"Yes, AI Is a Bubble. There Is No Question."
3/17/20261 hr 10 min
The AI buildout continues to break records, as the hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions of dollars into chips and data centers, even as investors punish their stock prices. But the revenue side of the ledger is showing signs of takeoff. In the last few weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have added billions of dollars of cash, on their way to becoming two of the fastest growing companies in history. Last year, Derek was convinced that AI was on its way to being one of the biggest bubbles in modern capitalism’s history. But the torpid rise of AI agents is starting to change his mind. So he wanted to bring someone on to test his evolving theory. The investor and writer Paul Kedrosky returns to the show to make his own case even more firmly: AI is a bubble, and the evidence is all around us. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Paul Kedrosky Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:05
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Derek Thompson· Host0:49
There's a theory about technology and how it changes the world that I find myself going back to over and over again. Carlota Perez, in her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, proposed that whether it's the railroads or the canals or radio or the internet, what tends to happen is this. Companies get so excited about the prospect of the next big thing that they always overbuild. Spending always races ahead of revenue. What follows is a crash and then a golden age. It's important to say, of course, that the railroads and the internet were both bubbles and life-altering inventions. The bubble and