We are currently in a period of rampant, speculative over investment in a new technology. People are investing because they don’t know who’s going to be the money maker, and they feel confident at least one will turn enough profit to cover the losses of the others. Companies are then being started on the basis of that investment.
Another part of the bubble behavior is the self fueling nature. AI buys ram and GPU, ram and GPU makers invest in AI. In the 90s, websites needed networking gear, and networking gear manufacturers started investing in websites. This similarity is not lost on those who were there before.
Investors also want control of companies so that when one starts to pull ahead they can push the others in different directions to keep competition from hindering it, increasing their odds of profit.
The bubble starts to properly pop when someone’s spreadsheet indicates that they’ve hit the amount they can invest while maintaining the desired probability of profit. Then the investments slow, so that cycle slows, and some companies can’t make payments on delivered product, others can’t deliver on paid for merchandise, confidence wavers and a lot of companies go under in rapid succession.
It’s unlikely the technology goes away entirely, but it’s just as likely we’ll see this level of enthusiasm in a decade as we were to all be surfing the information superhighways on our cyberdecks in the 90s. The Internet didn’t die, but the explosive hype did.
Then the investments slow, so that cycle slows, and some companies can’t make payments on delivered product, others can’t deliver on paid for merchandise, confidence wavers and a lot of companies go under in rapid succession.
The only thing is you’re doing a direct comparison to the dot com bubble which was
This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups.
If you look at the big AI companies, Gemini is Google, Microsoft has its hands in many pies Copilot which is Chatgpt, Meta with llama and the big Chinese ones are massive companies as well Alibaba with Qwen, Deepseek is the side project of a hedge fund etc
So I think while some of the smaller ones will run out of money there’s also literally the biggest companies in the world backing it and ai isn’t their only revenue stream
So I doubt there will be quite the same bubble burst as the dot com bubble
At the same time if you’d asked me if an oil shock bigger than the 1970’s would tank markets and we’d all be in recession a year ago, I would have said yes so what do i know
I mean, it isn’t history repeating itself exactly but it certainly has an echo.
I think openai is actually a great example for my point. They’re getting investment money from these companies, which is often spent at these companies, and part of the reason for investment is to influence direction.
The dotcom bubble also had major companies making investments. It’s that part of the bubble bursting is those large companies not withdrawing support, but stopping the continual increase in support. Microsoft, Apple and Cisco had massive losses during the bubble, despite being some of the biggest companies.
For bubbles in general, it’s worth remembering that a crash is a time of unprecedented change. Before 2008 the thought of Lehman bothers suddenly going bankrupt was implausible. Same for Washington mutual. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were originally publicly traded companies until the government just took them to stabilize the housing market. (Being a government founded company makes it a little weird, but they weren’t a part of the government)
So while I get what you’re saying, it’s a good idea to be wary of feeling that any company is … Too big to fail. :)
What is your definition of AI bubble?
We are currently in a period of rampant, speculative over investment in a new technology. People are investing because they don’t know who’s going to be the money maker, and they feel confident at least one will turn enough profit to cover the losses of the others. Companies are then being started on the basis of that investment.
Another part of the bubble behavior is the self fueling nature. AI buys ram and GPU, ram and GPU makers invest in AI. In the 90s, websites needed networking gear, and networking gear manufacturers started investing in websites. This similarity is not lost on those who were there before.
Investors also want control of companies so that when one starts to pull ahead they can push the others in different directions to keep competition from hindering it, increasing their odds of profit.
The bubble starts to properly pop when someone’s spreadsheet indicates that they’ve hit the amount they can invest while maintaining the desired probability of profit. Then the investments slow, so that cycle slows, and some companies can’t make payments on delivered product, others can’t deliver on paid for merchandise, confidence wavers and a lot of companies go under in rapid succession.
It’s unlikely the technology goes away entirely, but it’s just as likely we’ll see this level of enthusiasm in a decade as we were to all be surfing the information superhighways on our cyberdecks in the 90s. The Internet didn’t die, but the explosive hype did.
Good post
The only thing is you’re doing a direct comparison to the dot com bubble which was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
If you look at the big AI companies, Gemini is Google, Microsoft has its hands in many pies Copilot which is Chatgpt, Meta with llama and the big Chinese ones are massive companies as well Alibaba with Qwen, Deepseek is the side project of a hedge fund etc
So I think while some of the smaller ones will run out of money there’s also literally the biggest companies in the world backing it and ai isn’t their only revenue stream
So I doubt there will be quite the same bubble burst as the dot com bubble
At the same time if you’d asked me if an oil shock bigger than the 1970’s would tank markets and we’d all be in recession a year ago, I would have said yes so what do i know
I mean, it isn’t history repeating itself exactly but it certainly has an echo.
I think openai is actually a great example for my point. They’re getting investment money from these companies, which is often spent at these companies, and part of the reason for investment is to influence direction.
The dotcom bubble also had major companies making investments. It’s that part of the bubble bursting is those large companies not withdrawing support, but stopping the continual increase in support. Microsoft, Apple and Cisco had massive losses during the bubble, despite being some of the biggest companies.
For bubbles in general, it’s worth remembering that a crash is a time of unprecedented change. Before 2008 the thought of Lehman bothers suddenly going bankrupt was implausible. Same for Washington mutual. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were originally publicly traded companies until the government just took them to stabilize the housing market. (Being a government founded company makes it a little weird, but they weren’t a part of the government)
So while I get what you’re saying, it’s a good idea to be wary of feeling that any company is … Too big to fail. :)
Worldcom was gigantic and went bankrupt. Microsoft was so damaged that it took 15 years for its stock price to again reach its 1999 height.