Though my arguments might be verbose, theyâre ultimately pretty simple: AI does not provide even an iota of the benefits â economic or otherwise â to justify its ruinous costs. Every new story that runs about cost-cutting or horrible burnrates increasingly validates my position, and for the most part, boosters respond by saying âwell LOOK at how BIG the REVENUES are.â It isnât! AI revenues are dogshit. Theyâre awful. Theyâre pathetic. The entire industry â including OpenAI and Anthropicâs theoretical revenues of $13.1 billion and $4.5 billion â hit around $65 billion last year, and that includes the revenues from providing compute generated by neoclouds like CoreWeave and hyperscalers like Microsoft. Iâm also just gonna come out and say it: I think the AI startups are misleading their investors and the general public about their revenues. My reporting from last year had OpenAIâs revenues at somewhere in the region of $4.3 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, and Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in an an affidavit that the company had made revenue âexceedingâ (sigh) $5 billion through March 9, 2026, which does not make sense when you add up all the annualized revenue figures reported about this company.
In any case, I keep coming back to the word âhysteria,â because itâs hard to find another word to describe this hype cycle. The way that the media, the markets, analysts, executives, and venture capitalists discuss AI is totally divorced from reality, discussing âagentsâ in terms that donât match with reality and AI data centers in terms of âgigawattsâ that are entirely fucking theoretical, all with a terrifying certainty that makes me wonder what it is Iâm missing. But every sign points to me being right, and if Iâm right at the scale I think Iâm right, I think weâre about to have a legitimacy crisis in investing and mainstream media, because regular people are keenly aware that something isnât right, in many cases, itâs because theyâre able to count.
The AI bubble has entered its most hysterical phase, with every defense worded in the future tense, every argument written with enough word salad to put Sweetgreen out of business, and few tangible explanations as to how any of this works out economically.
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