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submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Sulvor@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

I think we're about to get a crash in 5 hours folks

The companies known as the Magnificent Seven make up over 20% of the global stock market. And a lot of this is based on their perceived advantage when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).

The big US tech firms hold all the aces when it comes to cash and computing power. But DeepSeek – a Chinese AI lab – seems to be showing this isn’t the advantage investors once thought it was.

DeepSeek doesn’t have access to the most advanced chips from Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). Despite this, it has built a reasoning model that is outperforming its US counterparts – at a fraction of the cost.

Investors might be wondering about how seriously to take this. But Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella is treating DeepSeek as the real deal at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

“It’s super impressive how effectively they’ve built a compute-efficient, open-source model. Developments like DeepSeek’s should be taken very seriously.”

Whatever happens with share prices, I think investors should take one thing away from the emergence of DeepSeek. When it comes to AI, competitive advantages just aren’t as robust as they might initially look.

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[-] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 65 points 4 days ago

The entire AI sector has been exposed for the naked emperor it is and the fall of this massively bloated and oversized investment may lead us into yet another AI winter.

Having said that, I remember relishing at the last Bitcoin crash, thinking that this completely useless token can only go into the negatives (when you adjust for the massive energy cost it takes to mine crypto, their value is less than worthless).

Guess what, bitcoin has only gone up since and it is now being backed by the US federal government. Imagine that. All the crypto idiots somehow got it right for the wrong reasons.

The market is not rational. At this point playing the market is as good as gambling unless your net worth is over a billion (Michael Hudson said this) and have access to insider information.

[-] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 74 points 4 days ago

I hope nvidia craters so I can finally upgrade my graphics card

[-] nasezero@hexbear.net 57 points 4 days ago

Even if it doesn't, I'm sure it won't be long until China overtakes the West in manufacturing the best GPUs and at a much cheaper cost, too.

[-] machiabelly@hexbear.net 51 points 4 days ago

I hope that it happens, but here in the states it won't make a difference. Even if they're better products, they'll be tariffed into oblivion. It'll be just like in the EV market.

[-] nasezero@hexbear.net 29 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

True, but at least tariffs (probably) won't be able to prevent Nvidia from crashing at that point. Who really knows, though, all this is shit is built upon multiple layers of irrationality, anyways.

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[-] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 37 points 4 days ago

Won't help if they just manufacture GPUs predominately for the Chinese AI companies. Need the AI bubble to actually burst already so that GPUs actually make it to the consumer market again.

This AI shit right after two major crypto bubbles has kept prices outrageously high for far too long. My graphics card is 10 years old, I'm dying over here.

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[-] Wertheimer@hexbear.net 52 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

NYT:

Stock markets fell sharply on Monday, dragged down by fears that advances in artificial intelligence by Chinese upstarts could threaten the moneymaking power of American technology giants.

OUR start-ups

THEIR upstarts

This is what caused the war between Freedonia and Sylvania!

[-] Yeller_king@reddthat.com 42 points 4 days ago

Seems more likely we'll just ban Chinese AI services like we've done with their cars.

I know you can just download their model, but most people won't do that.

[-] Simmy@lemmygrad.ml 42 points 4 days ago

You can't just ban OpenSource. Anyone company/person can just copy the code and use it. Profitable A. I in the U.S is finished. All it took is 6 million to train and a Chinese tech wizard.

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[-] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 30 points 4 days ago

Even if Chinese models were banned, and Chinese cloud services for running models remotely were banned, the episode shows that the vast VC money spent on AI firms was wasteful. Since most AI firms are dependent on investment to cover overhead, a threat to those VC cashflows would prove ill to the companies' stock prices regardless of access/pratical impact of Deepseek R1.

[-] gwysibo@hexbear.net 23 points 4 days ago

IDK how you would even 'ban' DeepSeek V3 anyway, shit is open-source including all weights and training data

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[-] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 43 points 4 days ago

Hope it crashes the housing market too.

Nice economy you have when nothing can be built because land is too valuable for its own good.

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 38 points 4 days ago

Lol I would love an intl housing crash right now. Houses where I'm looking are on the market for 200k which were bought for 100k in 2015 🫠 Landlords are even placing offers on places without even viewing them

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 37 points 4 days ago

Bought a house a few years ago and landlords were putting in offers of 10 or 20k over asking, so houses were getting snapped up before we could even view them. The only reason we got the house we did is because the owner was specifically refusing to sell to landlords.

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[-] StillNoLeftLeft@hexbear.net 42 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Could this be considered a living example of a production difference between a system focused on profit and a system focused on use value?

I know China is participating in profit making, but the cost difference here is so gigantic that one would think this makes people see the forest from the trees so to speak.

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[-] peppersky@hexbear.net 30 points 3 days ago

The bubble won't burst from this (someone else making a cheaper AI product does nothing to the idea that AI itself is a useful product and profitable investment), it's only once people realize that AI isn't profitable in the slightest that the bubble will burst.

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[-] Sulvor@hexbear.net 48 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Put this in the news mega, but seeing as that will probably close soon I'll add it here too:

Nvidia down ~8% in after hours trading, I'm thinking the bubble is finally about to burst in the morning, or at least the beginning of the burst

I've seen at least a few articles giving credit to DeepSeek

DeepSeek Shakes Up Stocks as Traders Fear for US Tech Leadership

Dow Jones Futures Fall As DeepSeek Threatens Nvidia; Meta, Tesla, Microsoft Earnings Due

Is DeepSeek about to cause a stock market crash?

Nvidia shares drop as investors assess implications of DeepSeek launch

Edit: Down 10% now, an hour later

How low can ya go

Can ya go down low

All the way to the floor

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 25 points 4 days ago

I'd still be a little apprehensive. it'll take more than an AI sputnik moment to topple the US stock market in the short term.

That being said, I'm just glad the savings I do have in investments are explicitly divested from the US tech bubble.

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[-] peppersky@hexbear.net 43 points 4 days ago
[-] Sulvor@hexbear.net 42 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)
[-] doingthestuff@lemy.lol 32 points 4 days ago

This post is 5 hours old. How are we doing?

[-] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 33 points 4 days ago

Nvidia's down 11% premarket stonks-up

[-] doingthestuff@lemy.lol 25 points 4 days ago

Good thing my only investment in Nvidia is personally owning a handful of their GPUs.

[-] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 24 points 4 days ago

If you bought in last year you'd still have double your money so even this drop may only amount to a haircut.

[-] doingthestuff@lemy.lol 35 points 4 days ago

Ah, but I also have no investments. Just trying to feed my kids and keep my cars running so I can afford to get to work and feed my kids and keep my cars running.

[-] Awoo@hexbear.net 31 points 3 days ago

Just trying to feed my kids and keep my cars running so I can afford to get to work and feed my kids and keep my cars running.

Mood

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[-] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 26 points 4 days ago

Stock markets haven't all opened yet. NASDAQ futures down 3.5%, S&P futures down 2%, NVIDIA down 12% in pre-market. A lot of other microchip/AI companies are also down in the 7-10% range.

We'll have to see what happens to the market once it opens, so checking back in 4-5 hours or so might give a better picture.

[-] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 20 points 4 days ago

Market open in 7mins (NYSE)

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[-] Tabitha@hexbear.net 25 points 3 days ago

When it comes to AI, competitive advantages just aren’t as robust as they might initially look.

well yeah, ChatGPT became public on November 30, 2022 and in the 2 years since the UI alone received so few updates it was like they only had a part time intern working on it.

[-] JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net 29 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

A big indicator of market volatility/panic, the VIX index, is up 40%.

Right now, it's around 21. For comparison, it peaked at 70 during the '08 crash, and 53 in '20 covid crash, so there might be a ways to go for this movement to translate into a generalized stock market crash.

[-] CleverOleg@hexbear.net 25 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I haven’t followed developments in AI all that closely. In a very general sense, it seems to me that the potential benefits of AI (or high-powered automation) are limitless. I think it’s hard to fully comprehend all the practical uses it will have and how it could transform the economy.

HOWEVER, currently the only applications I seem to see are: 1.) ChatGPT-like applications, i.e. ask a question and get a response that at best, writes up some text it would have taken you much longer to write or get a maybe right maybe wrong answer, or 2.) shitty art that can’t even make hands right; and even if it did, it’s just images. Not exactly economically impactful like the spinning jenny.

So… is what I said above really just how AI is being used in the US, and is that the reason for the huge bubble in asset values of companies like Nvidia and Microsoft?

[-] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 22 points 3 days ago

my analysis is roughly the same as yours. I also think 80% of the buzz around AI is just that... every US tech company has been rebranding existing services as somehow incorporating "AI". I don't watch a ton of commercials, but when I do see them, tech firms seem to all be investor-oriented hype messaging about how IBM or Apple or Dell Systems or whoever are using "AI" to do/make computer better-good for happy human.

everyone is just saying "AI" about everything.

to me, the market wealth associated is a speculative bubble around a term that has become meaningless.

of course an open source project from China is blowing proprietary performance benchmarking out of the water. the proprietary black box is always smoke and mirrors to attract capital to the secret, inscrutable sauce that is really just watered down ketchup and mayo.

[-] piggy@hexbear.net 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

So LLM's the "AI" that everyone is typically talking about are really good at one statistical thing:

"CLASSIFYING"

What is "CLASSIFYING" you ask? Well it's basically attempting to take a data and put it into specific boxes. If you want to classify all the dogs you could classify them based on breed for example. LLMs are really good at classifying better than anything we've ever made and they adapt very well to new scenarios and create emergent classifications of data fed to them.

However they are not good at basically anything else. The "generation" that these LLMs do is based on the classifier and the model, which basically generates responses based on statistically what the next word is. So for example it's entirely possible that if you fed an LLM the entirety of Shakespeare and only Shakespeare and you gave it "Two households both alike" as a prompt, it practically may spit out the rest or Romeo and Juliet.

However this means AI's are not good at the following:

  • discerning truth from fiction
  • following technical processes (like counting r's in strawberry)
  • having "human like" understandings of the connections between concepts (think of the "is soup a salad" type memes)

So… is what I said above really just how AI is being used in the US, and is that the reason for the huge bubble in asset values of companies like Nvidia and Microsoft.

Don't get me wrong, yes this is a solution in search of problem. But the real reason that there is a bubble in the US for these things is because companies are making that bubble on purpose. The reason isn't even rooted in any economic reality. The reason is rooted in protectionism. If it takes a small lake of water and 10 data centers to run ChatGPT, that means it's unlikely you will lose a competitive edge because you are misleading your competition. If every year you need more and more compute to run the models it concentrates who can run them and who ultimately has control of them. This is what the market has been doing for about 3 years now. This is what DeepSeek has undone.

The similarities to BitCoin and crypto bubbles are very obvious in the sense that the mining network is controlled by whoever has the most compute. Etherium specifically decided to cut out the "middle man" of who owns compute and basically says whoever pays into the network's central bank the most controls the network.

This is what 'tech as assets' means practically. Inflate your asset as much as possible regardless of it's technical usefulness.

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[-] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 31 points 4 days ago

For this post the first thing I noticed was this - What the hell?

Fate played a little joke on me. I have Hexbear set up to show me large images in posts and part of the Hexbear window was hidden.

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[-] coolusername@lemmy.ml 27 points 4 days ago

the latest nvidia chips havent even shipped in volume yet. deepseek was using quite a bit of the earlier ones

[-] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 23 points 4 days ago

Oh no! Will the money be okay?!

[-] blame@hexbear.net 19 points 3 days ago

Seems like it impacted NVIDIA, ASML and MSFT but Google and Meta don't seem impacted.

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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
156 points (99.4% liked)

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