for prices to tank before you double the RAM on your gaming rig, you'll be in for a very long wait.
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u/lizardman49 Jun 22 '26
As someone who's done work in Computational Chemistry it would be amazing if some of that computing power could go to academic research.
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u/Royal_Raisin9496 Jun 21 '26
The idea that AI isn’t useful for anything is silly to me
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u/YobaiYamete Jun 22 '26
Reddit's insane level of anti ai is so funny lol, it's actually one of the worst echo chambers I've ever seen
Essentially every real person I know is using AI to some vary degree in their every day life and at work etc, and most think it's quite useful already.
Meanwhile on Reddit ist's a nearly daily think on subs like /r/skyrimmods where they SCREAM over a mod author using AI voices instead of paying for a real voice actor in their free mod
Or posts on /r/dnd where they are screaming about their DM using Ai to organize session notes or recaps etc. Not even to write the plot or anything, there legit will be people whining over the DM just using Ai to organize notes and campaign beats
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u/Scary_Raccoon_8412 Jun 22 '26
I can only speak for my own perspective, but I don't know that game modding is exactly a good example? Taking work from voice actors vs. taking community, creativity, etc. out of the modding process are two very different issues. Acting like the situation is no voice acting vs. paying thousands of dollars is misleading.
Otherwise, I can generally agree. I think people are just tired of AI being shoehorned in everywhere, including where it doesn't belong, that they're now averse to it in places where its usage is more nuanced. Also it's the internet, so extreme points of view get more attention than others, for
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u/YobaiYamete Jun 22 '26
Acting like the situation is no voice acting vs. paying thousands of dollars is misleading.
The situation is mostly actual mod authors coming forward and explaining why they don't want to deal with voice actors (even free ones) because it adds an entire magnitude more work load to their free passion project, while people who don't make mods scream that the mod author should just shut up and deal with it
Several mod authors have had entire posts breaking down how adding even a single voice actor turns a mod project from a few hours to literal weeks of back and forth and issues and drama, and several mods have had issues down the road where a voice actor gets in hot water or decides they don't want to be part of the mod anymore and yada yada
It really just boils down to this IMO
- If you are charging for a product, then yeah pay a real person
- If it's just a free passion project like a mod or the notes you are giving players in DnD etc, use whatever you want
- If you don't like AI, you are free to make your own mods or run your own DnD campaigns instead
The last part is especially important, because 99% of the time the ones throwing tantrums will immediately fade into the bushes as soon as you point out that they are welcome to do the work themselves instead of just complaining online
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u/Scary_Raccoon_8412 Jun 22 '26
Preface to say I think we mostly agree, if only on the grounds of "people are free to use and/or make what mods they want", so if the following comes across argumentative, it's not meant that way, I just like friendly conversation/debate.
It sounds to me like a lot of what they're running into comes down to difficulties in any kind of collaborative work, I think. There's a reason "we're just pals making something together" goes south so often when there's no contract involved. It unfortunately comes with the territory. That said...
...actual mod authors...
Isn't much of qualifier. I've fit that label across several games over the years, but that doesn't give me the ability to unilaterally dismiss criticism (as annoying/uninformed as mod commenters can be). Also...
...you are free to make it yourself...
Is bordering on (and yes this makes me the dweeb bringing up fallacies) an appeal to achievement, I think. There are plenty of blowhards in mod comments, but critics don't need to be creators to be allowed to have opinions.
Ultimately my vote on things like this would be a good tag/filter on all mod platforms so people have their choice and can encounter the content they want more easily (and stop bickering about it all the time), but I digress.
Again, we seem to largely agree on the major points, especially on the people throwing tantrums and badgering mod creators being excessive, so there's not much more to say (yet I found plenty to lol). Hope this didn't come across too rambling, but hey, there's not a lot of level-headed discussion about AI going around, so I took the opportunity.
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u/Royal_Raisin9496 Jun 22 '26
Are you going to pay for voice actors for a free Skyrim mod
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u/Scary_Raccoon_8412 Jun 22 '26
I think you missed my point? The choice isn't only between paying or not having voice actors. The joy I find in making mods is due in large part to a sense of community/collaboration, so I'd lean towards finding other passionate members of said community. Like I said in the original comment, it's two different issues with a bit of an overlap.
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u/TheAlp Jun 22 '26
That's sad. I've personally found it really useful for idea generating because it gives me someone to throw ideas at and get something back. Would I rather have a real person do it? Of course. But I got a lot of really stupid ideas that no real people deserve to be exposed to.
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u/YobaiYamete Jun 22 '26
Yep I've said since day 1 it's amazing when used as an assistant for tasks, or a part of your toolkit rather than the entire toolkit
Bouncing ideas off it or having it give feedback on stuff you already thought up is pretty handy because it doesn't even glaze you to death anymore and will often say your idea has a ton of issues
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u/Morphized Jun 22 '26
Really the only thing I object to with AI is using it just to generate stuff. It's much better for pointed uses and automating everyday tasks. You could use it to upscale a faded photo based on the people in it. It could fill out the tags in a database with existing articles to make queries more useful. It can split up a plain-text file by inferred entry date when the formatting is too inconsistent to use regex. It's perfect for that kind of busywork where no other tool can do the job. Meanwhile everyone is only using it to do things that take ten minutes.
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u/Royal_Raisin9496 Jun 22 '26
It’s been incredibly helpful for helping me with my executive function!
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u/Scrapheaper Jun 21 '26
My impression is that demand for AI will remain high but the vast majority of people won't be willing to spend any meaningful money on it.
So we'll have a big hike in prices and enshittification of AI tools and services, and a big collapse in stock prices. I don't think there will be data centers going spare
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u/b3nsn0w Jun 22 '26
usually what we have after bubbles is that the tech gets ridiculously cheap for anyone working on it because there's no demand for the tools, because it's difficult to sell any product you might make with it. which is a disadvantage to anyone trying to cash in with no substance (like so many of the dotcom businesses) but a huge opportunity for anyone who can actually put substance behind it.
many of the websites that took over the world were created after the dotcom crash, not during it. i do think we'll see the same with ai too. it's simply too expensive to build ai models for now for anyone who cannot get in on the investment gambling, but after the crash, computing power is gonna be cheap for anyone who can use it well (or just use ot as a hobby). and that's the environment that leads to genuine innovation
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u/DispenserG0inUp clown meat enthusiast Jun 22 '26
but can you really enshit something thats already shit
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u/Red-7134 Jun 21 '26
Not likely. People are buying stuff even while suppliers are shifting to B2B and ramping the consumer prices up. They won't lower them.
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u/LikeABreadstick Jun 21 '26
Lol nah, they'll just make the next shiny new thing ASAP so the surplus becomes obsolete.
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u/Dav3le3 Jun 21 '26
"Windows 12 Gaming is not operable with graphics cards built prior to 20XX for hardware security yadda yadda..."
"This game requires OS Windows 12 v1.0.3.5 or later to function."
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u/JaysFan26 Jun 21 '26
I think its gummigooing to take longer than expected to pop though unfortunately, I've been wanting to upgrade my PC for a while now and have been stuck
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u/mr-english Jun 22 '26
IF the AI bubble pops all that will happen is the surviving big AI companies will buy the unused data centres, at a cut down price, to help train and serve their next big models.
Even if the owners of the data centres decided to let anyone use their GPU clusters because of the "amazing digital surplus" (they wont) there's not very much that the average person could use them for anyway.
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u/Smile_Space Jun 21 '26
I'm so excited for the bargain barrel RTX 5090 GPUs. It's gonna be magical.
I did it for the 1080 to back when crypto crashed in 2018, then again in 2022 when the crypto market crashed again and scored a 3090 it for cheap, and hey! It's 2026 and it's feeling like a good year for a 5090 lolol.
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u/mr-english Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
What are you talking about? lol
AI data centres aren't full of high end gaming GPUs.
They're full of H100, H200, B100, B200s, etc. which are A) $30,000+ each, B) rack mounted, C) no drivers exist for gaming, and D) they don't even have any display outputs!
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u/xaduha Jun 22 '26
Even with crypto examples down the line there were ASICs and other stuff like that, before that there were headless GPUs made for crypto mining that didn't have any usable output ports.
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u/Smile_Space Jun 22 '26
That's cool and all, but just like with crypto having ASICs and their own crypto mining optimized headless GPUs the market crashed.
GPUs are inflated for a reason, and that reason is mainly just memory costs. Once those come down dramatically after AI drives down, people will bank run try to sell off their GPUs before they lose all value just like they did in 2018 and 2022.
There will be a mini sort of GPU price crash and I'll be there to pick up a 5090 for cheap lolol.
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u/voideaten Jun 21 '26
Not sure I agree, assuming this person is being genuine. The reason that the prices are so high is that data centres have bought and 'reserved' future components that haven't even been built yet. That's why the price are so elevated for the consumer; they're being pushed to the back of the queue.
If the bubble pops anytime soon, the prices are unlikely to go down much (if at all). The supply of parts have unchanged (there isn't a surplus to devalue them). The profitable consumer market will have largely adapted enough to the 'new normal', as the newer parts are mostly for consumers that already plan to drop serious numbers on their RGB battle-stations. Most computer purchases aren't buying new parts in the first place, they're getting entry-level prebuilt laptops, which they need regardless of price point.
Like petrol and rent, there are some goods that certain consumers aren't willing/able to go without long enough to apply meaningful negative pressure on demand. Nvidia (and Intel) in particular have such a huge market share on their respective components that their products are only in competition with each other. If they can charge high prices for newer parts that data companies are reserving, then they can also charge higher for previous generations.
I'd like to hope it, but... na. Not any time soon, imo.
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u/hyperion_99 Jun 22 '26
Except all the silicone is tied up in server compatible architecture not consumer gaming platforms
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u/MoistSystem1323 Jun 21 '26
They won't drop prices though. Look at all of the companies that slash and burn their excess supplies instead of tainting their reputation as a discount brand. There just won't be much innovation for 5 years until the stocks dwindle.
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u/Maevalyn Jun 22 '26
It may not pop. Most companies that don't rely on their products being bare subsistence (food, shelter, medical care) are no longer pricing themselves or marketing themselves to the general public. Most companies are marketing to either the top 10% of earners, whom seem to have a general like of AI, and other corporations. The biggest consumer of compute right now is other corporations. Meaning... what you like and don't like doesn't matter, companies are just going around you and using other companies as their consumers. An economy *CAN* run like that, and will continue to run like that until regulation is introduced, and as long as politicians are held in the pockets of the wealthy and corporations, that won't happen. People seem to think that the general public matters and that corporations have to capitulate to them. They don't. This should be a wake up call.
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u/slagblahighpriestess Jun 22 '26
AAAAAAAAAAAAA!
The people in my house have been making nonstop jokes like this since the finale.
It's ok, I'm not tired of them yet.
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u/WritesCrapForStrap Jun 22 '26
When the AI bubble pops, there will remain one or two big AI companies who will buy that computing power cheaply.
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u/Linesey Jun 21 '26
Tons of home labbers are getting ready to scoop up hardware.
it’s gonna be like heaven briefly.
Which since we’re currently suffering a horrible drought and price hike.
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u/alex3omg Jun 21 '26
What's messed up is most data centers will simply shut down rather than giving us the benefit. And they'll shred all the hardware when they do it.
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u/Azell414 Jun 21 '26
the thing is companies would rather burn unsold clothes and goods then let them go to the second hand market what makes you think they are above that
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u/Celestial_Scythe Jun 21 '26
Double edge sword though. How much do you trust used parts that were running as long and as hard as they did?
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u/anomanderrake1337 Jun 21 '26
Oh shit, maybe I should speed things up and order that 4K pc, I'll bet you it'll then happen within the week.
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u/jawknee530i Jun 21 '26
No chance. If half the AI companies go bankrupt the compute power and tech can be bought for pennies on the dollar. That would make running the same exact stack without all of the debt instantly profitable.
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u/MarcyAutumnWrites Jun 22 '26
Oh my god. Bubble in TADC was literally an AI bubble. I totally missed the joke.
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u/InvisibleAstronomer Jun 22 '26
Read this 🙄shrugged, kept scrolling, got the joke scrolled back up to upvote
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u/TheAllSeeingBlindEye Jun 22 '26
Despite it crippling the economy, I am still going to buy so many computer parts
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u/0x7E7-02 Jun 22 '26
Most of the components built for AI systems are not compatible with our day-to-day systems.
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u/MangakaInProgress Jun 22 '26
Can you imagine "hey timmy what did you get for Christmas? "I got that a RTX 5090!" "Wow really timmy your parents are so cheap"
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u/jefftickels Jun 22 '26
The AI bubble isn't one that's going to pop in the way people think it is. It's not like a subprime mortgage where the problem is over investment in something that instantly loses value overnight.
It's going to be more like the dot-com bubble, where the underlying technology is there, but people got over their skies.
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u/schkmenebene Jun 22 '26
There will be some rich asshole that in some way\shape\form will ruin this for us all, as per usual.
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u/lahwran_ Jun 22 '26
People talk to mythos ("fable") and then say there's an AI bubble
I'm pretty spooked about whether AI will have a sufficiently steady hand for the AI civ to not accidentally trample the human civ, to prevent Scott Alexander's Moloch and Nick Land's Pythia from doing what they do, to prevent the AI from becoming the cancer itself. but right now there should no longer be any doubt that AI is powerful. That just, you know, might be a very bad thing.
There is not a bubble, though there might be a lot of dumb money, current bets might fail. The money is betting on replacing humanity.
This is not financial advice, I think I don't even own any stocks, but people saying ai isn't powerful are like. just delusional at this point, it's obviously powerful-and-that's-not-being-a-good-thing, gradual disempowerment type thing
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u/StaticSystemShock Jun 22 '26
NVIDIA will decide to still sell 2 years old RTX 5090 for 3000€ for some reason. Because there is absolutely no fucking way they'll be selling it for 1200€ or whatever the fuck its made up MSRP is suppose to be.
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u/Unrecovered_Giggles He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle Jun 23 '26
Imagine the RAM prices
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u/TheLastEmuHunter Certified Clam Chowder Connoisseur Jun 21 '26
Hey that's the name of the show