. . .

Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. Silicon Valley is dominated by management consultants that no longer know what innovation looks like, tricked by Sam Altman, a savvy con artist who took advantage of tech’s desperation for growth.

Generative AI is the perfected nihilistic form of tech bubbles — a way for people to spend a lot of money and power on cloud compute because they don’t have anything better to do. Large Language Models are boring, unprofitable cloud software stretched to their limits — both ethically and technologically — as a means of tech’s collapsing growth era, OpenAI’s non-profit mission fattened up to make foie gras for SaaS companies to upsell their clients and cloud compute companies to sell GPUs at an hourly rate.

The Rot Economy has consumed the tech industry. Every American tech firm has become corrupted by the growth-at-all-costs mindset, and thus they no longer know how to make sustainable businesses that solve real problems, largely because the people that run them haven’t experienced them for decades.

As a result, none of them were ready for when Sam Altman tricked them into believing he was their savior.

Generative AI isn’t about helping you or me do things — it’s about making new SKUs, new monthly subscription costs for consumers and enterprises, new ways to convince people to pay more for the things that they already used to be slightly different in a way that often ends up being worse.

Only an industry out of options would choose this bubble, and the punishment for doing so will be grim. I don’t know if you think I’m wrong or not. I don’t know if you think I’m crazy for the way I communicate about this industry. Even if you think I am, think long and hard about why it is you disagree with me, and the consequences of me being wrong.

There is nothing else after generative AI. There are no other hypergrowth markets left in tech. SaaS companies are out of things to upsell. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta do not have any other ways to continue showing growth, and when the market works that out, there will be hell to pay, hell that will reverberate through the valuations of, at the very least, every public software company, and many of the hardware ones too.

And I fear it'll go much further, too. The longer this bubble inflates - the longer everybody pretends - the worse the consequences will be.