AI might be a market bubble. It’s not a technology bubble.

It’s entirely possible that OpenAI overextended financially, that the circular transactions between AI labs, NVidia, and tech giants like Oracle will end badly (some commentators argue Oracle is in trouble already and that’s the real reason behind the mass layoffs). It’s beyond doubt that AI services are currently priced well below the cost of the electricity alone needed to run them – never mind the hardware. So yes, OpenAI might go bankrupt and Anthropic’s token prices might shoot past affordability for most of us. The market bubble can absolutely burst – especially with energy prices climbing.

But AI as a technology isn’t going anywhere.

We already know how to train large language models. We know how to build models that run on a Mac Mini or a PC with a decent NVidia card. We know how to build ML models beyond LLMs. We even know how to do it cheaper – as the Chinese labs demonstrate. None of that knowledge disappears. Neither do the people who have it. If OpenAI goes bankrupt those people go somewhere else. If token prices skyrocket that creates a massive incentive for others to figure out how to do it cheaper.

You can’t put the technological genie back in the bottle.

Those who think economic factors will make AI vanish and we’ll return to the pre-AI days – with an eldorado for UX designers and hand-written code – are detached from reality. Since the industrial era began some 250-300 years ago plenty of economic bubbles have burst and plenty of companies have gone bankrupt, but a major technology has never just disappeared. For that to happen you’d need a total collapse of technological civilization. And that’s (hopefully) not in the cards.

AI is here and it’s staying. There’s no going back – even if some people dream about it. I can sympathize with the sentiment, but unless a time travel device is discovered you can’t escape to the past. Better to adapt than delude yourself that it won’t be necessary.

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