this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Fuck AI
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I appreciate this article and Cory Doctorow.
But I will disagree that the AI bubble is structured enough like a traditional bubble to "pop" like how y'all expect. It's not like any bubble that has ever existed.
You know all those huge figures about investments you hear? That's not just debt and low interest lending. That's real cash investments in many cases. So unlike the Dot Com bubble, we currently don't have a third of the stock market over leveraged on pretend money. We don't have people building data centers on spec, like railroads to nowhere, they're booked out before the ground is broken. Data centers and power generation are IRL investments that are needed whether it's for AI use or not.
Also, there aren't a smaller set of goods everyone is after, like paying $1 million for toys.com, a URL never worth anything close to the hype. It's a wide open field of AI use cases, and while enterprise pilots are struggling to provide immediate results (no, the 97% of pilots fail figure is not technically accurate), agentic workflows are what consulting firms like KPMG are pushing hard. The rate of use case development is changing as fast as all the rest of it is, so nothing had reached close to a plateau yet. So banking on the 1:1 job replacement theory really ignores the insider view of how large corporate structures are already pushing adoption.
It's like 5 (or maybe 15) sets of overlapping concentric circles that are themselves bubbles, and 2 of them are solid right now, and so far 2 are not anything like a bubble ready to pop. The other 4 will keep the 5th propped up long enough to not feel the effects across the entire economy. Or that 12 of the 15 will prevent immediate issues as 3 of them founder.
All bubble popping will get you is consolidation anyway to MS and Google.
I can't say I agree with most of your details, but your second and last sentence are on point. This bubble (or bubble conglomeration that you describe) are not like any previous bubbles and in the end we are most certainly going to have a couple survivors still standing and take everything. The main thing I disagree with is that it will be the only thing that happens. We're going to see a massive gutting of the financial markets and although datacenters are real things that get used, we don't need this many specifically power hungry GPU/AI designed datacenters if the AI market pops. All these AI services are massively lossleading hoping to be one of the survivors. I think that once we get even close to the "pop" we're going to see desperate price hikes and even the bigger companies are going to raise their pricing along with it. I suspect that many of those customers are going to have to admit that their AI plans aren't living up to what they anticipated and will heavily curtain their usage once the prices jump.