Tootfinder

The financial AI bubble. It will pop at some time but don't make the mistake thinking that the technology will dissappear or the impact it will have on society (besides the destruction of the bubble bursting).
#AI #bubble

We found that ChatGPT made executives significantly more optimistic in their forecasts while peer discussions tended to encourage caution. Additionally, we found that the executives armed with ChatGPT made worse predictions, based on actual stock figures, than they had before they consulted the tool.”
But they'll still keep pushing it down our throats, because nobody wants to be first to get out of the bubble.

Research: Executives Who Used Gen AI Made Worse Predictions
In a recent experiment, nearly 300 executives and managers were shown recent stock prices for the chip-maker Nvidia and then asked to predict the stock’s price in a month’s time. Then, half the group was given the opportunity to ask questions of ChatGPT while the other half were allowed to consult with their peers about Nvidia’s stock. The executives who used ChatGPT became significantly more optimistic, confident, and produced worse forecasts than the group who discussed with their peers…

"Working with AI is kinda painful, like working with a 200 IQ dementia patient"
- Vince P.
#programming #ai #claudecode

Summarised by my partner as "The bank of England is saying WATCH OUT CHAPS"...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/08/bank-of-england-warns-of-growing-risk-that-ai-bubble-could-burst

My 13yo just coined the term, "The Great AI Depression," for when the AI bubble pops.

This Is How the AI Bubble Will Pop
The AI infrastructure boom is the most important economic story in the world. But the numbers just don't add up.
🫧 https://www.derekthompson.org/p/this-is-how-the-ai-bubble-will-pop

This Is How the AI Bubble Will Pop
The artificial intelligence boom is the most important economic story in the world. But the numbers just don't add up.

> As currently constructed, AI is an oligarchy-enriching, worker-immiserating, energy-depleting, brain-rotting economic bubble in waiting. Democrats can get on the public’s side here.
I haven't even read the article but (considering how strongly I agree with the premises here) I'm mostly just sad about how clearly this highlights the financial capture of the DNC
---
Democrats Must Oppose the AI Industry - The American Prospect

Democrats Must Oppose the AI Industry
As currently constructed, AI is an oligarchy-enriching, worker-immiserating, energy-depleting, brain-rotting economic bubble in waiting. Democrats can get on the public’s side here.

Man, I try hard to stay neutral-ish on the whole #genAI landscape, on the assumption that once the bubble pops, there’ll be gold nuggets in the rubble. But I read things like this and voices in the back of my head are shouting “burn it with fire!”

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History
"These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."

Things I had not expected to see today: Deutsche Bank making a numbers based argument that "AI" is a bubble and won't last https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/deutsche-bank-grim-warning-ai-industry

Deutsche Bank Issues Grim Warning for AI Industry
Deutsche Bank is warning that AI spending won't "remain parabolic," or continue to increase exponentially, a dire warning for the future.

SIMPLETON: Yes, this will crash the economy because wrong math = lost money
EXPERT: No, this won’t crash the economy because people screw up even without AI, business operations are already riddled with ridiculous errors, and human systems have grown resilient to pervasive local failure
WISE SAGE: Yes, this will crash the economy because the economy is currently propped up by gullible investors •believing• this BS is real actual magic, and if they find out it it sucks like normal, the bubble pops
From @…: https://social.coop/@eb/115328355039744280

A surge in AI company valuations is driving the popularity of special purpose vehicles, but some involve high fees, opaque structures, and layers of middlemen (Business Insider)
https://africa.businessinsider.com/mar

Investors warn AI FOMO could be fueling a risky bubble in companies like OpenAI and Anthropic
As AI valuations soar into the hundreds of billions, a parallel market of temporary financial shells is proliferating to meet investor FOMO, and many investors are starting to sound the alarm bells that it portends a bubble in the AI gold rush

“On labor and AI”
https://buttondown.com/practicaltips/archive/on-labor-and-ai/
“[M]aybe large numbers of us should come to a common conclusion that these bubble-boy charlatans shouldn’t just get to decide that the world’s economy (not to mention its ecology) sh…

On labor and AI
Happy Labor/Labour Day/bank holiday to you. Seems like a good day to talk about the elephant in the room again. The predominant storyline around labor, of...

"The [Wall Street Journal] writers compare the #AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history" -- @pluralistic
#LLMs

Bubble, Bubble, AI's Rumble: Why Global Financial Regulatory Incident Reporting is Our Shield Against Systemic Stumbles
Anchal Gupta, Gleb Pappyshev, James T Kwok
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26150

Bubble, Bubble, AI's Rumble: Why Global Financial Regulatory Incident Reporting is Our Shield Against Systemic Stumbles
"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble." As Shakespeare's witches foretold chaos through cryptic prophecies, modern capital markets grapple with systemic risks concealed by opaque AI systems. According to IMF, the August 5, 2024, plunge in Japanese and U.S. equities can be linked to algorithmic trading yet ab-sent from existing AI incidents database exemplifies this transparency crisis. Current AI incident databases, reliant on crowdsourcing or news scraping, systematic…

[OT] Wall Street's #AI bubble is worse than the 1999 dot-com bubble, warns a top economist https://gizmodo.com/wall-streets-ai-bubble-is-worse-t…

Wall Street’s AI Bubble Is Worse Than the 1999 Dot-com Bubble, Warns a Top Economist
A chief economist at investment giant Apollo says the top ten AI stocks are more detached from reality than the tech titans of the 1990s were. His chart is a stark warning that history is about to repeat itself.

Interesting URL here from the Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-bubble-building-spree-55ee6128?st=dMQAK5&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

You know, when the AI bubble does burst, there will be a hell of a lot of cheap gaming graphics cards for sale.

“the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector,”
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115277162069992407…

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)
Attached: 1 image Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into AI discussions. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026. ‡probably ⹋"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI" -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: …

If it bursts, it will hurt us all.
"The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble"
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-17-times-the-size-of-the…

Cory Doctorow @… on #AI:
[T]he AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into…

This dude writing for Rest of the World must be fully "AI"-pilled: While the global writing for the "AI"-bubble to burst sooner rather than later is on the wall, he's confabulating about the "AI" brain drain. 😂
https://restofworld.org/2025/javier-milei-ai-hub-argentina-talent/

Weekend list of critical reading links about the state[1] of Tech, AI[2] hype/finance/politics, mostly long form:
Ed Zitron's The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
How to use computing power faster: on the weird ec…

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my free work too.  Also,

@… 's important text about the AI bubble "It's [AI] a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they're used."

If you think there might be an AI bubble, but don't worry, even if it pops, how bad can it be?
Here's one number: seven tech companies (NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Tesla, Amazon) are worth ~20 trillion, ⇓ of total US stock market
For context: total subprime mortgages in 2008 were 1.3 trillion, total US mortgage debt 10 trillion
You have a 401k or index fonds? Your money is likely tied with the AI market. If you want that, that's fine. If you're …

Finance people: If I have a list of mutual fund symbol names and percentages of each, is there an easy API or data source I can use to calculate what my actual underlying equity exposure is?
The specific goal is figuring out how much of my 401k is actually in companies that are propped up by the AI bubble.
I can look at a single ticker symbol and see at least its top n hodlings easily enough but what if I want to know across ten different index funds I own different amounts of, h…

Remember the home assistant bubble? Wasn’t there a prediction that significant percentage of searches would be performed that way? Those people weren’t quiet didn’t they.😅
Probably moved onto promoting their perceived values of Gen AI now.

"Today's #AI bubble has absorbed more of the country's wealth and represents more of its economic activity than historic nation-shattering bubbles, like the 19th century UK rail bubble. A much-discussed MIT paper found that 95% of companies that had tried AI had either nothing to show for it, or experienced a loss" -- @…

Can the AI bubble please burst next week at the latest?
I'm already done with faculty talk praising AI this and AI that and forcing teaching to fully go tech-bro-style. Next term starts September 15, I just don’t want to set up “AI-safe exams” and having students use AI for everything at the same time
Oh, and don’t be so negative, we’re all using X and Y and the newest Z, it’s awesome! It just hallucinate or lies a bit, but so friendly, the nice bot, don’t you see? Magic!

New high-frequency gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions
Wen-Yuan Ai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02794 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02794

New high-frequency gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions
First-order phase transitions in the early Universe are a well-motivated source of gravitational waves (GWs). In this Letter, we identify a previously overlooked GW production mechanism: gravitational transition radiation, arising from graviton emission by particles whose mass changes as they pass through expanding bubble walls. Unlike conventional sources such as bubble collisions or sound waves, this mechanism operates at the microscopic scale set by the Lorentz-contracted wall thickness, lea…

In the ZIRP era, #UX was evangelized as a magic wand to 10x value — and after that bubble popped, UX found a niche as a delivery function. Unfortunately, optimizing our process for faster outputs over outcomes meant that #AI came and ate our lunch with instant outputs/no outcomes.
But this was no golden…

Design struggles to be born
The golden age of UX is over. But the momentum that it brought is not yet extinguished, and a new generation of design leaders is seizing it.

Yeah.... Cool story, bro. We're in the fever pitch of the bubble now.

Q&A with Bret Taylor, CEO of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, on Sierra's AI customer support agents, AGI, Sam Altman's comments on the AI bubble, and more (Alex Heath/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-w

Sierra CEO Bret Taylor on why the AI bubble feels like the dotcom boom
OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor on why AI means you won’t ever be stuck on hold again.

#FediLZ
From: @…
https://mastodon.social/@sixtus/1153029182…

»The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst:
Shock sell-off after study warns most investments in artificial intelligence get zero returns«
Surprise, surprise – NOPE!!! Is it always like this when hopes are sold and there are no tangible contents or even REALLY novel useful products. (ಠ╭╮ಠ)
🙄

The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst
Shock sell-off after study warns most investments in artificial intelligence get zero returns

AI is here to stay and will add value after a phase of finding out what works and what does not. In financial terms there is however a bubble that will explode....
https://fortune.com/2025/09/23/ai-boom-unsustainable-tech-spending-parabolic-deutsche…

The AI boom is unsustainable unless tech spending goes ‘parabolic,’ Deutsche Bank warns: ‘This is highly unlikely’
“In the absence of tech-related spending, the U.S. would be close to, or in, recession this year,” George Saravelos says.

"the #AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector...
when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone&q…

Wait I thought it’s the future of humanity and close to AGI https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/sam-altman-openai-ai-bubble-interview

"By 2030, anticipated demand for AI services would require $2 trillion in annual revenues, leaving a shortfall of $800 billion globally to meet that demand."
El Deustche Bank diciendo que la IA no va a dar beneficios en la puta vida y que cuando se pinche la burbuja se va a cagar la perra.
htt…

The AI bubble will crash on its own but it's our responsibility to make AI socially unacceptable.

A look at CoreWeave, whose financing strategy involves using GPUs as collateral for large loans, which enabled rapid expansion but resulted in $11.2B in debt (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivast

How CoreWeave’s GPU Bet Made Four Risk-Loving Cryptominers AI Billionaires
Creative financing and an enormous appetite for risk helped CoreWeave’s Michael Intrator ride the AI data center boom to a $6.7 billion personal fortune. But as bubble fears mount, his reliance on billions in debt to supply advanced chips to major AI players puts him in a powerful position.

really loving to get told both that our whole economy is about to collapse because ai is such a big deal and that our economy is about to collapse because ai is a silly bubble

Bubble-icious! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-23/vcs-are-scrambling-for-a-piece-of-ai-darlings-like-anthropic-cursor-cognition

It's worth bearing in mind that all AI companies are in that phase where they burn money to attract the most customers and hope that the competition blinks first. That means all AI is pretty badly underpriced.
For coding, that's a problem. It's just on the edge of being arguably positive for some. If the price goes up by an order of ten, the bubble is going to burst. And it may take the other AI use cases with it. After all, coding was kind of a killer app.

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out
Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed -

Examining the Relationship between Scientific Publishing Activity and Hype-Driven Financial Bubbles: A Comparison of the Dot-Com and AI Eras
Aksheytha Chelikavada, Casey C. Bennett
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11982

Examining the Relationship between Scientific Publishing Activity and Hype-Driven Financial Bubbles: A Comparison of the Dot-Com and AI Eras
Financial bubbles often arrive without much warning, but create long-lasting economic effects. For example, during the dot-com bubble, innovative technologies created market disruptions through excitement for a promised bright future. Such technologies originated from research where scientists had developed them for years prior to their entry into the markets. That raises a question on the possibility of analyzing scientific publishing data (e.g. citation networks) leading up to a bubble for si…

Oof, this collection of personal stories and experiences around how "AI" is impacting translators is rough: less paid work, the work they get to do is harder and more soul crushing, and of course between that and the deskilling there'll be a real problem when the bubble bursts.
«AI Killed My Job: Translators»
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-my-job-translators

I found a Tom Scott video from 2014 about privacy being dead back then, it is worse today in 2025 and it puts into perspective the lack of realization that people have to sense the change. It also predicts a different tech bubble (most likely AI) and an increasing level of surveillance, which we are seeing more of in the present with the UK laws in effect, and the EU following with their own laws for surveillance.
Honestly well worth the 20 minutes:

The financial AI bubble will burst, companies will go broke, investments will be lost, there will be a large consolidation phase, as with every wave of innovation. But there is not any signal that the actual use and application of GenAI will decline. We struggle with finding added value, using them in the right way, mitigating the risks, that is the main challenge.
#AI

VCs say some AI startups, under pressure to show rapid ARR growth, are using questionable accounting practices like counting one-time deals as recurring revenue (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/how-is-arr-calculated-startups-venture/

‘There’s so much pressure to be the company that went from zero to $100 million in X days’: Inside the sketchy world of ARR and inflated AI startup accounting
Annual recurring revenue is the metric VCs and founders love to tout. But skeptics think these overblown numbers are helping fuel a bubble.

Reviews for GPT5 are coming in!
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

The deeper we get into this AI Hype Cycle, the more it feels like the DotCom Hype Cycle of 1999-2000, to me.
When I was away last week, I saw a billboard with a suited white guy’s face (it looked like a realtor sign) and the headline “AI-ify your business”.
People are afraid of missing out on… whatever this is. Just like they were worried about missing the onramp to the Information Superhighway, 25 years ago.
This bubble *will* burst, and it’s going to hurt at least as muc…

🪛 Tricking LLM-Based NPCs into Spilling Secrets
#llm #ai

Tricking LLM-Based NPCs into Spilling Secrets
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate dynamic dialogue for game NPCs. However, their integration raises new security concerns. In this study, we examine whether adversarial prompt injection can cause LLM-based NPCs to reveal hidden background secrets that are meant to remain undisclosed.

Replacing something as central to modern digital life as a browser with something built by an unprofitable "AI" startup in the middle of a deflating bubble might be the least digitally literate thing one can do in 2025.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my free work too.  Also,

"The beatings will continue until usage improves"
I can not wait for this bubble to burst.
#AI

Tech talent biz Andela trains up devs in GitHub Copilot
: The beatings will continue until usage improves

As for “but it's great for coding!“…
…world-wide there's about 3.6 billion jobs or so, of which ~25 million are in software development; this means maybe about 0.7% of all jobs world-wide can use "great for coding".
Writing actual code amounts to maybe, if you're lucky, 10% of the work a software developer does.
The rest is meetings, high-level specifications, email and chat, more meetings, learning new things, updating stuff, lots of testing and debugging, etc.
The gist is, the supposed gains from "AI" are completely irrelevant (and indeed there's signs and studies that show it doesn't do anything for programmer productivity either).
tl;dr: This is the worst economic bubble in history, pushing a dream of a magical technology that unfortunately doesn't work, by appealing to investor greed.

With 35% of the stock market value coming from 7 companies benefiting from AI hype, and us being in a bubble, I felt it was time to diversify my retirement portfolio. I’ve added this asset to my holdings.

Especially since the "AI" bubble keeps focusing (through defense tech and supposed "workflow automation") on the governments of the world as bagholders.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/115066177879999756

Time for another round of critical AI weekend reading:
Crashing hard: why talking about bubbles obscures the real social cost of overinvesting into “Artificial Intelligence”
Aline Blankertz (@…)

Crashing hard: why talking about bubbles obscures the real social cost of overinvesting into “Artificial Intelligence”
More and more commentators talk about and warn of an “AI bubble”, and everybody seems to congratulate each other on being such a smart financial analyst. BUT: A bubble pops and you are left with air and maybe a splash of soap somewhere on the floor. A fairly clean affair. This kind of investor speak

As much as I try to be an optimist, I don't see the "AI" bubble popping soon. Too many people's wealth/stock valuation rests on its continuation.

Sam Altman says OpenAI "totally screwed up some things" on the GPT-5 rollout, confirms plans to fund a brain-computer interface startup to rival Neuralink (Alex Heath/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/command-line-news

I talked to Sam Altman about the GPT-5 launch fiasco
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed criticism of GPT-5’s rollout, the AI bubble, launching a social network and brain-computer interface, buying Google Chrome, and more.