Skip Navigation
Technology @lemmy.world
Buttflapper @lemmy.world

Feels like so many tech bubbles are about to burst

Hard to believe it's been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we've come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways

I'm a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don't want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.

Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we're not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn't caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don't have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That's at least a decade away

Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn't very widespread. We're again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance

Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It's so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they're just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that's copyrighted, but claim it's for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn't make any sense and just looks like they're going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty...

It just seems like there's a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don't see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?

134 comments

  • As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

    VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

    AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

    Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it's 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don't see the need - there aren't compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

    The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we're seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we've had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

    I don't see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.

  • COVID also inflated a lot of tech stock massively, as everybody suddenly had to rely a lot more on it to get anything done, and the only thing you could do for entertainment was gaming, streaming movies, or industrial quantities of drugs.

    Then that ended, and they all wanted to hold onto that "value".

    It is a bubble, but whether it pops massively like in 2000, or just evens off to the point where everything else catches up, remains to be seen.

    "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" are wise words for anyone thinking of shorting this kind of thing.

  • It's interesting how interconnected those points are.

    Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

    Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on "our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it" and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

    Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

    I'm predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.

    • The backlash to this is going to be fun. Having lived through the .com boom/bust, which wasn't a scam, the web was actually the future and was undersold if anything, no one with the stink of computer on them outside of a tiny elite could get decent fulltime work for like 5 years. AI is a scam, full stop. It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don't reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do. People are going to go full Butlerian Jihad from Dune when this blows up the economy, and it's going to suck so much more for everyone in tech, scammer or no...

      • The backlash to this is going to be fun.

        In some cases it's already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.

        It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.

        It is not completely useless but it's oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a "trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!" A bike is still useful, even if they're building a scam around it.

        Here's three practical examples:

        1. I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can't use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
        2. I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a "must check" pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I'd probably have missed them.
        3. [Note: reported use.] I've seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).

        None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don't require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It's either things that you wouldn't use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say "yup, that's bullshit" (#1, #3).

      • I mean I can list a lot of things AI (and I'll limit it to Transformers, the advancement that drives LLMs) has enabled:

        • Audio Transcription
        • Greatly improved language translation
        • Improved computer vision, in some situations
        • Combined with diffusion models has enabled targeted image generation, which we already know is being used in media and ads.

        AI isn't a scam, but it's being oversold and it's limitations are being purposefully hidden. That being said, it is changing how things are done and that's not going to stop. We're still seeing impacts from CNNs, one of the major AI/ML breakthroughs from over a decade ago, make impacts.

  • The pace of technological change and innovation was always going to slow down this decade. But Covid, Ukraine and a decoupling from Russia/China has further slowed it.

    You need three things in abundance to create tech. First an advanced economy, which narrows down most of the world. Second you need lots of capital to burn while you make said advances. Finally you need lots of 20 and thirty something’s who will invent and develop the tech.

    For the last 20 years we’ve had all of those conditions in the Western world. Boomers were at the height of their earnings potential and their kids were leaving home in droves letting them pour money into investments. Low interest rates abound because capital was looking for places to be utilized. China was the workshop of the world building low to mid range stuff allowing the West to focus its excess Millennials age workforce on value added and tech work.

    Now in the USA boomers are retiring and there aren’t enough GenX to make up the difference. Millennials and finally getting down to household creation or their oldest cohorts (Xennials) just now entering into their mid 40s and starting to move up in their careers but they probably still have kids to support. So it will be some time before capital becomes plentiful again. Gen Z is large but they aren’t enough to back fill the loss of Millennials.

    Ohh I made a point to highlight that this was a US demographic phenomena. Europe and Japan do not have a large Millennial or GenZ populations to replace their aging boomers. We have no modern economic model to map out what will happen to them.

    China is going through a demographic collapse worse than what you see in Europe or Japan. Only they aren’t rich to compensate add in the fact that they decided to antagonize their largest trading partners in the West causing the decoupling we are now seeing.

    The loss of their labor means the West has to reshore or find alternative low wage markets for production and expend a lot of capital to build out the plant in those markets to do so.

    Add on top geopolitical instability of the Ukraine and you have a recipe for slower tech growth.

  • Guys, I'm actually getting nostalgic over the messy-but-still-kinda-fun 2010s. Everything was just so much more exciting back then, and if it was absolute garbage, it was still fun to make fun of it (cough cough 2013 Mac Pro, garbage quite literally).

    Yeah, it was no "sunshine and lollipops" timeline, but still, over the literal boring hell of the 2020s, it was LEAGUES better.

134 comments