I keep hearing that retail investors are just small fry and have no power to affect any stock's valuation, but certainly the hype spreads to big money as well.
Even if I'm way off the mark, I would love to read about what happens to the economy in the mathematically plausible case that people keep buying and no one ever sells enough to mitigate the hype.
Sounds to me like a win for the workers, a win for the employer(in that they get better companies) and a win for society at large.
The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc.
An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output.
I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.
That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI.
I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of your work to a machine they own or rent. But perhaps someone here can find some tangible improvement.
1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars.
2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market.
3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully.
4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition.
5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.
- better speech to text, - better auto translation, - better image to text.
Other then that, I hate how AI is inserted into everything, how I cant tell anyone I did something without them telling me I could have use AI for it, the doom trolling , the AIG singularity bullshit as if it was new incoming god rather then a set of technologies.
Just beautiful.
If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.
Social media has also gone utterly crazy. The last time I saw a gaslighting operation on this scale and volume (including accounts who "hate" AI "because its so scary good") was during the start of the Gaza war.
These accounts becoming easier to distinguish too, because whether they boost AI or feign criticism they all categorically refuse to use the s word.
I guess there is a few trillion riding on perpetuating this mass psychosis so it makes sense they'd try to use every trick to keep it going as long as possible.
Internet bubble was nothing like this. The scale is greater, the promises are more insane and the pop is going to be much more devastating.
And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...
We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed.
There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble.
Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.
I did a bunch of that type of work pre covid. IME it's usually an hour to build and about 3-5 weeks to handle bureaucracy, data cleaning and detective work to account for the lack of docs. AI would probably handle that 1 hour's worth of work OK but using it for the rest of that work would be a shortcut to hallucination town, especially when the context is something you have to dig up by actually talking to people.
Also it's the only bit of that job that isnt mind numbing.
There's an enormous number of projects all over the economy these days which are being presented as an enormous "AI win" where the benefits were dubious at best, because it's become a clear route to career advancement.
I'm equally certain that it has its niches but ~80% of where I'm seeing it used it's either smoke and mirrors or creating more problems than it is solving.