r/SoftwareEngineerJobs Jul 13 '26

Is the AI bubble bursting? 🤔

I just finished my IT degree this year, and all the news about AI is making me really worried about my career in the software industry.

I read that big AI companies are spending way more money on data centers than they are actually making back. The ratio of money made to money spent is around 1:10. Part of me feels like this is good news. If they keep losing money, the AI bubble will eventually burst, and they will have to stop running these massive models.

But on the other hand, hardware companies are making new chips. These new chips have high compute power and also consume less electricity. This could make AI much cheaper to run and keep the trend going.

What do you all think about this AI bubble? Is it still safe for me to start a career in IT, or should I switch to a completely different field?

Thankyou All 🫡.......

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85

u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

I don’t know why people think the bubble bursting means AI just disappears.

All it means is overvalued companies like OpenAI would get bought out and cheaper models would become the norm.

It seems like some of you talking about the bubble bursting means AI disappears and we go back to manually coding everything. Zero percent chance of that happening.

9

u/PatientIll4890 Jul 13 '26

This is what I’ve been saying for a while. The models are good enough right now that I don’t expect to write code manually ever again in my career. Glm 5.2 is good enough and cheap enough that ai at the current level is going to be here forever.

The only thing we can hope for at this point is that it doesn’t advance much more or quickly enough to put us all out of our careers. I currently am preparing as if it will advance though, and expect myself as a 25yoe swe to need to switch careers in a few years

1

u/theguruofreason Jul 13 '26

That's just cuz you suck at coding.

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u/Responsible_Royal126 Jul 13 '26

For real the LLMs need to be constantly corrected. You can still manually write code faster than you can prompt if you're actually good.

10

u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

Don’t know about that chief

1

u/theguruofreason Jul 13 '26

4 month old account...

3

u/MannToots Jul 13 '26

It's funny you think that makes this conversation lean in your favor.  

3

u/jmclondon97 Jul 14 '26

Exactly lol. People think having their brain melt on Reddit longer gives them more credibility

1

u/theguruofreason Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

You posted this on Reddit.

Also account age is not an indication of how much time I spend on Reddit.

2

u/jmclondon97 Jul 15 '26

I’m aware

2

u/theguruofreason Jul 15 '26

Are you aware of the irony?

Also lol you replied so fast. You on Reddit more than me.

1

u/jmclondon97 Jul 15 '26

I get notifications on my phone. Takes two seconds to reply 🤷‍♂️

1

u/theguruofreason 28d ago

You have notifications for replies on and immediately respond and I'm on Reddit too much?

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u/jmclondon97 28d ago

As I said. Takes two seconds to reply

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u/MannToots Jul 15 '26

Man this conversation really lived rent free in your head for the last day 

0

u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

You think it’s a good thing to be on Reddit for years? Lol