If AI didn’t change your life in 2025, it will next year. This is one of the few predictions that can be made with confidence in unpredictable times. This is not an invitation to believe the hype about what the technology can do today, or what it might one day achieve. Propaganda does not require your belief. It’s so bloated on Silicon Valley finance that it’s distorting the global economy and fueling geopolitical rivalries that it’s shaping your world, regardless of whether the most fantastical claims about AI potential ever materialize.
ChatGPIT was launched just three years ago and became the fastest-growing consumer app in history. It now has about 800 million weekly users. Its parent company, OpenAI, is rated approximately $500bnOpenAI CEO Sam Altman has negotiated a complex and, in the eyes of some, suspiciously opaque network deals with other players in the field to build the infrastructure needed for America’s AI-powered future, The value of these commitments is about $1.5tnThis isn’t actual cash, but keep in mind each person is spending $1 Second Surpassing one trillion-dollar reserves would require 31,700 years.
Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft, which has a $135 billion stake in OpenAI, are all staking hundreds of billions of dollars on the same bet. Without all these investments, the American economy would collapse.
Economic analysts and historians of past industrial frenzies, from 19th-century railroads to the dotcom boom-and-bust at the turn of the millennium, are calling AI a bubble.
Altman has said: “I think there are many parts to AI kind of bubbly Now.” Naturally not part of that. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has called it a bubble, but “nice kind Which accelerates economic progress. A good bubble, in this analysis, finances infrastructure and expands the boundaries of human knowledge. These benefits persist after the bubble bursts and justify the waste of people getting hurt along the way (the little people, not the Bezos people).
The tech fraternity’s boom is a heady mix of old-fashioned hucksterism, plutocratic megalomania and utopian ideology.
At its core is a marketing pitch: Current AI models already outperform people at many tasks. It is believed that machines will soon achieve “general intelligence” – cognitive versatility like ours – thereby eliminating the need for any human input. More generally, intelligent AI can teach itself and design its successors, advancing through astonishing exponents of capability toward higher dimensions of super-intelligence.
A company which crosses that limit will have no problem in repaying its debts. Those who bring this vision to life – and the key evangelists are all men – will be to omniscient AI what the ancient prophets were to their gods. This is a good job for them. What happens to the rest of us in this post-Sapiens sequence is a little hazy.
The US isn’t the only superpower interested in AI, so attending Silicon Valley for maximum awesomeness has geopolitical implications. China has taken a different approach, inspired in part by the Communist Party’s tradition of centralized industrial planning, but also by the simple fact of being second in the innovation race. Beijing is pushing for rapid, widespread implementation of low-level (but still powerful) AI at every level of the economy and society. China is betting on a general boost from simple AI. The US is poised to make an extraordinary leap forward in general AI.
Since the prize in that race is global supremacy, there are few incentives for both sides to worry about the risks, or to sign international protocols restricting the use of AI and mandating transparency in its development. Neither the US nor China is interested in subjecting a strategically important industry to standards co-written with foreigners.
In the absence of global governance, we will rely on the integrity of robber barons and authoritarian apparatchiks to build moral guardrails around the systems already embedded in the devices we use for work, play, and education.
Earlier this year, Elon Musk announced that his company was developing Baby Grok, an AI chatbot aimed at children under the age of three. The adult version has expressed white supremacist views and proudly identifies as “MechaHitler”. That pretentiousness at least has the quality of candor. It’s easier to recognize than the subtle encoding of bias in bots, which aren’t given the kind of hard ideological steers that Musk gives his algorithms.
Not all AI systems are large language models (LLMs) like Grok. But all LLMs are susceptible to hallucinations and delusions derived from the material on which they are trained. They do not “understand” a question and do not “think” about it like the conscious mind does. They take a prompt, test the probability of its key words occurring together repeatedly in their training data, and assemble a plausible-sounding answer. Often the result is accurate. This is usually reassuring. It could also be garbage. As the amount of AI-generated content increases online, the ratio of content to quality in the LLM’s diet changes accordingly. Due to the consumption of junk food, they cannot be trusted to provide nutritional information.
This trajectory looms a bleak destination: a synthetic pseudo-reality mediated by the sycophantic mechanical offspring of narcissistic Silicon Valley oligarchs. But that is not the only route available. Nor is it necessarily the most probable. The irrational enthusiasm of AI boosters and their cynical association with the Trump administration is a familiar story of human greed and shortsightedness, not a new phase in evolution. The product is truly groundbreaking but flawed in ways that reflect the distorted character of its progenitors, whose genius was salesmanship and financial engineering. They have created brilliant engines that prioritize spectacular displays of intelligence over the real thing.
The real bubble is not stock valuations but the inflated ego of an industry that thinks it is just one more datacenter away from computational divinity. When the recovery comes, when America’s Icarus economy reaches cold waters, there will be a chance to hear other voices on the subject of risk and regulation. It may not come in 2026, but the moment is approaching when the starkness of the choice on offer and the need to face it becomes inevitable. Should we create a world where AI is put to the service of humanity, or will it be the other way around? We won’t need ChatGPT to tell us the answer.
