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Posted by saigrandhi 12/10/2025

Is it a bubble?(www.oaktreecapital.com)
336 points | 569 commentspage 5
josefritzishere 12/10/2025|
This is one of the few times I think Betteridge's law is wrong.
MarkusQ 12/10/2025|
Yep. But be careful, somebody doesn't like when you say that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46136301

laacz 12/19/2025||
An economist friend recently said. If it bursts, it's definitely a bubble. If it does not burst, then it's not a bubble.
threethirtytwo 12/10/2025||
Ai is currently a bubble. But that is just a short term phenomenon. Ultimately what AI currently is and what the trend-line indicates what AI will become will change the economy in ways that will dwarf the current bubble.

But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely possibility given the last couple of years.

I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and therefore AI is completely bullshit. Remember: The internet was a bubble. It ended up changing world.

jbstack 12/10/2025||
Yes, a bubble just means that it's over-valued and that at some point there will be a significant correction in stock values. It doesn't mean that the thing is inherently worthless.
sosborn 12/10/2025||
A great example is the DotCom bubble. Wiped out a lot of capital but it really did transform the world.
jonwinstanley 12/10/2025|||
But also, a lot of the dot com companies that people invested in in 1999 went bust, meaning those specific investments went to zero even if the web as a whole was a huge success financially.
RyanOD 12/10/2025||
Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio.

Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.

lizknope 12/10/2025|||
I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to under $20.

Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell, but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They had tax bills of over $1 million but even if they sold it all they couldn't pay the bill. This dragged on for years.

Esophagus4 12/11/2025||
I heard of stories like that!

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50476...

That lesson is part of why I dump my company's shares the first chance I get.

lizknope 12/11/2025||
The person in the story is literally the person at Cisco I was talking about. I worked on 2 projects with him. Great engineer.
nelgaard 12/11/2025|||
But you would not have had Google in you portfolio.

The bubble burst in 2000-2001, Google IPO was in 2004.

The S&P500 also did not do very well at the time.

That is the problem with bubbles.

bigstrat2003 12/11/2025|||
Yeah, but unlike LLMs the Internet was an actual useful technology.
MangoCoffee 12/10/2025||
Google said the dotcom bubble is roughly from 1995 to 2001. That's about 6 years. ChatGPT was released in 2022. Claude AI was released in 2023. DeepSeek was released in 2023.

Let's just say the AI bubble started in 2023. We still have about 3 years, more or less, until the AI bubble pops.

I do believe we are in the build out phase of the AI bubble, much like the dotcom bubble, where Cisco routers, Sun Microsystems servers... etc. sold like hotcakes to build up the foundation of the dotcom bubble

rvz 12/10/2025||
> Let's just say the AI bubble started in 2023. We still have about 3 years, more or less, until the AI bubble pops.

Minimum 3 years and at a hard maximum of 6 years from now.

We'll see lots of so called AI companies fold and there will be a select few winners that stay on.

So I'd give my crash timelines at around 2029 to 2031 for a significant correction turned crash.

bn-l 12/11/2025||
Author states that he’s neither an investor or a techie. Why is this on the front page?
cal_dent 12/11/2025|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Marks_(investor)
sshadmand 12/11/2025||
What you make of this memo really depends on who you are and how you're positioned. The dot-com era was absolutely a bubble. Tons of companies died, but the internet itself didn't go away, and the people who backed the right companies did extremely well. The 2007 housing bubble, on the other hand, was a totally different kind of event: broad, systemic, long lasting, and painful for almost everyone.

AI looks a lot more like the former. Some companies will fail, valuations will swing, but the underlying technology isn't going anywhere. In fact, many of the AI firms that will end up mattering are probably still undervalued because we're early in what will likely be another decade long technology expansion.

If you're managing a portfolio that needs quick returns and can't tolerate a correction, then sure, it probably feels like a bubble, because at some point people will take profits and the market will reset.

But if you're an entrepreneur or a long-term builder, that framing is almost irrelevant. This is where the next wave of value gets created. It's never smooth and it's never easy, but the long-term opportunity is enormous.

cmiles8 12/11/2025||
There’s not much serious debate on IF there’s a bubble. There is and it’s a big one.

The debate is more on what happens from here and how does that bubble deflate. Gradually and controlled where weaker companies shut down and the strong thrive, or a massive implosion that wipes most everyone in the sector out in a hard reset.

cal_dent 12/10/2025||
I think this gives an excellent framework for how to think of this. Is it a bubble? Who knows is a perfectly valid answer.

I do think there’s something quite ironic that one of the frequent criticisms of LLMs are that they can’t really say “I don’t know”. Yet if someone says that they get criticised. No surprises that our tools are the same.

jesuslop 12/10/2025|
[flagged]
MeteorMarc 12/10/2025||
Look for the quote "coding is at a world class level"...
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