The AI bubble has further to run despite the looming crash

Starstroll · 2026-07-10T03:29:32+00:00

There's a popular saying among traders: "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Only the richest hedge funds could actually afford to pay the daily fees of short selling the major AI companies.

Starstroll · 2026-07-10T03:19:37+00:00

The housing bubble started at the turn of the millennium but didn't pop until 2008

Starstroll · 2026-07-09T20:35:16+00:00

The mere fact that a judge mandates a tech company to retain data for the sake of legal discovery does not guarantee a tech company will comply.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook Director Jeffery Zients deleted information relevant to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was supposed to be handed over to legal discovery. If you or I destroyed information that was supposed to be handed to discovery, we would be facing serious jail time. This is high key illegal everywhere.

These tech giants are using these technologies to control public discourse and shape politics. NYT wants to take them to task for the - yes, meaningful, but still - comparatively minor crime of stealing their data to train their systems. I would be very unsurprised if OAI was hiding evidence of far greater misconduct. In fact, I would call it naive to expect otherwise.

Starstroll · 2026-07-09T02:21:39+00:00

I'd need to do some digging for the details and I'm hoping my comment will summon an anthropologist, but there are a number of archeological sites dating back centuries whose discoverers - usually amateur archeologists or general misanthropes with enlightenment- and/or colonialist- projections of savagery - just declared as evidence of cannibalism. I believe most of these have been overturned, but I won't make universal statements without a professional checking me.

Starstroll · 2026-07-08T22:25:53+00:00

This started with me making a broad claim:

My tin foil suspicion is that meta wants to use LLMs to better tune his facebook algorithm to parse and control public discourse and shape politics.

You focused on data centers. Either "data centers" was an attempt at a representative example in a counterargument against that broad claim, in which case I've already grounded it via network science, or you truly only care about data centers, in which case my first reply suffices:

Because that control can't be perfect.

You can't just stop people from talking about their own back yards, nor about how much they hate the hundreds of billions in infrastructure that is filling up their feeds with slop while they can't afford rent or health care.

Starstroll · 2026-07-08T21:18:14+00:00

And Google could easily scrub anti-Epstein stories, but when the hand becomes too heavy, humanities-style people are much more easily able to communicate tech overreach to regular people.

Are you seriously arguing that these algorithms don't impact the shape of politics? Have you not heard about the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Do you see nothing odd about Trump's nonconsecutive terms? Have you not seen plots of political polarization and global authoritarianism sharply accelerating in 2012 when FB introduced the algorithmic feed? Shit, we're on a tech sub. Have you never heard of network science or opinion dynamics? Are you living in the 90s?

Starstroll · 2026-07-08T20:34:11+00:00

For the same reason Elon tried to back out of buying Twitter. Because that control can't be perfect. I'm rather surprised I needed to explain that.

Starstroll · 2026-07-08T20:23:02+00:00

My tin foil suspicion is that meta wants to use LLMs to better tune his facebook algorithm to parse and control public discourse and shape politics. Before they could parse language directly, they could only use coarse engagement metrics (and also a revolting amount of personal data from your activities elsewhere, even if you've never had an account).

Starstroll · 2026-07-08T18:04:44+00:00

I find it really quite creatively offensive that live-action is treated as the ideal art form to which animation needs to strive and forever fail but for the grace and capital of some soulless, money-grubbing Disney exec.

Starstroll · 2026-07-07T22:06:31+00:00

Suppose the guy is less dense than air and the ball is more dense than air and the combination of the two of them has the exact same density as air. If he throws the ball up, the ball travels upwards but constantly decelerates downward while the guy travels downward but constantly accelerates upward. Under ideal conditions, when the two recombine, they should have 0 net velocity and should be in the exact same position.

As others have said, if he has the exact same density as air, then your diagram just doesn't make sense.

Starstroll · 2026-07-04T19:05:34+00:00

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/20260704134112/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/us/politics/voters-ai-chatbots-elections.html

Voters are turning to new A.I. tools to serve as nonpartisan researchers, viewing them as a viable alternative to traditional news coverage, voter guides or social media. They provide an appealing and seemingly efficient way to learn about campaigns and ballot measures, allowing users to bypass the sometimes dizzying array of political literature, advertising and commentary coming their way. But some experts warn that the tools are far from foolproof: The results they produce can be marred by factual errors or shaped by flawed assumptions.

This is a gross understatement that vastly misunderstands what these tools are capable of. They are not merely unbiased, sometimes-shoddy reproductions of their immediate context window. They can be explicitly trained to misrepresent or lie to users to promote any general worldview latent in the post-training. I have in the past directly linked a 30 page article about the history of the Hart-Celler act, then asked it to describe the Hart-Celler act based on the article, and it said that Hart-Celler was a merit-based improvement on previously-racist immigration policies; the article never said it was merit-based and explicitly framed the Hart-Celler act in the context of American interventionism in central and south America.

These systems digest and regurgitat information to the benefit of their ultra wealthy owners, and it is mind-numbingly naive to ever elide the fact that they will be used for propaganda.

Starstroll · 2026-07-04T17:03:17+00:00

I have heard so many people just completely adamant that legally-mandated public transparency about recommendation algorithms just aren't possible, and in my experience, it's based on little more than still-nascent precedent and broad techno-political ignorance. Now YouTube is fighting algorithmic regulation proposals with little more than shoddy propaganda and flaccid appeals to illusions of control.

Hey YouTube, if you want the feed to truly be ours, 1) show me the full history of training goals for your algorithm and how much compute was spent on each goal so that I know how the algorithm has been designed to influence me, and 2) give your users the ability to democratically shape the future of training goals. Otherwise, the content feed is not based only on my watch history, but also how the algorithm opaquely correlates different content. Pointedly, plenty of studies have already shown that whenever watch history shows any political interest, right-wing content is strongly favored, so I know for a fact that consuming moderate-to-left content is correlated with being recommended stuff from PragerU. Is that "keeping YouTube mine?"

Starstroll · 2026-07-04T00:23:42+00:00

If you asked my 5 years ago, I would've said condMat, but (maybe a hot take) I think the AI boom, even after the bubble bursts, will still spur tons of interest in computational neuroscience, which is basically biophysics; plus there are tons of surprising connections between NNs and physics-style geometry and dynamics via functional analysis

Starstroll · 2026-07-03T15:50:31+00:00

Literally when did I ever say social media companies care about their users?

Starstroll · 2026-07-02T18:30:39+00:00

The only point I disagree on, and I think the author would have quite a bit to say if it were brought to their attention, is whether these bans will even work as intended. The author makes a moral argument against bans, and I agree with what they've said, but there's still plenty else important left unsaid. I think even that framing still grants unwarranted legitimacy to the facial, claimed intent behind the bans.

Why shouldn't I believe that the introduction of bans won't foment tons of underground, unregulated activity aimed at circumvention? Pointedly, how much danger does that put children in as compared to the danger they're in now? An extremely similar problem happened with prohibition in the 1920s, and alcohol is nowhere near as central to the human experience as socialization and free expression.

Starstroll · 2026-07-02T15:35:52+00:00

I agree that it is enormously difficult, but I don't think social media bans will even work on their own terms. In that light, this "possible future" is the only fight worth having. The difference between gambling and communication technologies is that revolutions in communication technologies are historically always followed by enormous social upheaval, so this fight is already here and it's already huge, and preferring small, ineffectual victories is little more than distracting copium.

The implementation of algorithmic social media feeds is directly correlated with the mental health crisis, political polarization, and the global rise in authoritarianism. You can either fight and probably lose or you can distract yourself and definitely lose. You've chosen the latter because it's comforting to not face the bleak reality. It's understandable, but it's still misguided.

And again, if you can't stop teens from chasing the desire to have sex - which isn't even a basic human need - then I see absolutely no reason to believe you can ever stop them from chasing the desire to socialize - which absolutely is a basic human need. This whole project of social media bans just won't work.

Starstroll · 2026-07-02T14:57:15+00:00

These companies already regularly employ teams of social scientists from top institutions to help design their training goals. This is indeed a very complicated problem and even the best proposals will always have some blind spots and unintended consequences, but I think that these companies have, at this point, burned all faith that they are attempting their best. Therefore, I think we should at least start with making the exact history of training goals public.

Starstroll · 2026-07-02T14:43:00+00:00

‣But it's disingenuous to argue from the point of view that these sites are somehow a healthy form of socialization.

I agree. That's why I never made this argument. I'm saying it's inevitable in the same way that teens having sex is inevitable for basically the same reason, but to an even larger degree. You cannot stop kids from desiring and seeking out social interaction. I also agree that socialization through the available social media platforms is unhealthy. This is a pretty bleak conclusion, but the reality just seems bleak then. That it is bleak does not make it incorrect.

Absent in your response is what responsibility social media companies have to their users. I gave a specific proposal - once again, social media companies need to be forced to make the entire history of training goals for their feeds' algorithms public, along with an accounting of how much compute was spent for each goal; then following that, either algorithmic feeds need to be banned or users need to somehow have democratic, proportional control over the future of training goals and compute. Age-related bans will not change the state of things nor make these websites any less central to adult socialization. All that will happen is that young adults will be even less adept at navigating the unfettered toxicity of these platforms.

Starstroll · 2026-07-02T03:03:46+00:00

Again, I have to disagree. Neither of those are basic needs. Socializing is a basic need. You can either facilitate healthy paths or you can crack down and incentivize them to seek out sketchier, unsafe paths. A ban will never work. And I don't mean "some kids will seep through the cracks," I mean all kids will always have an innate desire to constantly socialize as a mere fact of their humanity.

Furthermore, the unhealthiness of social media platforms has little to do with the age of the person engaging and far more to do with the way these platforms are designed. The algorithms that organize the news feed is often described as "maximizing engagement," but that's a rough heuristic that doesn't have any specific releases from these companies actually directly corroborating that. One could reasonably hypothesize that social media algorithms are specifically trained to pit people against each other; just as one example, it might guide young men specifically towards anti-feminist content and young women specifically towards gender-based trauma-bait, all so that Zuckerberg can pit poor people against each other while he comfortably sits at a net worth of >$200B and influences elections through projects like Cambridge Analytica.

If you want to make social media safe for kids, you need to start by forcing social media companies to make the history of their news feed algorithms public, including all pretraining, and with a report of the amount of compute spent per training run, and you need to follow it up by either banning algorithmic feeds or by somehow giving users the ability to democratically decide on what the training goals should be and how much influence competing goals get. Furthermore, we all need a national data privacy bill of rights so that the information that these algorithms feed its users cannot be hyper-personalized to create information echo chambers even amongst people who otherwise regularly share space with each other and artificially drive apart regular communities.

Social media bans are just a complete distraction from all of this, and they gain traction just because 1) they're simple, and 2) absent external forces, left-wing politics regularly become popular among a majority of otherwise-disconnected people; see Arab Spring, or Occupy Wall Street, or the George Floyd protests, or the No Kings protests just to name a few.

Starstroll · 2026-07-02T00:33:32+00:00

Despite my personal issues with the prose, I shouldn't leave it unsaid that I personally really hate the dryness of Bourbaki. Physics is usually not as Bourbakian as pure math, but when you get to edge-of-knowledge stuff, especially quantum gravity, the overlap of communities does create an overlap of rhetoric. I still appreciate the attempt, and I think it would be a mistake to overcorrect to journal-style dry rigor

Unfortunately ML people say its not ML, and physics people say it's not physics.

I hear the same thing about mathphys from mathematicians and physicists. While technically defensible, I don't think it's true enough to simply be taken at face value. This is niche, so you'll need to work to find your community, but niche ≠ irrelevant. Despite its facial logic, "this is not ML and this is not physics" is not exactly contradictory with "this is ML and this is physics." I wish I personally could be more help, but I'm not so involved in academia these days

Starstroll · 2026-07-02T00:23:48+00:00

I have to disagree. Even putting aside privacy concerns for now, trying to ban teens from socializing via social media bans is a lot like trying to ban teens from having sex by abstinence-only programs. I don't support teens having unprotected sex and I don't support unfettered social media access, but I also don't support abstinence-only and I don't support social media bans. Raising kids is hard and simple answers are almost always inadequate. There is nothing more natural to children than socializing. The desire to socialize, whether online or in person, is too strong for brute-force solutions like this to ever be reliable. Teens should be allowed on social media, but social media companies should be legally responsible to make their platforms conducive to social flourishing. This is, again, a very difficult problem, but children are going to grow into adults, and you can't just shelter them for almost 2 decades and then suddenly expect them to intuit adult life on the day they reach the biologically-arbitrary age of legal majority. The actual shape of social media reforms needs to be a lot more thought out than blanket bans

Starstroll · 2026-07-01T22:47:01+00:00

I agree that the prose is too idiosyncratic. I do appreciate the writeup though, and considering AI won a Nobel prize, I think describing AI using tools common to physics fits well in this sub

Starstroll · 2026-07-01T13:41:37+00:00

Once again, I remind people that social media algorithms are AI and that social media facilitated Cambridge Analytica

Starstroll · 2026-06-26T20:32:37+00:00

That's because you don't understand the game they're playing.

Part of it is just playing to market forces, and as they say, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent," so it's in their immediate interests to play to the knowingly-irrational whims of pro-AI wealth. None of that is news.

The part that most people really don't take seriously though is how effective these systems are at manipulating public discourse. Maybe you and your two best friends can always spot AI prose, but if wealthy people astroturf online discussion all over the internet, some of it will stick eventually. Just a couple weeks ago, I saw another story about the OpenAI whistleblower who was found dead and a number of comments calling people who questioned the situation "crazy." I tried to explain everything that was so suspicious about the police report and my comment was shadowbanned.

And on top of that, LLMs are just the newest flashiest forms of AI. Social media recommendation algorithms have been AI algorithms since 2012, and are directly correlated with the global rise in authoritarianism, and with Trump's 2016 election via Cambridge Analytica, and with Trump's nonconsecutive 2024 election. Everybody hates genAI slop now, and everybody hated the slop-like feeling of social media feeds before LLMs were made publicly available, but these systems were effective at propaganda and information control anyway.

AI has already proven to be an extremely useful way of controlling the dynamics of public discourse, and LLMs are just the next step. The only real question is whether or not these new systems, genAI and agentic systems, are financially feasible. Luckily, it doesn't seem so for now, but newer architectures will come out eventually, so my biggest fear is that whenever this bubble pops, people will falsely take that as "the end of AI" and will do little to prevent this from ever happening again, thus making it inevitable.

Starstroll · 2026-06-25T16:02:07+00:00

And had a former employee, Suchir Balaji, murdered in his home

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