Maybe “is AI a bubble?” is the wrong question

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I’ve stopped thinking that’s the right question. The better one: do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?

• Clock 1: can costs fall fast enough, soon enough?
• Clock 2: will the money last long enough?
• Clock 3: does real demand arrive fast enough to replace the circular kind?

Bull and bear mostly agree the technology is real. They disagree on the clocks.

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A relatively balanced discussion on the economic prospects of GenAI. Of course, the author attracts responses on… 😬 Twitter… so I’m not replying there. But I enjoyed the relative neutrality of Emile’s piece.

I’m not sure, of course, whether asking about the economic stability of GenAI is the right question in the first place. It sort of presupposes that it’s a net good (note that I didn’t say “has value”: there are definitely things it’s useful for), right, to ask whether it’s something that we can afford to pay to keep around?

But sure: we can keep watching these super-long runways and wondering when they’ll run out (or somebody works out how to get the tech off the ground)!