The Argument for Letting AI Burn It All Down

Suddenly, and no Before long, our favorite tech industry leaders began offering cautionary advice. Sam Altman said that AI is in a bubble “definitely”, although it is built around a “kernel of truth”. Mark Zuckerberg An AI bubble said “probably,” though “if the models continue to grow year after year with capability and demand, maybe there won’t be a decline or something.” Even Eric Schmidt is calling for calm about artificial general intelligence and Focus on competing with China.

The question everyone wants answered is: How? bubbles Pop? Will we wake up and realize we don’t really want to talk to LL.M. anymore? Can someone find a way to build an AI tool for a thousandth the price, blowing up ChatGPT by a thousand? Are we going to check the news one day and see pictures of stock traders screaming at each other on the exchange floor as tech company stock prices turn bright red? My answer is: I have no earthly idea. But I really, really hope that, someday soon, AI becomes… normal.

I love simple technology. They come with manuals. They change periodically, but you can build craft and professional skills around them. Bubble technologies change constantly, and there is always a threat that they will either destroy society (bad) or make everyone rich except you (bad). There are many ways to predict when a technology is becoming mainstream—price-to-earnings ratios and other boring things. The metric I use is the C/B ratio: conference to blogging. If people constantly attend conferences about one topic, it is still not normal. If they’re mostly blogging about it, that is. I made it up, but I assure you it is prophetic.

I work with AI all day, and at the moment there are a lot of conferences and gatherings and not a lot of good, boring technical blog posts. Technology industry loves Conferences, because our product is so abstract that it’s hard for us to figure out where we sit in the nerd-chimp hierarchy. This is why VC firms often sponsor get-togethers; They allow for pheromonal exchange and dominance displays, usually enacted with PowerPoint. If you’re feeling naughty, invoke Chatham House Rules.

People sometimes talk about the golden age of blogging, but less about why people blogged: no one had money, and nothing was cheaper than talking online. When money flies in the sky, and startups take off, conference budgets are often the first thing to go. Nerds still want to talk about their nerds though. That’s when they start posting—it’s the only way to figure out who you are. Eventually, AI’s C/B ratio will begin to move toward blogs.

Not yet, though. We may have a ways to go. The globalized economy, driven by experience and greed, has become a world-wide suspension bridge, anchored by a few giant anchors like OpenAI and Nvidia and Google, bolstered by promises of planetary AI transformation — and if one of those anchors wobbles, just in case, and the promises fail and the whole bridge can materialize, All AI startups (including me) will fall into the sea. Constantly anticipating it is just one of the many things that make 2025 so much fun.