There’s been a lot of bounces where the US stock market “lost” trillions then came back to its original point and more, see the election and March of 2025 and 2026
Could mean something could mean nothing, only time will really tell
A lot of people in the comments conflating “AI bubble burst” with “AI has disappeared completely”, and saying it’s not happening because AI still exists there.
When the dot com bust happened, the internet didn’t just disappear overnight, it just shrunk into something more reasonable. I feel like this is the same.
I mean, this isn’t true from my perspective. All the Chinese LLM labs are still developing full steam ahead. Model/architectures are getting updated so quickly it’s a meme amongst inference framework devs, because they can’t even support one model before the next one is already out.
…They’ve always been thrifty, though. The difference is they don’t need a trillion dollar bubble to fund their modest, more sustainable dev/inference costs.
No new news. Deepseek is still raising billions in funding rounds.
/doubt
China has been taking steps to keep it’s AI industry in check. They’ll be fine. Their bubble pop is essentially a market adjustment. We all just get bent out of shape because of how big these numbers have gotten over the last few decades. The important thing is that the Chinese government took steps to protect it’s other sectors which is why we likely saw their bubble pop before ours.
It’s less that they protect companies, and more that they don’t care when they end.
That protects the industry.
Compared to America where specific companies lobby to limit competition, and end up just charging more for shitty products.
It’s pretty much why we keep losing.
Because if the big companies never end, they buy up everyone else. Too big to fail means it’s too big to even exist.
What? Their real estate is popping too. Could you be more specific as to what “steps to protect its other sectors” means?
I can’t.
I believe what I said, but I’m not following the Chinese market in any serious way. One of my comment edits was to disclose that but I choose the more basic statement. I’m fully willing to be wrong when presented with data. I felt that removing my own hedge allowed comments like yours to more directly challenge the statement.
I’m in the middle of studying for a mid term. I don’t want to use the energy to dig into it. I got my stance mostly from articles I’ve read in passing on how they have regulated their AI market to protect workers and manage circular investing. It could easily have been propaganda.
Refreshingly honest social media comment!
Good luck on your mid term. no /s
They don’t have a handful of companies financing each other in a giant game of venture-capital-human centipede that will topple the entire market when it goes belly up.
That’s not what steps they’ve taken. I’d like to know what they’ve done.
This is an odd distinction to draw. What do you mean by done in this case?
The CPC much more closely controls their internal markets so the fact that companies are not doing the whole “circular investment” game is a direct result of policy decisions made by the CPC rather than companies in China just sort of “deciding” not to hop on the band wagon.
The CPC didn’t send a task force to fight the money demons but they did implement policy that led to this state of affairs, which is what they’re supposed to do.
So you think china is going to be fine or have a minor hiccup? What about when the us bubble pops?
Centralized management of your economy allows you to respond to, and plan for, situations like this better than a pure market can.
I think the CPC will end up in a better international position because the US did not more responsibly deploy this technology.
Honest to god, the entire first world might feel the shockwave of the AI bubble bursting. This is not only being shoved everywhere, international commerce runs on the petrodollar and, with the American continent being the biggest importer of Chinese goods, it’s hard to see that not affecting China as well.
Also, there’s a war happening on Iran, so… You will definitively feel if it all happens all at once, with the fuel crisis too I mean.
Their real estate has been popping for the last decade.
their real estates have been “popping” for several years now. i still remember finance bros making videos titled “is china going to collapse in 30 days??!?!!?” a couple of years ago.
in reality it’s just the government managing risk and taper speculation in the real estate market.
It looks like every news article about China’s real estate says their prices are lowering continuously. That means in America that their loans would be under water. Honest question, isn’t that the case for China too?
And the honest answer is: it’s complicated.
First thing, property prices going down is not necessarily a bad thing, but people don’t usually see it that way.
Simple truth: if you own a house, you would want house prices to go up, forever. This is true anywhere on Earth, and it’s true in China too. But as a society, you can’t allow house prices to go up forever. Because that means getting onto the housing ladder becomes harder and harder, young people would have to rent forever. Their income thus funneled into the property owning class, inequality goes up, stability goes down, and so on. Everyone can see the problem, but not all governments can do something about it. This is where China, an oppressive authoritarian government, has its advantage. They doesn’t have to worry about if the voters are going to elect them again. So they are afford to make some people unhappy.
But it’s not that simple actually, lowering property prices is almost uniquely bad for China. Because property is universally seen as the vehicle to preserve wealth in China. In fact a majority of China’s household wealth is stored in the property market [1]. Another compounding factor: China has a large pre-sale housing system. In other words, people are borrowing money to buy houses that aren’t even built yet, and that accounts for 90% (!!) of house sales [2]. I’m sure you can imagine, when property prices go down in this kind of system, people are gonna get really really mad. In fact people got so mad they got onto the street! If you know anything about China, you know how big of a deal this is. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in China. Last time this happened, people died and that particular event even became a freaking internet meme.
And all that plus the fact property developers in China are often choose to take a lot of risk and are highly leveraged 3. This is almost reminiscent of the subprime mortgage crisis, yet a catastrophe similar to the 2008 crash hasn’t hit. Why? Because China’s government has a much stronger hold of the economy, and they are much more willing to intervene than any western capitalist country. Being authoritarian also helps. They have a lot more policy lever they can pull, so they can allow the property prices to gradually fall, without taking the entire economy with it. Which is kind of unimaginable in the US.
This is not to say their system is perfect - and that’s without talking about their horrible human rights records. Their policy makers are human too, and make mistake. Their stock market will rise and fall, the point is you shouldn’t try to fit what happens in China into the typical western economy boom-and-bust narrative. That’s not how it works in China.
[1]: The portfolio of the average household in China is more highly concentrated in real estate than elsewhere. For instance, 62 percent of its assets are in real estate, compared with 38 percent in Japan and 28 percent in the United States. (2020) Source
[2]: Developers have responded to restrictions on accessing other sources of funds by increasing their use of presale funding (Graph 5). While presales have long accounted for the bulk of new residential property sales in China, their share has increased from around 80 per cent to almost 90 per cent since 2016. (2020) Source
thank you for the detailed comment!
you can’t allow house prices to go up forever. Because that means getting onto the housing ladder becomes harder and harder, young people would have to rent forever. Their income thus funneled into the property owning class, inequality goes up, stability goes down, and so on. Everyone can see the problem, but not all governments can do something about it.
Here in hyper-capitalist dystopia, our property owning class is placing their bets on being able to deter that ‘stability goes down’ part with all-pervasive surveillance and authoritarianism.
The important thing is that the Chinese government took steps to protect it’s other sectors
But At What Cost?!
Also, so much of this seems to undersell the global common denominator: skyrocketing energy prices.
China is getting hit earlier because they’ve relied so heavily on the Persian Gulf and Russia to date. By contrast, the US - a major energy exporter - can remain insulated (and even reap a fat dividend) as their energy export values balloon.
AI is voracious for energy, so Chinese data centers got hit faster and harder than their American peers. I would not assume this rebounds the same way in the States, because the US is willing to subsidize AI development AND fossil fuel consumption in a way China is not.
I think this is just blatantly wrong. China has vastly more energy capacity that the US and, 3-4x what the USA has. China has the entire USAs energy capacity purely as renewables. The entire time, the competition around energy has been a moot point for China. They don’t need more efficient or powerful chips because they had the energy spare to just use more. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made a good statement on this point. The reason for this, whatever it is, could be entirely unrelated to energy.
China has vastly more energy capacity that the US and, 3-4x what the USA has.
Okay, now look at per capita energy.
the competition around energy has been a moot point for China
That is extremely inaccurate
I think it’s partially innacurate to compare per capita energy consumption for the two nations.
The average American lives a vastly different lifestyle to someone in china, consider that per capita consumption of China is now higher than that of the EU. It’s not the whole picture. An average American uses almost four times as much energy as a Chinese or European person at home.
If you’re talking about standard of living, sure, per capita makes sense. There’s no argument that for the majority of people in the US their standard of living is probably objectively higher.
However, China’s industrial electricity usage per capita has overtaken that of the US long ago.
The average American lives a vastly different lifestyle to someone in china
That hasn’t been true in decades.
for the majority of people in the US their standard of living is probably objectively higher
What are you using to calculate standard of living?
Certainly not life expectancy, education, housing, or cost of living.
can you clarify what energy the US is exporting?
The US is the largest exporter of Natural Gas on earth. and Top 3 for oil, like other Lemmings mentioned.
despair
The US frequently exports light crude oil at a premium while purchasing heavy crude for less. The refineries in the US are largely set up for heavy crude, so it works out and nets a high profit for oil companies.
Colonialism and hate.
Not sure about the person you responded to’s specific context but the US sells energy on energy markets. Primarily to neighbors.
Source, currently interviewing for a major ISO and have had to learn this shit
Debt
We’re damn good at it too.
Millionaires trade it like baseball cards.
China built a lot of solar and wind projects, so they’ve been divesting from oil and gas, so a crash lets them stockpile oil for other purposes.
This is how they win: everyone’s gonna pop, but their iron fist over the banks will prevent an absolute bust.
We haven’t learned from fanny-mae and we’re gonna get soundly fucked.
We learned, we put mechanisms in place. We got people in power that actually wants this to happen so they steal even more wealth from us.
I think there should be no bailouts.
Ohh they know whats coming, they just don’t care because they are in the big boy club, and we aren’t. It’ll be another firesale where private equity thats in the know will pick up devalued assets on the cheap
Who is this “we” you are lumping us all into?
And now everything will go back to normal and people in China will stop using AI.
Right?
Boy, it seem’s China’s beating the USA at all aspects of AI.
/rimshot
You joke, but there’s a few communities on Lemmy that REALLY love China.
I’m aware. Given the current state of the USA, I understand the willingness to overlook China’s imperfections.
At a certain point, the old tribalistic feuding needs to give way to responsible globalized stewardship of the planets finite resources. To be civilized it’s to be scientific; to be scientific requires accepting certain realities about our world.
a few?!
I was looking for the cynical joke in there. Thanks for beating me to it!
China doesn’t have the chips to keep it accelerating.
AI isn’t a bubble. It’s here to stay. Get used to it.
The dot com bubble didn’t mean the world wide web wasn’t here to stay. There is an AI bubble.
You must admit, a lot of people think the bubble bursting will be the end of the technology. I see that sentiment a lot on here.
It will be an end to trying to force chatbots to do literally everything. It will not be an end to the chatbots.
You aren’t wrong. That sentiment is everywhere in the comments below, and highly voted.
Depending on when the bubble bursts, It would effectively be. AI needs this continuous terminal upwards velocity of investment with no profit to show for it in order to keep improving despite the diminishing returns we’ve been seeing. It’s viability as a long term technology is uniquely dependent on it reaching a state of efficiency or otherwise capability that doesn’t yet exist.
I really wonder why it is that the pro-ai fanatics are so sure it will stick around just as it is today without anyway to actually pay for it.
You’re confusing AI with OpenAI.
They, anthropic, others, are constantly pushing and over-extending, but theyve already long since by passed models that are useful for various tasks. Certainly not everything, but if the big players died tomorrow you could run a local model on a gaming GPU that would still do decent amounts of work if you were the kind of person who had a use for it.
Not everyone is, and thats ok.
I find chatgpt very useful for work, but id be cool with them failing and having to downgrade. Models already did what I needed well enough a year ago, maybe a bit more.
The companies operating frontier models and AI as a viable technology on the scale it exists today are inseparable. If the big players died tomorrow you’d still have that vastly inferior local model that would be good enough for light work for awhile, but without all the eye-popping amounts of money to continue training and scraping data on unprecedented scale, its usefulness would fade over time. Most companies today would not feasibly be able to host and train their own models to be used in the ways they use frontier models today.
LLMs would still exist as a niche solution for some things but what AI fundamentally is, and how it could be used would be entirely different in very short order.
Websites aren’t also incredibly resource heavy money holes with no proven path to viable profitability.
They were back then. Only the ones that got so big they could negotiate their bandwidth costs or even buy out ISPs made it out alive. Everyone else was sunk by the exponential bandwidth costs.
It was expensive, sure. But not entirely nonviable across the board like we see today with AI. It’s not even close.
Those “Big companies that could afford to negotiate Bandwidth prices” don’t even exist in the AI context of today. They’re still speculative. If the bubble pops before that speculative future comes to fruition, the development of the technology towards that end stops.
My message is aimed at the anti AI crowd. Yes, there is a bit of a bubble right now, but AI progress will continue and it will become part of our daily lives just like the internet transformed how we live.
“Bubble” refers specifically to overvalued assets.
Lol
No shit it’s here to stay. How it’s executed is straight fucking trash and fucking our planet worse than it already is! With all the renewables like wind, solar, hydro, and add nuclear, we could be independent of oil and gas and then build out AI more when it’s matured and more efficient.
Or it might be more apt to say that it shriveled like a rapidly deflating balloon: over the past four months
Not as catching as “bubble burst”. LLMs have proven their use. It’s here to stay. There’s a lot of superfluous stuff, but people are coping if they think the bubble is going to burst and their jobs will all go back to how the were.
LLMs have proven their use.
No they have largely not except in niche applications and they have proven relentlessly they cannot be trusted with anything important.
My trades friends don’t use AI, one of them doesn’t even know the names of any of the models.
My wife first heard about LLMs this year. She’s never used one, she’s never seen anyone use one, she doesn’t know anyone who has used one. She’s an engineer.
Lemmy leans way too heavily towards tech workers. There is a whole world of people that have literally nothing to do with our field and the trends inside it. They know nothing about it, they’ve no interest in engaging with it, it’s completely useless to them.
My wife’s company recently adopted using Active Directory for managing users.
EDIT: To take it a step further, I work adjacent to OEM manufacturers for industrial control systems. Half of our customers are running windows 98.
The handiman who works for my family quite often is not super technical. He was troubleshooting a mini split for me and I walked out to see him vocally chatting with chat gpt going through error codes, handless.
He found a use, and you’d be wrong to assume “trades” are safe from the chatbot. That doesn’t mean his job is going away, but maybe he can do more solo jobs and doesn’t need a helper all the time. Or maybe he does his jobs faster. Who knows!
People don’t need to know model names to find a use.
One in eight people globally use an AI app, not just something that happens to include an ai feature like Google search, on a regular basis.
There are definitely still going to be pockets totally not touching it, and that will probably continue for a long time, but its very much soaking into global society.
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-global-overview-report
None of that means you should be using it, just pointing out that your immediate social group may not be an accurate reflection of reality.
Like as a counter anecdote - my gran has used it - and i feel like when old people get to a tech its approaching ubiquity, Facebook being the primary example I have in mind.
Probably, which is depressing.
I’m told it’s useful for things that aren’t searching for things on the internet or performing groundbreaking theoretical mathematics research. I’m starting to think my interests are too boring for it to really touch anything other than coding, which as I’ve said elsewhere I have ceded and am now exiting the field I am in.
Its no different from any other tool really, you don’t pick it up and immediately master it, you learn what it is and isn’t good at and ideas come over time as you go about your life and you wonder if problems that might previously not have been worth even trying to solve could be worth throwing at this new tool.
I used it to get a overview of the most popular tracks in a specific genre in a specific city 20 years ago by pulling set list data from various places on the internet the other day. Incredible results.
Trivial but very useful to me, as someone who spends a lot of time looking for new music.
I would love it if the UX was just a bit better. I don’t like that the primary interaction is natural language personally. It would be cool if LLM interaction was through a DSL like a LISP. Would make the experience somewhat more appealing and, in my case at least, a bit more user friendly
To take it a step further, I work adjacent to OEM manufacturers for industrial control systems. Half of our customers are running windows 98.
Hah! I’d actually consider industrial automation to be one of the more-likely applications for LLMs. Not necessarily LLMs driving the system, but outputting software to drive PLCs and similar. My understanding from past reading is that industrial automation is one of the principal things that China is interested in using LLMs for.
searches
https://faxiangongchang.com/en/reports/china-industrial-ai-agent-2026
What AI Agents in Factories Are Actually Doing
Down on the shop floor, industrial AI agents are currently running most solidly in four types of scenarios.
Quality inspection. Vision large models are replacing traditional rule-based machine vision. Among the 12 lighthouse factories newly added by the World Economic Forum in September 2025, AI and generative AI use cases account for up to 50%, with demonstration factories reporting results including a 41% reduction in product defect rates.
Process parameter optimization. In the Baosteel hot-rolling line case disclosed by Huawei Cloud, the Huawei Pangu large model improved finishing-mill width-spread prediction accuracy by more than 5% and raised yield by 0.5%, which by its own account translates into more than 90 million yuan in additional annual revenue. It should be noted that such figures are all vendor-disclosed and still lack independent third-party verification, but directionally they are consistent with public data from lighthouse factories.
Engineering and maintenance assistance. Siemens Industrial Copilot improves the efficiency of generating programmable logic controller code by roughly 60%, and pilots of its maintenance edition show an average 25% saving in reactive maintenance time; the product won the Hermes Award at Hannover Messe 2025. The factory operations agent Microsoft launched at Hannover Messe 2025 lets employees ask in natural language, “Why did Line 3 stop yesterday?”
Scheduling and order management. This is the entry point closest to AI agents for small and mid-sized factories. An AI tool aimed at small and mid-sized factories has disclosed a set of figures: after adopting AI scheduling and order tracking, factories’ average order delay rate fell from 25% to within 5%; one factory in Dongguan cut its order-splitting preparation time by 60%; and an annual fee of about 10,000 yuan corresponded to a return of roughly 1:12. These are again vendor figures, but they touch on an important fact—the value of AI agents for small and mid-sized factories lies first not in sophisticated process optimization, but in freeing up the labor tied down by high-frequency, tedious work such as order tracking and scheduling.
They mention PLC code generation, but I guess some other areas too.
It’s not that you can’t use LLM’s in the industrial space. It’s that there’s not much, in my experience, demand to do so.
I have worked with a food packaging plant (one of those Window’s 98 places). They are still using RSLinx from like, decades ago. Why would they change it? The PLC code does not need to be updated except under specific circumstances (which is why we use ladder logic in the first place).
New stuff may use it, but a company creating a new industrial product doesn’t really translate into that product being purchased.
This is something I think software people tend to struggle with. In “traditional” engineering you can’t just deploy something to prod. Projects take years for approval, years of testing, years to go through the political process, years to build. The things you see getting built today were being designed 10 years ago using technology from 40 years ago.
Design is normally the first thing to happen before the rest of the above does and its the fastest part of the process already. Because of this big projects are allergic as fuck to new technology. I have watched proposals for a more advanced high-pressure CO2 turbine system get knocked down purely because “it’s not what we’re used to.” That “new fangled design” was roughly 30 years old at that point. Nuclear plant’s just started implementing general purpose microprocessors.
I really believe a lot of Lemmy would benefit from spending a turn working on, like, nuclear commissioning or substation work. Software tends to compress peoples idea of a what a reasonable timeline for going from idea -> proposal -> design -> implementation is.
I’m not saying that eventually AI won’t be used but we have a understand that most of the time the customers have no interest in adding anything.
My wife first heard about LLMs this year
She’s an engineer
What
she doesn’t know anyone who has used one
How would she know if she’s only just found out herself?
These things are heavily used in engineering
In addition, the tradesmen who have done work on our place lately have all been using AI. One took photos during quotation and used AI to show what it’ll look like when they are done. One used it for invoicing. One used it to find the right parts. I’d argue your bubble in the world is an exception rather than the rule
She’s an engineer
What
An actual engineer, not a software engineer.
Yeah, all my buddies use AI heavily on the job. You can very quickly create draft plans and models. I just looked through the schematics for a wind farm, all the underground work that’s needed, foundations, etc. All generated with AI
Damn… I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a giant wind turbine on a stormy day if the engineers had vibe-planned the foundations…
One used it for invoicing.
AHAHAHAHAHA
Why is that funny? It did a great job. A big problem in the industry is tradesmen forget to invoice for jobs, and when they do invoice their invoices are not well itemised and the works are not well described. After all, they are tradies not accountants.
All the pieces of work had great descriptions of the work performed, it was well itemised and was provided same-day - not weeks later
What
Sorry brother-man. Her field doesn’t touch them.
One took photos during quotation and used AI to show what it’ll look like when they are done
… Why? How would an LLM “show you what it will look like?”
Are they using the LLM as a basis for what they’re going to do? Why would they do that?
You upload a photo to the agent of your choice, e.g. openai, grok, Gemini
It modifies the image according to your instructions. E.g. “show this wall patched, with a black tile splashback using red grout, and the rest of the wall painted a glossy maroon”
The tradesmen and the customer can agree on what the work is supposed to be before it’s done, preventing misunderstandings.
But like… Why? I’ve had work done on homes before and did not request a image… What is the purpose of the image? Do the tradesmen use the image to perform their work? If so why not model it in CAD? If not, why use it at all?
The tradesmen say, “is this what you want” and you say “yep”. Everyone is on the same page
Takes about thirty seconds
Why model in CAD? Who is paying for that? Are your carpenters and plasterers able to make anything in CAD? Such an effort could blow the cost of the job out 10x
If you wanted it modelled in CAD, you’d do the initial pass and most of the work with AI too
So the image is not used. It’s done for fun? I suppose that’s fine if they’re just showing it to you for vibes but I don’t see how that would be different from me asking a tiler to do my shower tile-work, telling them what I would like, and them showing me a meme on reddit. Cool I guess? Please return to the tiling task?
Honestly I would prefer they just send over a sample. Why get a pretend image of what it will look like when I could just see a tile for free?
And why would I use AI for the CAD work? I know how to use CAD. I suppose if I was in a situation where someone had a gun to my head and said that I had to render a sink fixture in under 45 seconds I might be motivated to speed up that process but I can’t think of a time in my life where I faced bodily harm if I did not complete a creative task quickly.
EDIT: Nevermind, I can think of a few times I have faced bodily harm based on the speed I could complete arbitrary creative tasks.
What use AI has doesn’t matter if it’s untenable to continue to operate long term. Whether or not AI is here to stay is entirely reliant on its ability to turn a profit.
Loads of jobs wont change in the way people have been told they will.
I feel like people who confuse LLM technology with LLM business are getting increasingly rare.
