this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
38 points (95.2% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
7650 readers
222 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Depends on what bursts the bubble. If it's the users realizing it isn't actually useful, and demand plummets, those datacenters will be a fire sale from companies collapsing, but operating the sites may not be anywhere near profitable anymore.
Every one of these companies knows that LLMs aren't actually capable of what they're marketing and are hoping they can keep riding the edge until they either can do what they claim, or they can abandon ship. They're banking on company executives being idiots and prioritizing the possible cost savings of firing staff (a very safe bet) and end users not realizing the grift because of a lack of accurate info (also a pretty safe bet nowadays).
i spose. as a data engineer of sorts, the llm use im exposed to is not going to be disrupted by some bubble. its providing real world efficiencies shifting cost centers from messy human salaries to 24/7 b2b services. whole call centers automated. analytical departments literally decimated. human beings are the costliest part of any business, and thats why so much effort is being put to replaces those human resources.
my success every year is based on how many positions i eliminated implementing automation processes.
for every obvious use of an llm, there are a hundred back-end, non-customer facing services being implemented. this is where people are actually currently losing their jobs, and those jobs arent coming back.
its hard to envision any bubble that is going to stop that apart from the american civil war 2.0.... and even then, id be skeptical.
seems to me like the impossibility of corporativism is breaching at it's seams and "AI" is a patching
from what you're writing
all i can see are human processes being replaced by more reliable automated ones, and the compute required or provided for those isnt going to just disappear because some us-euro-centric valuation bubble.
its a service domain available on every continent and its being successfully and financially beneficially implemented in thousands of ways most people just dont understand.
there is money being made, but the false valuation is masking the reality.
is it over valued in most sectors? fuck yeah. is use of llms/ai or the building of data centers around the globe going to stop anytime in the next few decades? fuck no.
so will there be a financial bubble burst where lots of ai players lose out big time? maybe. will that affect the use of ai/llms in absolutely any capacity? fuck no. it would keep chuggin along with new owners.
The prices will eventually get jacked up once the market penetration is judged sufficient. Likely they'll charge as much money as they can, so it'll end up being just a hair under what a human would cost, maybe more of the switching cost is high.
I smell a trap.
This is the intention. David Rosenthal recently wrote a blog piece about it. It goes quite deep into the economics but this is what I understand from the piece:
Good piece.