

Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- The link is brokenby febed
- Speaking of AI stock, what has happened to NOK?by ww520
- Everything has been running on borrowed money since the 17th century.by jojobas
- > Grey Swans: risks that were in the data but overlooked or dismissed because few had synthesized the signals into a coherent picture.
Directly conflicts with
> Alert and Critical signals represent readings that have historically been associated with meaningful financial stress.
These are all pretty standard things to track and are regularly (and publicly!)
Not saying we’re not in a bubble or near/far from it popping, but these metrics aren’t going to precisely tell you _when_, which is pretty much the only thing that matters.
by tyre - Make the most of your heavily subsidised $20 / $200 subscriptions while the credit spreads allow it.by carlsborg
- I’m not sure that’s quite the right framing. If Anthropic goes bust, Fable persists as an asset that can be run by someone who didn’t have to pay to develop it, probably profitably, and probably in a way that gets cheaper over time. The debt pony show is paying for the next model.by petesergeant
- Am I too dumb to read or this thread is heavily botted? Why most top comments are unrelated to the linked site (which is pretty obscured already)?by raincole
- As a side note. All money is borrowed. That's how money gets created! Short explainer video by the great late David Graeberby mempko
- First, and obviously, the article is talking about capital when they say 'money'. Not all capital is borrowed.
Second, not all money is created via borrowing (but the vast majority is!)
And the YouTube video you linked to is very confused even about the money that is created via borrowing.
Government debt is not required to create money. The Bank of Japan bought stock ETFs to get 'freshly printed' money into circulation. ('Freshly printed' in scare quotes, because these days it's just entries in a database.) Another example: Singapore's central bank (MAS) does not use Singapore government debt to create Singapore dollars; I'm not even quite sure they would even be allowed to.
You can say that money itself is a debt of the central bank; and that's sort-of true, but it's not what David Graeber talks about.
A bit of a pedantic last point: silver coins or bitcoin also require no borrowing to create. Silver coins have been used as money, bitcoin could conceivably be used as money. (There are other problems with these options, but that's besides the narrow point.)
by eru - Totally depends on what you define money as.
If "money" is the some function of all outstanding credit, then yes, it is created (mostly) by bank lending
If you define money as a web of trust then it is mostly created by those that create the rules. The state
by worik - The headline and the link have nothing to do with each other.by blitzar
- Key reports to understand the root problem (no ROI):
- Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/top-of-mind/gen-ai-too... (Goldman Sachs)
- AI’s $600 Billion Question: https://sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/ (Sequoia Capital)
- The Simple Macroeconomics of AI: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32487/w324... (MIT / Daron Acemoglu)
by okzgn - How can people in Hacker News still doubt AI's benefit when they are seeing in front of their eyes every technical profession getting disrupted to oblivion in the last year. Just ask basically any software engineer how much their profession has changed over the last 12 months
Obviously there is risk, but can't we really extrapolate the AI gains forward and just see how big it's ahead to become?
by gpt5 - Warren Buffet way
Revolutionary technology + massive adoption ≠ good investment
Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit, attracted by the growth and glamour of the industry. The airline industry since its birth has had a collective net loss, in aggregate, despite moving hundreds of millions of people.
Commodity Product, no switching costs. Infinite competition
by defactor - It isn't a commodity product in my opinion. Far from it. I think it will ultimately be a monopoly or duopoly for SOTA. The mid to low end is commodity, yes. But SOTA models are not commodities.
The number of competitors for SOTA drops by a few every year. The winners make more money, get more revenue, buy more compute, train better model with compute, buy best talent, and the cycle goes.
I think it's easier to fall behind and never catch back up than people think. One disastrous training run can leave a lab months to a year behind. For example, Meta's disastrous LLAMA 4 models. Meta is lucky to have their ads business as a funding source. However, Anthropic's revenue is growing so fast, that ability to use ads as a funding source to stay in the race may not last much longer for Meta.
To me, SOTA LLM training is very much like new chip fab nodes. One disastrous node can put you behind for many years or forever. The cost to build the next chip node doubles every every 4 years (Rock's law). The cost to train the next SOTA model likely has some similar power law which means over time, it's too costly for losers to keep up. The only reason TSMC isn't a defacto monopoly for advanced chip nodes is strictly due to geopolitics.
by aurareturn - The airline industry since its birth has had a collective net loss, in aggregate, despite moving hundreds of millions of people.
The industrialisation essentially socializes the cost across a lot more people though, so even though it doesn't make a profit it does mean people can have air travel without it costing millions per flight for the few people who can afford it. Essentially the economies of scale from having lots of flights isn't enough to make it profitable but they are enough to make it affordable.
There's no spare money to extract from the airline industry but it's still very useful. The same could be true for AI in the long term.
Sometimes the goal of an industry is to exist rather than to make a profit, because the benefit to society is more important than profit. People don't like that though so they do a bit of creative accounting or head-in-the-sand denial around it.
by onion2k - > The airline industry since its birth has had a collective net loss
True. But it has added enormous benefits to many other parts of the economy.
Airlines do not capture that value.
That is where the AI companies are. Adding value they cannot capture
by worik - A while ago I was thinking, “Gee, AI is so complicated, how can I keep up with the landscape?”
After reading these articles go by so often, it feels like what I actually can’t keep up with is the bond market. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in the bond market, but the bond market is interested in you. I want to be able to read the signals at the bottom of this article, and divine some kind of prediction that can guide me… I don’t know, to choose whether I should buy a house or change the investment strategy in my retirement fund or something. But I’m just seeing all these signals go by, waiting for the story to be written, which only happens when the dust settles.
I guess I’ll go back to not understanding AI, instead of not understanding the bond market.
by klodolph - As a retail investor, you should buy an index fund and then forget about it.
By the time you have read this article, the professionals and their computers will have digested that material a thousand times over and have priced it in.
To be more precise: buy the lowest cost most diversified index fund you can buy and then hold it. If you want to spend some smarts to get a better return: look at how to minimise taxes and fees.
by eru - I was able to create a custom index based on the top 500 that I stripped the big AI stocks from (shovels too). Then I added decent chunks of international, small cap, and treasury ETFs to it.
I have no illusions that I can time a bubble, but I'm hopeful I'm at least partially shielded, and most importantly I feel better about ignoring wall street again.
by rapind - Don’t forget there is a constant pressure for everyone to have an opinion on how this is going to end while hoping it ends tomorrow so they can be vindicated. The dotcom bust took a decade to grow and collapse. I think it is too early to make predictions with AI. I mean the sentiment here is either it will dry up the world and kill us all or transcend humanity, there’s no gray area. I don’t want to fall into the emotional sieve that seems to drive everything.by mrloopex
- > Gee, AI is so complicated, how can I keep up with the landscape?
The interesting thing is: you do not need to keep up. It’s actually way easier and cheaper to wait a bit for the chaos to stabilize, then learn to use the tools. You don’t need to have been someone who experienced the whole evolution, non stop at the edge. It’s ok to let the enthusiasts discover how things work and eventually learn from them. Just like any other technology. The whole „you will be left behind“ is nonsense. If AI is the future, then it will here to stay and you can let others map the domain first
by dgellow