is the ai bubble going to burst?
probably.
will we have another ai winter?
no.
an AI winter is what happens when funding dries up and progress slows to a crawl.
it happened in the ’70s and ’80s, when hype ran out and the tech just couldn’t deliver.
today, people are talking about the insane amount of money flowing into ai, and OpenAI is at the center of it.
their intercompany investments have now topped $1 trillion, which is more than double their own $500B valuation.
understandably, everyone’s been wondering whether we’re stuck in a massive bubble that’s bound to pop.
eventually, investors will start demanding returns and want their money back.
but, the momentum of AI research will be hard to stop.
the knowledge is not gatekept, open-source models can’t be taken away, and many capable models don’t need to be run on supercomputers.
previously, the research promised tangible results but failed to deliver.
now? we have chatbots that are beating humans on major benchmarks like math and coding, agentic workflows can handle most entry level jobs, and the video and voice models aren’t only fooling the elderly…
on top of this, we’re not limited by hardware.
it’s roughly 10 million times more powerful in flops than during the last AI winter.
so the issue isn’t about technological promise anymore.
the problem is money.
but money has nothing to do with whether the research continues.
back then, ai research was locked in a few university labs. now, the knowledge is everywhere.
back then, if a project died, the work died with it. now, open-source models can't be taken back.
back then, ai was a niche academic field of study. now, it’s integrated into millions of products we all use daily.
you can't uninvent this. the bubble will burst, but the technology isn't going anywhere.