The Rot-Com Bubble
We recorded 12 claims from this post. 12 can’t be checked. 2 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (12)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“And now, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office — the nation’s privacy watchdog, with powers to impose steep fines on violators — is probing whether the technology presents an unacceptable risk to consumers. Which, as anyone with a modicum of common sense can confirm, it does.”
Our reading: Microsoft Recall presents an unacceptable risk to consumers.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“It's the same reason that Sundar Pichai and Liz Reid are forcing generative AI into Google Search even as it actively misinforms their customers, recommending people introduce glue and rocks to their diet, claiming former U.S. President Barack Obama is a muslim, and regurgitating stories from satirical news outlet The Onion as indisputable fact.”
Our reading: Sundar Pichai and Liz Reid are forcing generative AI into Google Search, even as it actively misinforms their customers, for the same reason Zuckerberg pushes it: the hope of getting more hyper-growth.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Every single company chasing the generative AI dragon is hoping that it's the next Amazon Web Services — the ubiquitous cloud product that went from a side project to a bigger revenue-driver than Amazon's store, and today underpins much of the Internet — because it sort of, kind of seems like it's "the next big thing in cloud," even if it doesn't actually seem to do anything useful, let alone incredible.”
Our reading: Generative AI does not appear to do anything useful, despite companies hoping it will be the next AWS.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“On top of that, nobody really seems to be able to explain why or how generative AI is the next big thing.”
Our reading: Nobody really seems to be able to explain why or how generative AI is the next big thing.
No horizon
Qualifier: really seems
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“They can generate images, quickly query datasets (albeit with no guarantees of accuracy), and craft poetry, but there is no endearing reason to pick up one of them every day and use them.”
Our reading: LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude can generate images, quickly query datasets (with no guarantees of accuracy) and craft poetry, but there is no endearing reason to pick one up and use it every day.
No horizon
Qualifier: no guarantees of accuracy (applies to dataset queries)
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“The use cases they enable are neither exciting nor ubiquitous, nor are they, if we're honest, anything like what tech executives are trying to sell us, and the problem might not be that it's useless, but that as a piece of technology, it just isn't a hyper-growth market or industry-changer, no matter how many hundreds of billions we put into it.”
Our reading: The problem with generative AI might be not that it is useless but that, as a technology, it just isn't a hyper-growth market or industry-changer, no matter how many hundreds of billions are put into it.
No horizon
Qualifier: the problem might ... be
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“Sam Altman isn't asking Microsoft for a $100 billion supercomputer because generative AI is going to get better — he's doing it because what we have today isn't the world-changing boondoggle that the tech industry needs it to be, and his only prospect of fulfilling the lofty promises he’s made is with a tech industry equivalent of the Marshall Plan.”
Our reading: Altman seeks a $100 billion supercomputer from Microsoft not because generative AI will improve, but because current AI is not world-changing and massive spending is his only way to meet his promises.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“For the best part of 15 years we've assumed that the tech industry would always have something up its sleeves, but what's become painfully apparent is that the tech industry might have run out of big, sexy things to sell us, and the "disruption" that tech has become so well-known for was predicated on there being markets for them to disrupt, and ideas that they could fund to do so.”
Our reading: It has become painfully apparent that the tech industry might have run out of big, sexy things to sell, and the disruption tech is known for depended on there being markets to disrupt and ideas to fund.
No horizon
Qualifier: might have run out
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“The Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin both raised incredible sums of capital based on the vaguest of ideas — that people feel overwhelmed by their smartphones — to build products that range from extremely bad to potentially fraudulent, failing to build a product that nobody asked for based on some combination of ignorance and ambivalence.”
Our reading: The Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin raised incredible sums of capital on the vaguest of ideas to build products that range from extremely bad to potentially fraudulent.
No horizon
Qualifier: potentially (applies to fraudulent)
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“He’s the archetypal Rot-Com CEO — an unqualified lobbyist pretending to be a technologist and abusing anyone he needs to in the pursuit of growth.”
Our reading: Sam Altman is the archetypal growth-obsessed CEO, an unqualified lobbyist posing as a technologist.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Conditional forecast
“When the bubble bursts, I imagine these firms will be absorbed by the massive tech companies that have put billions of dollars into them in exactly the same way that Microsoft absorbed Inflection, quietly hiding their shameful failures and repurposing the massive compute investments to bolster the already-existent cloud infrastructure.”
Our reading: When the AI bubble bursts, OpenAI and Anthropic will probably be absorbed by the big tech companies that invested in them, as Microsoft absorbed Inflection.
No horizon
Only if: when the AI bubble bursts
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“I just don't think that anyone in big tech is prepared for the bubble to burst.”
Our reading: He doesn't think that anyone in big tech is prepared for the bubble to burst.
No horizon
Qualifier: I just don't think
Held from this post (2)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.