> However, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which has minted its fair share of tech entrepreneurs, Prof [...] says [..something innocuous about whether there's an AI bubble...]
If there were a bubble right now, would it be suicide for a professor at the Stanford business school to be quoted by a reporter saying that?
AI by and large has done nothing but make our environment worse.
People literally outsource thinking to it.
People have killed themselves because there were no stopgaps in the communication aspect.
Rural towns are getting overly fucked by water and electricity usage, adding in the fumes produced.
All of this for what, so we can make a video of Michael Jackson high-fiving Ghandi?
The implementation was haphazard and some could say felonious, but altm*n is richer than 99% of us, and would never actually see the inside of a courtroom.
Idk. OpenAI has 800M weekly active users, which puts it in the top, like, four most used software systems in the west. They also just stated that they're emitting 6B API tokens per minute, which depending on the model puts their annualized API revenue between $1B-$31B. They have as many active eyeballs as a typical Meta property, and Meta's annualized revenue is ~$150B; but OAI hasn't monetized them yet. They will. And they have API revenue, and they have further advancements in white collar automation tooling, and they have, well, AGImaybe.
Its also super clear that this is a technology that most of Big Tech totally missed and seems unable to catch up on (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft; Google is doing fine). There's a seriously possible Microsoft-vs-IBM-v2 play possible in the next couple years.
I'm a cynic, but I'm not convinced this is a bubble in the traditional sense. I'd argue that its startlingly asinine to point at a product that went from nothing to being used by 10% of the planetary population in two years, accidentally, like they internally thought it was a stupid idea and still think its a stupid idea, and say "nah they got nothing".
I mean, it's a bubble. The question is, who's going to lose more money, and who's going to recoup at least some of the investments back before the music stops.
Given the enormous number of people paying for AI subscriptions/services, it is very clear the AI market as a whole isn't a bubble.
But given the amount of change, and competition, it is just as obvious that there will be many sub-market bubbles, of varying size, with unpredictable thresholds, timing and resolution.
And large companies, tech and non-tech (they all depend on information tech), will burn fortunes defensively. Which, if understood as a hedge isn't a bubble.
--
For now, real demand for higher quality AI is insane. What will be interesting will be the dynamics as it passes the "average" person. (That will appear to happen at different times to different people, because these models are not ever going to be "just like us".)
I can imagine AI getting smarter fast enough to overshoot contemporary needs or ability to leverage. Needs and new leverage adoption are limited in rate of change by legal, political, social, economic, and adjacent/supporting tech adaptation rates. Any overshoot would completely commodify AI for as long as it took for use to catch up with potential.
That would resulting a temporary but still market-wide AI bubble burst. When nobody (or only a small minority) needs the best AI, and open source and low margin models will clean the clocks of high investment burning overshooters.
It is easy to underestimate how many small, unimportant, irrelevant, independent and easy adaptations that a new tech needs to deliver very different kinds of value, that are actually huge, important, inherent and non-obvious adaptations.
An analogy: Give a bright adaptable 10x (relative return/time vs. the norm) developer a billion dollars. See how long it takes them to re-orient themselves to their new scale and challenges, and get even 2x the returns on their new wealth relative to the norm. They may do much worse than 1x.
Achieving superintelligence "too fast" would have a similar effect. It will take almost every actor more time to adjust than we think. And many capable and historically successful enterprises, including some at the forefront of AI, will die of adaptation-overload shock.
From that viewpoint, OpenAI looks like they are doing the right things. Because they are going as vertical as they can, they will be confronting new-value-proposition frictions much earlier than others might. That is a very wise move given all the uncertainties. (Besides the obvious motivation of wanting it all.)
Don't worry guys, it's not a bubble, it really feels like AGI is around the corner, and a new technology: CGOT; Chain of Graph of thoughts, we recursively think 10x and it's like it can make a platform error hello world game in Javascript guys it's gonna replace EVERYONE!
13 comments
[ 0.73 ms ] story [ 39.4 ms ] threadBank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516265
OpenAI, Nvidia fuel $1T AI market with web of circular deals
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45521629
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490549
Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512317
If there were a bubble right now, would it be suicide for a professor at the Stanford business school to be quoted by a reporter saying that?
People literally outsource thinking to it.
People have killed themselves because there were no stopgaps in the communication aspect.
Rural towns are getting overly fucked by water and electricity usage, adding in the fumes produced.
All of this for what, so we can make a video of Michael Jackson high-fiving Ghandi?
The implementation was haphazard and some could say felonious, but altm*n is richer than 99% of us, and would never actually see the inside of a courtroom.
Its also super clear that this is a technology that most of Big Tech totally missed and seems unable to catch up on (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft; Google is doing fine). There's a seriously possible Microsoft-vs-IBM-v2 play possible in the next couple years.
I'm a cynic, but I'm not convinced this is a bubble in the traditional sense. I'd argue that its startlingly asinine to point at a product that went from nothing to being used by 10% of the planetary population in two years, accidentally, like they internally thought it was a stupid idea and still think its a stupid idea, and say "nah they got nothing".
https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelli...
So nah.
People are spending real money on the product, it's not just the companies spending on infrastructure.
But given the amount of change, and competition, it is just as obvious that there will be many sub-market bubbles, of varying size, with unpredictable thresholds, timing and resolution.
And large companies, tech and non-tech (they all depend on information tech), will burn fortunes defensively. Which, if understood as a hedge isn't a bubble.
--
For now, real demand for higher quality AI is insane. What will be interesting will be the dynamics as it passes the "average" person. (That will appear to happen at different times to different people, because these models are not ever going to be "just like us".)
I can imagine AI getting smarter fast enough to overshoot contemporary needs or ability to leverage. Needs and new leverage adoption are limited in rate of change by legal, political, social, economic, and adjacent/supporting tech adaptation rates. Any overshoot would completely commodify AI for as long as it took for use to catch up with potential.
That would resulting a temporary but still market-wide AI bubble burst. When nobody (or only a small minority) needs the best AI, and open source and low margin models will clean the clocks of high investment burning overshooters.
It is easy to underestimate how many small, unimportant, irrelevant, independent and easy adaptations that a new tech needs to deliver very different kinds of value, that are actually huge, important, inherent and non-obvious adaptations.
An analogy: Give a bright adaptable 10x (relative return/time vs. the norm) developer a billion dollars. See how long it takes them to re-orient themselves to their new scale and challenges, and get even 2x the returns on their new wealth relative to the norm. They may do much worse than 1x.
Achieving superintelligence "too fast" would have a similar effect. It will take almost every actor more time to adjust than we think. And many capable and historically successful enterprises, including some at the forefront of AI, will die of adaptation-overload shock.
From that viewpoint, OpenAI looks like they are doing the right things. Because they are going as vertical as they can, they will be confronting new-value-proposition frictions much earlier than others might. That is a very wise move given all the uncertainties. (Besides the obvious motivation of wanting it all.)
"It's going to drag down the rest of the economy.""