Why You Should Expect an AI Crash
economist.comCircular financing, without regard to technical limitations. We've known about this for a few years. Old news.
AI hype organizations like Latent Space (+ others) ban people who disrespect any aspect of AI today, and articles like this get buried.
Isn’t it what they call Recursive Self-Investment?
Recursive self-investment. Can't believe we didn't come up with this phrase earlier
Truly bootstrapped…
Circular financing and various forms of booking sales ahead of or for future delivery are things that have caught up with other companies in the past and/or were straight-up SEC violations. Enron is an example.
Does Jensen's replacement have the industry connections, clout (or bully factor depending on perspective) and appetite to continue the circular financing? Its the CFO I think that is replacing him and they may have objected to these things all along and might have been over-ruled.
Yeah doesn't seem like news. More of a case of when than if.
In the words of Keynes, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
A crash (or at least notable correction) is coming but I sure as hell couldn’t time when.
Yeah, and also the similar quote that being early is just as bad as being wrong.
Could be worse when near term cash is paying 5% and TIPS are paying 2.5-3%.
As they say, when you’ve won the game, it’s best to stop playing.
A failed anthropic IPO could be a trigger, a lot is riding on the imaginary valuations of anthropic and openai.
HN has been talking about a crash for almost as long as Dario has been saying white collar jobs will be gone in 6 months and Sam has been saying they’re 6 months away from AGI.
At this point we may literally get commercial nuclear fusion power (which has been “30 years away” for the last 60 years) before any of the other things happen.
People should put money at stake on their idle speculations instead of being another doomer posting consequence-free wishful bias confirmations, hoping AI will fail and leave them be at their now-pointless jobs. This is also why prediction markets are useful signal, which I'm sure is another topic that rustles your jimmies. https://polymarket.com/event/ai-bubble-burst-by
At a certain point the entire economy is a cycle. These are like the....epicycles.
(...The design hack to make the geocentric models work. Maybe it's also a metaphor...)
hey c'mon, there's no need for that kind of language. it's called 'recursive financing'
It is going to break the back of SaaS. We can't outspend AI on infrastructure. We've had a global application deployed on GCP then AWS and I've never seen a stockout until this year, and now we get them so often we are being forced to reserve capacity. I also can't wrap my head around the basic economics. If you spend 10x yearly global gross revenue sales on building out infrastructure, software can only get more expensive to make.
Anyone got a gift link or archive?
dang's rule is this can be a submission if the content can easily be accessed with some tech savviness. This might need to be flagged.
Nobody seems to be able to read the article.
Yes, The Economist keeps updating its website security against anyone seeing an article for free.
This link is inaccessible, locked behind a very effective paywall.
Gift link for 7 days https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/11/12/why-you-should-...
[delayed]
Unfortunately it already says expired.
The page says "gift" but I still can't see TFA. Am I holding it wrong?
I wonder if they limit how many times gift links can be accessed.
Requires a “free trial”
“This gift link has expired. Register to access this article”
Archive.today had a bad grab, waiting for it to be updated after reporting it.
Well, now the CFO is in charge of nVidia we may see some problems.
Because while a founder CEO can play fast and loose with gray finance rules, I don't expect an appointed CFO can do the same. At least not one that expects to work again if they are found liable for it. It is kind of interesting in this way that the board has made this choice. It almost says they are looking to insulate against some liability here.
The more cynical framing, especially on this site, is that the "Founder CEO" has a presumptive immunity from prosecution for banal stuff like bookeeping. They aren't perceived as beholden to the shareholders in the same way, because we in the peanut gallery think they "own" the company more than mere investors do.
But obviously no, in the real world fraud is fraud and if you get caught cooking books with other people's money you go to jail.
The same CFO who has been signing off on every deal?
It’s no longer smart to predict an AI bubble pop. The question is only when. Any article trying to sound smart without giving dates and justification for those dates isn’t saying anything.
I wake up, I read articles about how the AI crash is coming. I figure that it's not actually coming because everyone is talking about it, so it's priced in.
And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop, so I figure that the crash must be coming because there's too much optimism.
I go to sleep. Then I wake up and read...
> decide that it's not coming because everyone is expecting it and pricing it in.
I'm in the same boat. I'm hoping that the crashing is moving slowly enough that it can unwind carefully, and that not enough data centers got started that things can't simply be cancelled without much harm.
A bunch of fake money borrowed on commitments over data centers never built and plowed back into the ouroboros rather than escaping into the larger economy seems like it could be unwound with only a few people going broke. The only wasted real production would be in all of the chips - and they might be able to go somewhere, somehow. The data centers currently built will certainly be well-utilized - the overcapacity hasn't actually, physically been done, right?
If a bunch of circular financing went into doing something that never fully happened, is that a crash or a lifting of a mask over a real economy that has continued its previous slide?
And if capacity ends up fully utilized and prices do go up, won't there be dozens of viable half-done projects, the best of which that could be dusted off and rolled out again?
AI is a parabolic thing.
It’s made so many people so much money chasing this future that feels just over the next hill. I think being a downer about it is short-sighted, but it’s equally short-sighted to assume that the go-go crazy run that we’ve had will continue forever.
My experience with this has been insane, companies like Nvidia and Micron have made me pretty rich. But you can’t be emo about it. Take advantage of your gains and be a good steward of your resources.
I’m also old enough to remember 1996, and the amazing future as chronicled in Wired magazine. Come 2000, the wipeout was humbling, but many aspects of the web visionaries was correct.
> And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop
Really? It feels like most people are talking about an AI bubble, with a vocal minority in opposition.
If most people are talking about a bubble, then...
Any day now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETxmOfw0JM
..and how much of that AI optimism (and some pessimism) is generated by the same proprietary llms? Recursive self-enbubbling?
I guess a broken clock is right two times a day, 14 times a week and 700+ times an year?
Great can't wait for GPU prices to come down.
I just want RAM
Someone else is going to figure out what to do with them before gamers can get their hands on then again
Emmm. AI maybe? Does AI stop becoming useful if SP500 drops? If anything we get constrained build out while demand continues.
Probably some breakthrough in quantum simulation running on them or something
In life, one should expect anything. In compute, one should expect zero.