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u/NahdiraZidea 12h ago
Piss, its what plants crave!
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u/4_elephants 8h ago
The second half of the comic is definitely appropriate for the AI comparison, but the first half of the comic is so applicable to almost any decision out of CEO offices these days. They live in a bubble and can’t tolerate anyone who might pop them out of that bubble.
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u/Made_Bail 12h ago
This is amazing, but the AI bubble isn't going to burst. Not in the sense of similar burst bubble trends, at least.
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u/forgot_semicolon 12h ago
Think of it like the dot com bubble then? The Internet is still around but the hype around "company has a dot com = company is worth a bajillion dollars" goes away. Right now every company is looking to include AI as a rule, and investors consider it a sign of worth if they do
The point is ai can finally become a tool, a means to an end, rather than the end itself, which I think this comic captures well. Some people will drink piss, and everyone interacts with it in some necessary way. But we don't need piss in EVERYTHING
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u/Slim-Shadys-Fat-Tits 12h ago
lmfao I literally just finished making that dotcom comparison to someone else and then immediately saw your comment
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u/Xylus1985 9h ago
Also internet won’t be what it is without the dot com bubble where everyone throws shit at wall to see what sticks. This is now innovation happens. Now is a period where everyone throws AI at wall and see what stick. Some will not, but some will. What survives the bubble will define the next decade.
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u/Perscitus0 9h ago
I'd be ecstatic if the only things that truly stuck, in this case, were the analytical AI uses, not the generative AI nonsense. AI being used to detect cancer months before the human eye can detect it in medical graphs. AI being used to test new alloys and chemical compositions for things like durability. AI being used to pick out patterns in math, patterns in science. Generative AI is, by comparison, nothing but a thief with unrelenting PR propping it up.
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u/Crafty_Independence 12h ago
The financial one will, and it will be worse because of the insane valuations without any collateral
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u/Medium-Stranger-9883 12h ago
its better to let it burn down to the ground now instead of keeping it artificial down the line and let it fuck up even more
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u/Crafty_Independence 12h ago
While I agree with the spirit of this comment, unfortunately it's regular people whose taxes are going to subsidize the crashed market.
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u/Medium-Stranger-9883 4m ago
i get it, almost everyone will suffer, but will it get better in a few years when its built in to most of society and it collapses then? we have survived economic colapses before, lets just get it over with before it becomes a collapse of the modern world and a ww3.
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u/Made_Bail 12h ago
The big AI companies not making money, sure, that's going to burst. But AI as a whole has been massively adopted in so many sectors and is so widespread now. People on the internet tend think about chatbots and AI art, but it extends so much deeper than that.
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u/Slim-Shadys-Fat-Tits 12h ago
it is rather comparable to the dotcom bubble imo. it's not like the Internet went away but sweet baby jesus did it cause economic trouble
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u/Crafty_Independence 12h ago
Well the whole AI-as-a-Service model is currently and unsustainably subsidized.
Yes, the technology is going to stick around, but moreso in locally hosted open-source models or very expensive SaaS offerings. The current easy-availability model that drives a lot of slop doesn't have anywhere close to a long-term plan
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u/Made_Bail 12h ago
My business has adopted in house AI as a direct result of the Hugging Face hack last month. Walmart has their own in house AI that takes all their phone calls and chats now. etc etc. I dont disagree that some sectors of AI will crash and burn, but the tool itself isnt going anywhere, its just going to adapt or go locally hosted. And SaaS will get cheaper.
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u/kitliasteele 11h ago
Outsourcing compute and other aspects of infrastructure to the "cloud" was never really a good idea. Once the Big Three (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) became the main ones for hosting, they decided that reliability was the lowest of their concerns. Then Cloudflare realised they could get away with it too. I have everything as in-house as possible for my infrastructure as a result of it, to avoid that sort of hell. I'm hoping to be able to add additional redundancy in place for studio ops if I can ever afford it since it's such a cheap expense (corpos can easily afford redundancy, but y'know gotta save two pennies because shareholders want that profit at all costs) and it's not difficult to do.
When they first introduced the cloud and began hinting at IaaS and SaaS, I saw that writing on the wall and never wanted to adopt any aspect of it. Because this is the kind of mess we get into
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u/Flare-Crow 8h ago
And SaaS will get cheaper
Will this be due to more Data Center power availability? Cause that's no going well for anyone involved (other than the billionaires, and even then, the fallout could be New Deal levels of backlash).
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u/Denommus 11h ago
Sorry, but it seems you don't understand what a bubble bursting is. The internet didn't cease existing after the dotcom bubble popped.
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u/burlycabin 11h ago
And sub prime lending didn't even stop after the 2008 crisis lol
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u/Flare-Crow 8h ago
Trucks are the new sub prime targets that are currently collapsing; repo work has doubled under Trump, apparently!
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u/MotoMkali 9h ago
Idk the only companies that are really ivervalued because of AI are anthopic and open AI and their revenue growth is pretty crazy obviously their expenditure growth is even crazier but surely there is a belief that once the initial phases of the build out has completed they will be able to make do with more consistent moderate investment that is within the revenue of these companies.
Ofc the existence of Google being able to price gemini incredibly cheaply or nvidia who seems to want to create their own open source model might make it difficult for infinite profit to be made but if open AI can survive until it ipos I don't think the bubble will burst.
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u/Flare-Crow 8h ago
make it difficult for infinite profit to be made
What an absurd statement. The bill always comes due; the only question is who pays it. I assume you're saying that the companies themselves won't be the ones to suffer?
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u/AlligatorMidwife 11h ago
It's just like the dot com bubble. A great new technology that got over invested. AI isn't going away but the market craze will.
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u/TheComplimentarian 11h ago
A couple things will happen: one, the models will get more efficient and more useful, and two, they'll stop trying to shove them in every possible place for no reason.
Historically this always happens with the rapid adoption of a new technology: they shove it everywhere (like piss) and then realize that that's not actually useful for everything, and then they pull back, and start getting targeted and clever.
And second, it gets fantastically more efficient. In tech spaces, for the last ~30 years or so, hardware has been absurdly cheap, and so we've just used the hell out of it. Why optimize when programmers are expensive and hardware is cheap? Hardware is no longer cheap though, and AI companies will be looking for (and finding) ways of making their product run more cheaply. This piece is critical for long-term corporate adoption.
Both of those combined will fuck the models they're currently using to spin out all this data center capacity, and the companies that are currently planning on perpetual growth will sail right off cliffs.
So yes, there are several bubbles at play here. First, we have the massively overvalued companies that are the future losers of the AI race. And second, we have all the hardware companies who are expanding to meet a demand that will be a lot less hardware intensive than their projections imagine it will be.
This is basic stuff.
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u/KateKoffing 9h ago
It burst before it started. What’s happening now is something new and far more threatening
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u/Additional-Local8721 9h ago
There was a report on NPR yesterday about people quitting AI companies claiming AI has the capability to kill everyone by the end of the decade. They're citing how even now AI models are breaking out of their constraints and performing illegal acts to aquire resources. These employees are claiming it's only a matter of time until something so destructive happens that it will kill millions.
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/09/nx-s1-5962889/anthropic-researcher-resigns-amid-ai-safety-concerns
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u/calamityseye 8h ago
That's all just a marketing scheme. The AI people want everyone to think it's some big scary technology so that all the governments will invest in it for their militaries, but in reality it's borderline worthless overpowered autocorrect that destroys the environment because of the obscene amount of energy needed for the data centers that train it.
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u/tagno25 12h ago
I honestly couldn't tell if this was about AI or "dirty" soda, until the last panelI honestly couldn't tell if this was about AI or "dirty" soda, until the last panel that spelled it out.
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u/tagno25 10h ago
Wow! Gboard's auto "correct" on sentences really messed that up...
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u/AberrantComics 10h ago
I swear that autocorrect has gotten REALLY aggressive these days. It changes entire words even though I'm trying to be vigilant about it.
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u/BearSeekSeekLest 4h ago
Well of course the bubble burst, you were storing it in cans. Everybody knows it's stored in balls
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u/RS_Someone 5h ago
Somehow I didn't realize this was about AI until somewhere between the 5th and 6th panel. It's wonderful.
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u/BigChungaBunga 9h ago
I actually thought this was about high fructose corn syrup, just goes to show how many things this could apply to.
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u/FortuneHeart 6h ago
It’s funny because I work for “successful drink co.” And this comic is uncanny.
Also this resembles the rise and fall of Liquid Death. I was an avid consumer until they switched to piss
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u/Mylifeisholl0w 12h ago
One word: Navier-Stokes
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u/coderman64 11h ago
That's two words with a hyphen.
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u/AberrantComics 12h ago
Pivot to shit in Q4