Invest into stuff that people will need regardless of the bubble popping like medicine, food, internet access, energy, ... . Stay away from luxury/travel stuff.
Also, during a crash there is the so called "flight for quality" where people cash out from risky assets and invest in stable ones that can weather the storm. So, try to invest in assets that are A or above (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_Global_Ratings). The chart is for countries, but analysts grade companies as well in case you want to stay away from treasuries/national bonds.
Also diversify geographically. US will likely take the biggest hit if the bubble pops, so perhaps European markets that lagged behind in adopting the technology are safer (IMHO).
Personally, I am preparing by moving money from growth items to stable ones a bit at the time. To diversify even further I am using ETFs that, in addition to what mentioned above
1) pay dividends (whether these distributed or reinvested doesn't really matter)
2) are denominated in or hedged in safer currencies (CHF especially, but also Euro)
You definitely get smaller returns, but the name of the game is to maintain what you have, not to make heaps of money.
Finally, I am not a financial advisor, so do your own valuations/risk assessment analysis.
I would argue that parts of the economy should (hopefully) remain healthy. I mean, AI bubble or not, people need medicine, food, internet access, energy, ... . Invest in that.
Also (not a financial advisor), when a crash occur there is a so called "flight for quality" where people move money they made by cashing out the assets to stable (A+ assets). So look for companies that have solid financials and can weather the storm.
Finally, diversify not only on the industry, but also geographically. EU, Swiss, Asian. I personally stay a bit away from emerging markets stuff as I don't have enough knowledge to make informed decisions (I don't even consider Emerging Market ETFs which should be run by SMEs).
You really said 12 USD/KWh? Time to put solar panels/batteries over there. Even if you resell to the grid at 1/10th of that you recoup the investment in O(months) and not O(years)
Yeah, it's a bit of a convoluted system. They'll take your peak day during a period, and charge you 12/kwh for your usage during the peak period of the day.
So you can easily add 1-200 dollars to your bill for one day of higher usage.
Similar to my thoughts. If we are still scrambling to find stuff the average Joe finds useful, the 100s of Billions poured into this gold rush are wasted (IMHO).
Nadella's vibe lately (here and in his 2025 retrospective) seems to be "AI can be amazing and transformative and life-changing, and it's up to end users to figure out how to make that happen and they're not doing it and it's not our fault."
It's not even a solution in search of a problem, it's a tool in search of a reason to use it as a solution to a problem on such a scale that it justifies the billions of dollars of money we've poured into it while driving up the cost of fresh water, electricity, RAM, storage, data centre space, and so on.
This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.
The web was an academic project funded by modest research grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and electricity AI requires. The output of that research emphasized open source and decentralized implementation, which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are predicated on vendor lock-in.
Consumer adoption also happened organically over time, catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly contributed to filling landfills with their free trial disks).
Well, LLM is mainly aiming to
“Improve” what we can already do. It’s not really opening up new use cases the way the personal computer, the smart phone, or the Internet did.
Ideally, zillions of consumers have been languishing for years and when the time is right they're all collectively chomping at the bit when a new highly-affordable technology comes along that they just can't get enough of.
Dude, I'm getting a shovel factory for practically nothing. I'm easily realizing 5x value on that investment.
I'd say for an estate that I am the executor of, it probably saved me $50k in legal fees and other expenses because it helped me analyze a novel problem and organize it ask the right questions of counsel.
Another scenario i had to deal with i needed a mobile app to do something very specific for a few weeks. I specced out a very narrowly useful iphone application, built it out on the train from DC to NYC, and had it working to my satisfaction the next day. Is it production code ready for primetime? Absolutely not. But I got capability to do what I needed super quickly that my skill level is no longer up to the task to accomplish!
IMO, these things let you make power tools, but your ability to get value is capped by your ability to ask the right questions. In the enterprise, they are going to kill lots of stupid legacy software that doesn't add alot of value, but adds alot of cost.
I'd wonder how much that scales up though for the benefit of the companies that are each investing hundreds of billions and hope to see a net return. How many developers like you (presumably less of you seeing as each is more productive) or enterprises you work for paying fees (along with slimming down legacy costs paid to someone) does it take to get up in the 12 digit range?
No idea, and not my problem. I’m surprised I’ve been downvoted so much in these comments. I’m not saying OpenAI et al is a good company or good financial scenario, or good investment.
The technology is amazingly powerful. Full stop.
The constraint that drives cost is technical — semiconductor prices. Semiconductors are manufactured commodities over time, those costs will drop over time. The Sun workstation I bought for $40k in 1999 would get smoked by a raspberry pi for $40.
Even if everyone put their pencils down and stopped working on this stuff, you’d get a lot of value from the open source(-ish) models available today.
Worst case scenario, LLMs are like Excel. Little computer programs will be available to anyone to do what they need done. Excel alone changed the world in many ways.
Nah, I'll move much of it locally when it becomes cost justified to do so.
I doubt that the exponential cost explosion day is coming. When the bubble pops, the bankruptcies of many of the players will push the costs down. US policy has provided a powerful incentive for Chinese players to do what Google has done and have a lower cost delivery model anyway.
The cost iceberg with this stuff isn’t electricity, it’s the capital.
Other than Google and Facebook, the big hype players can’t produce the growth required to support the valuations. That’s why the OpenAI people started fishing for .gov backstops.
The play is get the government to pay and switch out whatever Nvidia stuff they have now with something more efficient in a few years.
My take is that if we are still scrambling to find something objectively useful (as recognized by the median person) then we really are in AI bubble territory.
When non techie friends/family bring up AI there are two major topics: 1) the amount of slop is off the charts and 2) said slop is getting harder to recognize which is scary. Sometimes they mention a bit of help in daily tasks at work, but nothing major.
My non tech friends/family use AI to ask for silly stuff (they could google it), or just to ask silly questions and see how they react. We have a relative not that famous but maybe known in a niche and they spent like a whole weekendd sending screenshots of GPT, where they asked if this person was known, who was this person, etc.
They don't find AI useful, just a toy. Is their fault? Maybe.
> They don't find AI useful, just a toy. Is their fault? Maybe.
idk i'm a software dev, and to be honest, when outside of work this is also what i use chatgpt for, its really funny to see its reactions to various prompts
It is the second substantial sell from EU. Additionally, those things gain momentum fast since the later you sell the less money you make from the bonds you are selling.
So everyone doesn't want to be last and the sell-off takes off fast and violently, forcing unmanageable interest rates.
+1 for Interactive Brokers. You can migrate super easy by having them filing a full ATAC. I came from Charles Schwab, which I have to keep because my employer sends GSUs to either Schwab or Morgan Stanley.
Additionally, the UX is much better (IMHO) than Schwab, both on mobile and desktop.
That is fair. Sorry, colored by the fact that I actually live in Switzerland and so investing them in Swiss treasuries is like keeping the cash for me.
That's an easy mistake to make. When you're looking internationally you always have to take the rates into account. For you it doesn't matter, but a lot of parties are investing in Swiss treasuries exactly because it is like keeping CHF. which tends to do well relative to their own. The long term USD vs CHF rate works out strongly in favor of holding CHF.
Also, during a crash there is the so called "flight for quality" where people cash out from risky assets and invest in stable ones that can weather the storm. So, try to invest in assets that are A or above (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_Global_Ratings). The chart is for countries, but analysts grade companies as well in case you want to stay away from treasuries/national bonds.
Also diversify geographically. US will likely take the biggest hit if the bubble pops, so perhaps European markets that lagged behind in adopting the technology are safer (IMHO).
Personally, I am preparing by moving money from growth items to stable ones a bit at the time. To diversify even further I am using ETFs that, in addition to what mentioned above
1) pay dividends (whether these distributed or reinvested doesn't really matter) 2) are denominated in or hedged in safer currencies (CHF especially, but also Euro)
You definitely get smaller returns, but the name of the game is to maintain what you have, not to make heaps of money.
Finally, I am not a financial advisor, so do your own valuations/risk assessment analysis.
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