A bubble doesn't necessarily mean that the the underlying tech/innovation isn't useful. It's a financial and economic phenomenon that is pretty well understood and researched:

- During the hype cycle, investors tend to overestimate the short to mid term effects and underestimate the long term effects.

- It's near impossible to pick the winners in advance, and research has shown that investors underestimate how many losers there will be.

- The financial system/market works very well when there are localized issues with debt. Those get seemingly automatically detected and repaired. But broad increases in credit not so much. Those spread into the whole system in non-obvious and complex ways and destabilize the whole system, which can lead to very large corrections.

etc.

Personally I'd say that it's a problem that prices of consumer goods go up that far to satisfy this part of the market. We could need a more sensible way to advance the technology.

In my opinion this is incomparable to what we are seeing with agentic AI that is rapidly replacing handwriting code.

I figure chances are AI is not going to stop here.

Things look different from within a bubble, you need an outside perspective.

- AI is a genuinely transformative technology on par with the internet and on track to probably surpass the smartphone

- The inflated valuations, the circular flows of money (or "money"), and the financial cup-shell game mean that the players of the game are all a few bad weeks away from catastrophe. This is, of course, nothing new for SV -- but the scale this time is new. Some believe it will soon collapse -- "bubble," thus.

The question is when will the frontier AI companies turn a profit on said transformative technology since other than NVIDIA and big tech, it is losing them tens of billions and who will survive a crash when it comes.

This is when you know you are in a bubble when people with a clear financial incentive are going on to newsletters, podcasts and posting extremely outlandish predictions to sell the public on something.

The amount of engineers becoming snake-oil salesmen and vibe-coders becoming cybersecurity experts overnight selling AI courses is a good indicator which I am looking at.

THe game is up - huge returns are not coming but some areas will benefit from LLMs like Software Engineers. Continued competition and reinvestment among the players will yield good outcomes imo.

Investors who didnt sell their stock in time are going to be p1ssed though. Wonder how the fall out will be managed.

This is good. It's how you know they lacked the intellectual rigour required to be engineers in the first place and thus never were.