Never buy derivatives as a non institutional investor.

#2: What I've done so far: Haven't bought stock in a year. Have moderate short positions on Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla. Have big short positions in the most popular Quantum computing companies. (Scams IMO). I have sold most of my positions ("profit taking"?) in stocks which have gone up a lot in the past year. (Nvidia, Broadcom etc), and am no longer using margin; about 1/3 of my brokerage value is now "cash", generating ~3% interest.

There are almost surely severe bumps ahead for the AI space and that will likely spill over into the broader market. But unless you’re retiring in the next few years don’t worry about it. You can’t time the ups and downs and the only proven strategy is to just keep investing in a broad indexed portfolio and just ride out. You’ll take a short term hit but also end up buying on the dip because you don’t stop investing.

I dunno.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

You think the hedge funds selling SPY options don't have this priced in already? Of course, you can still make money on this bet, just like you can win money at a roulette table, but unless you think have some special insight that hedge/quant funds don't have, buying options should be negative EV.

It doesn't matter to investors if OpenAI or Anthropic can build AGI if a year later 10 competitors have similar models and eat into the revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic needs years, if not decades, of significant market dominance, post-enshitification, to justify their investment spend.

> Everyone in the tech and media world is dead set on this being a bubble.

is completely orthogonal to this:

> Yet, even now, Fable is able to do the work of 4-5 engineers when used by a single senior engineer.

The industry being in a bubble or not is irrelevant to the tech being good or bad. The dot-com bubble popped (and was a bubble) even while the tech was fit for purpose.

If that's true or not, it's a bit irrelevant. Maybe teams won't shrink because of Jevon's paradox, or maybe tech debt will catch up.

But it doesn't matter because the people calling this a bubble mostly believe that the companies burning money cannot have the return on investment needed. This can be for a variety of reasons, but my favourite one is just that open source AI models are good enough, cost a fraction of what the frontier ones do (with predictable costs), can be fine tuned, and can be relied upon (no orange tweet banning your acces to the model you've been using). So for me OpenAI and Anthropic will really struggle to merit their valuations.

And then companies like Oracle are just a dumpster on fire. GPU hosting is a commodity business; expensive one, for sure, but there's no way in hell they'll make actual returns on the money burned with zero moat. And things are even worse when you consider the political involvement of the CEO and his nepo baby, which can easily burn good will.

If you're selling deterministic output, just use traditional code. If you product is inference, it has to be the best inference. This becomes more apparent when you bounce between powerful models and smaller cheaper ones, the cheaper ones _feel_ worse to use.

Is Meta even in this race anymore?

If Oracle is highly leveraged or betting the farm on AI, then their credit worthiness goes down.

Alternatively, if money floating around to make loans is drying up, companies have to offer better terms to attract the dwindling supply

I keep seeing these unsubstantiated claims. They’re out to get us and just pump and dump on public markets!

Yet, before they IPO they have to go around and do what? Who sets the IPO price? Who buys the shares? If the shares tank, the valuation of the company goes down and locked up shares lose value. It’s not really in anyone’s interest for IPOs or investments to fail and while pump-and-dump schemes certainly exist they are not the norm. The conspiracy theory level of distrust and cynicism is not healthy and makes one a very poor investor.

If individual investors are buying shares and getting blown up, that’s their problem. Invest and due your own research. Broad market funds exist and have so for decades. Most financial advisors even will put you in to those funds and corporate 401k plans while increasingly allowing for more investment flexibility (freedom is good) default and educate employees by default on target date funds and index funds. There is a wealth of information out there.

Any hosted service can be bent into the shape of a cloud. Large parts of Oracle Cloud balance sheet is probably just hosted PeopleSoft and similar.

They have this in common with IBM which, at least on paper, have a large cloud business.

CrowdStrike and Uber

> Hetzner

I don't know of any upper market EMEA customers on Hetzner. I've met Scaleway, OVHCloud, and even STACKIT users but never Hetzner.

I'm guessing they don't care if actual business gets caught up in that because from their POV actual business comes from an account manager, and self-serve is just them cargo culting AWS/GCP

There are competing definitions of what intelligence even is, and the one that I find most striking is from Francois Chollet which is that intelligence can be boiled down to skill acquisition efficiency. This type of definition makes intelligence more akin to polishing a ball than growing a watermelon.

The superintelligence doomers warn that the watermelon is going to start growing exponentially and crush everyone. But what might actually be happening is that we are not growing a watermelon but rather polishing the ball until its really smooth and shiny. There's a point where you can get it to micron levels of polish but for most tasks (white collar text domains tasks), it's smooth enough! You will be able to go to the ball store and buy a low cost made in china ball for most tasks.

The real challenge is actually branching out domains and modalities to tackle things like blue collar labor. Over time, white collar work automatable or able to be made hyperefficient by LLMs will see LLM commoditization.

It’s not much of a moat, but it’s more than a lot of orgs have.

The specialized models for targeted verticals being discussed may well not be sold by tokens, but instead be behind the scenes powering dedicated packaged solutions where the customers don't have raw access to the model. Token providers still won’t have a moat, but AI isn't just selling tokens.

No value judgement. I think this is a fantastic strategy.

Unlike AMD, Google can actually ship software. AMD has never shipped good software other than drivers (maybe) in the entire history of the company, including both ATi's history and true AMD. They have always relied on Intel to provide the software.

They're the only player in the Identity-Document-Email-VM-Storage space that's even remotely unified.

A little bit dangerous for a US administration (any US administration) to do a bailout of unloved companies just before a midterm.

Not that Trump won't do it, just saying that he'll think twice about it if he wants to hold on to the power that the American people have given him. It's one thing to boast that he can shoot someone in the street and the public won't care, quite another to tell the masses that he's funding their upcoming unemployment using their tax money :-)

I can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcasm or not :-/

Aren't all the token providers right now over-provisioned? They aren't trying to use up all their capacity, they're selling it to one another.

it only "works" if the government actively does everything in its power to support the boom. No restrictions on new power sources, on pylons and transformers, on new factories to make power sources and compute, on data centres.

This was never going to be the world we live in.

Still surprised by the admin actively punishing politically incorrect power supplies (renewables) and then starting a stupid war with Iran, but even without that nonsense, we were never going to see the US do a command economy pivot, and even if we had something would've broken like it usually does with noobs (and even most politicians are noobs) trying a command economy pivot.

That site is too funny :-)

> [mid-2026] But China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models.

> Reliable Agent copies thinking at 13x human speed

Still waiting for a reliable agent to think at any speed.