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Ask HN: What happens after the AI bubble bursts?

101008 | 2026-02-16 13:44 UTC | source
38 points | 41 comments | original link
I keep hearing we’re in an AI bubble, but I’m struggling to visualize the day after scenario.

If the bubble pops (meaning these massive compute costs never turn into actual profits and the VC money dries up) what does the tech landscape look like?

A lot of us use Copilot, Claude, or ChatGPT daily for coding and docs. If the subsidized cheap access vanishes because these companies can't eat the losses anymore, do the tools just disappear? Because if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?

I’m especially curious to hear from anyone who lived through 2000 or 2008. Does a postbubble world mean we just abandon the tech entirely or is it a move toward expensive solutions?

Comments

andsoitis | 2026-02-16 13:49 UTC
You can run smaller models locally that are pretty good at code gen.

Give it a try.

To get started: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/12/qwen25-coder/

or https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/llama-33-70b/

d0mine | 2026-02-16 22:02 UTC
`ollama launch opencode --model glm-4.7-flash`

https://ollama.com/library/glm-4.7-flash

theandrewbailey | 2026-02-16 13:54 UTC
When the dot com bubble popped, the internet and websites did not go away. (I'm posting this to a website ending in .com) When the mortgage crisis happened, mortgages certainly didn't go away.

When the AI/LLM bubble pops, LLMs will still exist and be used. They just won't be hyped and pushed everywhere.

NKosmatos | 2026-02-16 14:00 UTC
AI is here to stay but not in the way big corporations dream of it. People will continue using AI but when the AI bubble pops, sooner than later, things will stabilize and adapt to real usage with a different business model.

As you correctly state, the cost of AI as a Service (AIaaS) will increase for end users, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It will allow the "real" users to continue having access to it and sieve out the ones who are just playing around. Prices for RAM, GPUs, SSDs will normalize a lot and more people will move towards local models.

Similarly to what happened with the dot-com bubble (I saw it happening), it doesn't mean that everything will disappear, but that it will change/adapt. All of us AI realists are currently being treated like technophobes when we say things like that ;-)

Eridrus | 2026-02-16 14:37 UTC
Your assumption is wrong.

The LLM companies are profitable on the current gen models. Inference is profitable, rather than subsidized.

They are raising the biggest chunk of capital to buy data center compute that will come online ~2 years from now and be an order of magnitude larger.

The bear case for the labs is that they're Cisco, not Pets.com.

heisgone | 2026-02-16 19:25 UTC
There will be consolidation has few players will have the revenues to justify training their own model. Google has enough cash and revenues to be one of the survivors of this race. Openai and Claude will survive in some form or another, at least as a brand. xAi will burn through SpaceX revenues and capital so it will stay around for a while. China will keep subsidizing models. Meta might keep a subpar model around. It still a race for relevance so not everyone will make the cut.
travisporter | 2026-02-16 20:52 UTC
I can go on Gemini, claude, mistral, (and even chatgpt) for free (even through a VPN), so they are definitely not profitable for me as they are not getting anything from me. are you saying subscriptions are subsidizing me?
willmarch | 2026-02-16 23:17 UTC
They’re getting data from you which is quite valuable.
bdangubic | 2026-02-17 01:26 UTC
you are the product :)
JanSt | 2026-02-17 10:16 UTC
Google search is also free to use
matt_s | 2026-02-16 18:01 UTC
I think even if AI can help developer productivity, there are a lot of other elements to software delivery and speeding up developers isn't necessarily going to speed up overall project delivery. A hard question to answer then is, what is the ROI if an organization is spending $10k/month on AI tools but project deliveries are mostly the same as before?

If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.

Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.

raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-17 02:57 UTC
The ROI is from all of the junior developers you don’t have to hire to do the grunt work.

I work in consulting and I would have had to scope projects with myself as the lead and at least a couple of juniors to do the grunt work while I do some of the work myself and do the tech lead type work. Now I can do it all myself.

Muaz_Ashraf | 2026-02-16 18:16 UTC
They are already increasing the pricing gradually.
bdcravens | 2026-02-16 19:08 UTC
If such a bubble popping means that only coding agents survive and we can get away from talking baby videos, I'm all for it.

> if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?

Probably. If you're not gaining at least $1000 a month in productivity now, then you're doing it wrong. I suspect however they may become an enterprise only offering, with limited availability to "normies"

> I’m especially curious to hear from anyone who lived through 2000 or 2008. Does a postbubble world mean we just abandon the tech entirely or is it a move toward expensive solutions?

In the late 90s you could get 100k a year for being able to spell HTML, and then the bubble pop pushed all the grifters back to whatever they were doing before. Those with real skill stuck around, even though it did suppress salaries for a while.

codegeek | 2026-02-16 19:13 UTC
I am not sure if AI is a complete bubble. To me, it is similar to Amazon, Uber etc in their early days when they were just burning cash but were providing something of great value to consumers. Ultimately, they figured out a way to get cash positive.

I think once the dust settles n next 2-5 years, few clear winners will remain who will figure out a way to become cash positive.

paulcole | 2026-02-16 20:25 UTC
> Because if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?

I wouldn't find it hard to personally justify $200/month or $300/month for the single best LLM tool available to me. Right now I have $100/month spread out over a few different tools and it's a bargain.

karmakaze | 2026-02-16 20:46 UTC
I don't think I'd want to pay that much since my personal use is limited and not serious/important. Employer pays for work usage.

I'm curious why do you keep many subscriptions around? Asking because I do too though don't have a good reason to keep anything other than Anthropic/Claude.

paulcole | 2026-02-16 22:17 UTC
I think right now I have Claude, ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Perplexity. I guess that's not quite $100 now but I used to do Gemini, too.

Personally:

Perplexity has replaced Google searches for me – basically looking things up

ChatGPT/Claude is what I use for generating code (I'm not a programmer but I like scripting tasks at work)

Claude I think is better at writing than ChatGPT

MidJourney is $10 and I like it best for image generation which I do for work and like to keep it around.

blahblahblah23 | 2026-02-16 20:30 UTC
Clearly we all get on the next train, robotics or quantum.