I want the AI bubble to pop, but as time goes on, I increasingly believe it will not. At least not without being tied to another major collapse.

Can someone who works for a large software development company confirm ?

I work for a large software development company that initially was very hesitant about AI anything, but has since gone whole hog because everyone else is doing it. To run our stack locally and debug interactions between services requires a machine that costs about 50% more than it did a year or two ago and they are not in stock at the moment. Storage and memory costs are insane. We are partially offloading the development stack to the cloud now, so expect to pay more for the server you rent as you compete with us for resources.

In the hands of a competent developer, anthropic's models for instance, are pretty good in my experience. In the hands of an incompetent developer, they are a nightmare. Tuning base prompts has helped us stem the flow of garbage from weaker colleagues to a manageable level, and continuing that work seems to be improving things incrementally. I can foresee having a library of prompts for the whole organisation for each common thing we want to do. I expect that model owners will inevitably steal those prompts since they are in the position to observe them, and they'll use them to improve models to where they better intuit what you are asking for and use better patterns by default. I also expect tooling to change to assist models, probably to the point that they will be AI first.

But it's clear to me that everything is changing for better or worse, regardless of what anyone thinks of it. As for what corporate thinks, it remains to be seen if competence is valued, or if "close enough is good enough", will suffice.

I don't expect anthropic or anyone else in the AI space to stop iterating on models of any kind. I do expect anthropic's (and others in the space) goal to be to get the models to a point where not using them will be a net disadvantage when trying to compete in the software development space. Then they will up the price, and use fiddling to keep the price just below where it makes sense to hire another developer, in order to suppress those wages.

Moving on from there, I expect them and others in the AI space to be training models for all kinds of things, which will end up suppressing wages in other industries. Whether that is even possible remains to be seen, obviously, but it won't stop them from trying. Success (if any), or even the perception of it, in the software development space will spurn others to try the same thing but somewhere else.

Bubbles don’t HAVE to burst anymore

You haven't really offered much to support this assertion.

They are right, bubbles do not have to burst anymore. The housing bubble is one example. The stock market basically only going up is subject to the same forces. Economist Gary Stevenson explains. TL;DW, once rich people reach a certain wealth threshold, they have nowhere to put profits except to reinvest, which begets more profits, and so on, until they outcompete you for those assets. Once they buy up as much as is available for one asset class, they move to another. This is why housing and the stock market keep going up and up. They will even invent new asset markets to pull more money from people: see what's happening to veterinarians for instance.

I can assure you that any bubble will burst if there's an interruption in shareholder sentiment.

Who are shareholders? I've heard that 80% of the stock market is owned by the 1%. And 90% of the stock market is owned by the top 10%. Even if none of that is true, what is close to the truth? 50-60%? That's still too much, and how long would it take them to reach those higher numbers anyway? Besides, if the majority shareholders already have more money than they could ever spend, why do they even need to change their sentiment?

It's interesting that their CEO is sinking many millions into conservative political campaigns.

To preserve the status quo, preventing anything that stops his gravy train. The same train that is causing all of this.

Right now, everyone's pension fund has invested in the "magnificent 7" because frankly, no one can afford not to.

Absolutely. Everyone's pension has been swept along into this system, and held for ransom and to beat us with at the same time.

The bubble is being maintained by not taxing those who have more money they can ever spend. They reinvest it. The profits they end up with don't come from nowhere, that money has to come from somewhere, and there's only so much money in the system. If you follow that path, you come to know how the monetary system works, and why we inevitably have to print money to keep the system going (it's a function of the system). Printing money causes inflation. The money funding this whole situation is essentially coming from all of us, stolen fractionally by inflation. The bubble won't stop until people have nothing left and/or are no longer able to function (societal collapse), or we tax billionaires and begin to fix things. We have a hard road ahead either way. Good thing it's so necessary to create Bigfoot blog videos, we couldn't live without them.