Comment by feearent

>>> As one final note, I don't think the rhetoric about the AI bubble is really about finances. Conversation about the AI bubble is too widespread for it to be a contrarian position, and too gleeful to be driven by investors' fear. More than anything, I think the supposed AI bubble has become such a large talking point because it represents the hope that things can go back to how they used to be. People are afraid of what's going to happen with AI, and rightfully so. Beyond fear for the future, AI in the present has become uncomfortably common, with AI slop everywhere online and increasingly even IRL. This has all happened so fast, it's easy to forget that ChatGPT came out a little less than 4 years ago. Our world has changed in such a scary and odd way, and while I have a pretty optimistic view of AI overall, I get why people would want it all to go away. So, people wishcast. They tell themselves that this is all a giant bubble, and one day soon, everything will crash down and immediately go back to how it used to be.

And on a personal note, this probably goes against all economic theory, but I think the larger the scale gets of money, the less "real" it becomes. The US national debt is $40.5 trillion. I personally don't think a fraction of that will ever really be paid. There are rich and poor, but once you become rich, that added richness is essentially useless, and the debt we see is a mixture of money missing from the poor person's wallet, or the money missing from a billionaire's portfolio. One of these is more sensually palpable than the other.

If your product is good enough, shows potential, and has meaning, it will get funding. I have never done a startup or gotten venture capital so it's pretentious for me to say, but I think the money just comes, through effort (and I think 100's of pitches for the new startup), and we can't always know from where. It's just there. My brain is too small to consider where that money comes from. We're not valuing money at a certain point, but just sheer utility, and so investors will be there to back you up. In decades-long terms, sometimes centuries-long.

The debt will keep building up, but so will be our infrastructural changes. Early adoptees will get rich to degrees, and investors who held a conservative view on major progress like AI (will still be rich but) will be slightly less rich. Maybe there will be unpaid debt, like the 500 billion incurring a $400 billion loss during the dot-com crash. But the technology will continue growing.

After all, money doesn't mean anything anyway (in the theoretical sense). It buys us soup, clothes, and a place to pay rent to, but it is just an agreement. And with the changes in the world economy that some of us are expecting to see after the AI revolution grows even more, I really don't know what the meaning of money will become.