It’s worth remembering that every major technological shift has gone through a speculative boom that looked like a scam in the moment. The dot-com bubble didn’t mean the internet was a fraud - it just meant people overestimated how quickly its impact would pay off. The same was true for the housing market after the subprime crash: people still need places to live. What’s happening with AI now feels similar. There’s definitely hype and inflated valuations, but that doesn’t mean the underlying technology will vanish once the bubble bursts. The noise will fade, and what’s genuinely useful will become infrastructure - quietly integrated into everyday life, just like the internet did.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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And no one at wall street bothered to ask actual engineers of the actual likelihood of all of these crazy promises being made. Ask engineers and they'd give an optimistic and realistic approach and could guide investors on what is possible and what isn't. But nooo, gotta love the hype cycle instead
As someone who's been through the Bay Area/ Silicon Valley Startup gauntlet, I can assure you that there are plenty of engineers who are deep in the AI koolaid.
"Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. It's the same chunk of money is being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three)."
- Doctor Doctorow
Hmm, the graph given is sus. The trend starts before the AI sector was really a thing, like literally 2010.
If I just look at the extra degree to which it came back after covid, it's maybe double the dotcom bubble and a lot smaller than 2008.
Edit: To explain a bit more,
they're basically assuming that any growth past the corporate interest rate plus 2% is bullshit. If they've drawn the graph correctly that actually predicts the 'oughts recessions pretty well, but past 2010 looks a lot like it has meaningless drift.
The big question, when it comes to whether to buy into this, is if it works across the last century. Since it's a simple, old idea and it's not everywhere I'm guessing no, and they did some strategic cropping.
"This is fine."
Yep. We're all cooked.
Except the billionaires - who will obviously retreat to their cozy luxury bunkers in New Zealand.
So if your system is oscillating wildly, your P term is too large, right?
P = social media, 24h news cycle I = education D = regulation
?