Lol well, wonder where he gets his information. Seems sus. I am familiar with who he is. Just curious what piece of information was the “tipping” point. People don’t put money down like that unless they have insider knowledge, IMO.
The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
Submitted 3 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/big-short-michael-burry-1-billion-ai-bubble
Comments
Helix8o8@lemy.lol 3 days ago
justsomeguy@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah they do though. His bet before the 2008 crash was similar. It’s where the market is pointing. Publicly available data suggests there’s a big ass bubble. The timing is essentially a bet. Last time it almost wiped him out because he was a bit early. We’ll see how it goes this time.
wewbull@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Well he found out about the sub-prime mortgage fiasco by looking at the public filings that nobody bothers reading. All of the companies involved are public companies that have to file accounts. He’ll be tracing what’s going on and painting himself a picture.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 3 days ago
I think it’s a bubble but I’m also suspicious we’re near peak investment and think it could sustain for a while yet. I wonder what sort of range he’s projecting for the peak and timeframe
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I don’t like or trust the stock market and all of the back door manipulations that can, and have, been done, but this guy is not wrong.
supamanc@lemmy.world 3 days ago
This is a long term investment, predicting that the bubble will burst _at some point _. It doesn’t signify that he believes the collapse to be imminent. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent!
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Now if it never pops at least it’s funny that he lost a bunch of money
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Which would explain why the Fed is dumping trillions of dollars into banks right now.
PlanterTree@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Predicting the random market movements is … almost impossible, even for this “big short guy” imho.
Pulsar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I have been trying to make sense of all AI Capex announcements for a while and I don’t get it. So please help me out if you know the answer.
US Investment in 2024 ~$400b, 2025 ~$500b, 2026 ~600. Global investment 2026 1.5~$2.2t. Let’s say $2t US Investment by end of 2026. Investment will continue into the future but let’s assume that is not the case. Also that GPU will be obsolete in 5y. So, they have 60m to recoup $2t +ROI ~10%. So about $40b a month, US has a labor force of 170m. Thus, AI industry needs the equivalent of ~$240 per month per each employee person. I don’t see myself or my employer paying this for AI any time soon.
unit327@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
They don’t care about making profit by selling a product or a service, it’s all a speculative bet. They think if they “simply” make AGI they will win all the economy forever.
1984@lemmy.today 2 days ago
I dont think the bubble will pop but I also dont think there will ever be agi from this.
This is primitive tech and cant do agi. We would need something completely different than language models.
iii@mander.xyz 2 days ago
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Although I do think that there’s a big AI bubble, the reality is that Pandora’s box has already been opened, and it’s not closing back up. The technology is here to stay and it will continue to be integrated into everyday life bubble or no bubble.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I don’t see a future with big AI modrls like Meta AI, chatGPT, or Copilot going away those and others like them are used by people. But things like Meta’s new all AI app or things of that nature as well as the tens of thousands of the empty startup AI companies are what’s going to disappear. They’re products that nobody wants or uses, and they’re only there to inflate stock valuations. That’s where the bubble lies. The tech is here to stay, but only in cases where it’s actually used.
AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
It was so over hyped from the beginning though. The broligarchs insisted as long as we fed it all of our data, and threw unlimited money at it, there was no way it wouldn’t be a success. That’s literally all America has been doing for nearly a year. They’ve forced it into every government department possible, even places where it clearly didn’t belong. They’ve thrown billions at it, they allowed fucking 19 year old DOGE fuckwads to access hoards of sensitive data on every U.S. citizen, and watched as they stole every cent they could get their hands on. After all of that, how much has AI in the U.S. actually improved since January 19th, 2025?
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the technology itself. It really is exciting stuff that has a lot of useful applications. The issue has always been that the growth and development is driven by greed rather than realizing potential. With no government accountability or regulation and with the populace ignorant and apathetic, a bubble was bound to be the outcome
wowwoweowza@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Can’t wait.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Seems like more of a bet specifically on Palantir, unless there are a bunch of other smaller bets they didn’t bother to mention.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 days ago
of all the AI, thiel kept palintir, and his other LOTR-themed Ai companies very secretive. since mossad/IDF, and ukraine uses it, i bet it gives faulty/false positive targeting?
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
But as you said those are all secretive contracts. How would anyone know that kind of thing to bet against without some insider info?
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
It is a gamble for sure against innovation and a blind one too. I say this as it is clear right now that scaling up LLMs while very effective at substantially improving many AI metrics, it really did not have much impact on logic. I have been calling this the Cognitive Gap and it is really holding back AI.
Clearly the big LLM companies do not have a solution to this gap despite efforts like the reasoning models and that likely means we need an entirely different tech to front end LLMs or replace them.
This begs the question…who has a line of sight on how to scale up logic and the answer as near as I can tell is no one right now. Maybe there is something in a lab somewhere, or even with just a small team or individual, but it is not presently visible. It could come out any day now and make all those Data Center investments worthwhile or may take years before we see the Cognitive Gap close which will really make those same Data Centers completely out of alignment with the value they bring.
Shorting the AI industry is a roll of the dice, but less so than the blind investments still happening in Data Centres despite no clear path to improve logic and close the Cognitive Gap. In fact shorting seems like the safer bet.
Going to be interesting as if the Cognative Gap is not closed for years to come, those Data Center investments are never going to pay off as the value will just not be there. The entire USA economy is tied to AI it seems right now so the roll of the dice is perhaps the biggest risk / reward in history.
unit327@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
And even if they solve some problems with AI and make them smarter, they still have to solve the “actually making a profit” problem to justify these share prices. LLMs already have some use at their current level, but certainly not for the price they’d need to charge to break even, let alone actually making a profit. If they double the smarts but double the training and/or inference cost, they’ll still end up in the same place.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I read a stat that if the true costs of AI was past onto users it would 42 times more expensive or something along those lines. Who know the right number, but it is obviously out of alignment with the value AI is able to bring today. Imagine instead of $20 / month it was $840 / month to just break even.