Suddenly and no long ago, our dearest tech industry leaders started suggesting caution. Altman himself said that artificial intelligence is “certainly” in a bubble, although it has formed around a “grain of truth.” Mark Zuckerberg stated that an AI bubble “is quite possible,” although “if the capabilities of the models continue to grow year after year and demand continues to grow, then maybe there won’t be a crash or anything like that.” Even Eric Schmidt advises to composed down about artificial general intelligence and focus on competition with China.
The question everyone wants answered is: How will the bubble burst? Will we wake up and realize that we don’t really want to talk to LLM anymore? Will anyone find a way to build AI tools for one thousandth the price, allowing a thousand ChatGPTs to flourish? Will we one day check the news and see photos of stock traders shouting at each other on the trading floor while tech stock prices flash dazzling red? My answer is: I have no earthly idea. But I really hope that one day artificial intelligence will become… normal.
I love normal technology. They come with instructions. They change periodically, but you can build craft and career skills around them. Bubble technologies are constantly changing and there is always a risk that they will either destroy society (bad) or make everyone but you wealthy (worse). There are many ways to predict when technology will become normal – price-to-earnings ratio and other monotonous stuff. The metric I utilize is the P/B ratio: conferences to blogs. If people constantly attend conferences on a particular topic, this is not yet normal. If they blog mainly about that, then yes. I made this up, but I assure you it’s predictable.
I work with AI all day long, and now there are so many conferences and meetings and few good, monotonous tech blog posts. Technology industry loves conferences because our product is so abstract that it’s strenuous for us to figure out where we are in the nerd-chimp hierarchy. This is why VC firms sponsor meetings so often; they allow for pheromonal exchanges and displays of dominance, usually implemented via PowerPoint. If you feel rude, invoke the Chatham House Rule.
Sometimes people talk about the golden age of blogging, but less about why people blogged: no one had money and there is nothing cheaper than putting words on the Internet. When money flies to money heaven and startups become dead ends, conference budgets are often the first to go bust. But nerds still want to talk about their nerdiness. Then they start posting – that’s the only way to find out who you are. Eventually, the AI P/B ratio will start to tilt.
Not yet. Perhaps we have a way ahead of us. The globalized economy, driven by expediency and greed, has become a world-spanning suspension bridge, suspended from a few giant anchor points like OpenAI, Nvidia and Google, reinforced by promises of planetary AI transformation – and if one of these anchor points weakened even a little and the promises were not fulfilled, it would be maybe the cable will sag and the whole bridge will fall apart and all the AI startups (including mine) will be trapped in the sea. The constant anticipation of it is just one of the many things that made 2025 so fun.