by Doc – Owner, Founder, I Use a Ton of AI and I’m Still Glad This Thing Is Popping
Just putting this here so I can say “I told you so“. I knew, as soon as ChatGPT released during my time in law school and it was procuring hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and the media was celebrating that it would replace lawyers (fun fact: it couldn’t then, and it can’t now) that this would be an economic bubble. I have a bachelor’s in Economics and another in Finance, and I specialized in bubbles throughout history in my Economics studies. I know a bubble when I see it, and pouring hundreds of years’ worth of investment into a company with no foreseeable revenue stream large enough to turn a profit is a bubble. To be fair, it was obvious enough that anyone could have seen it was a bubble.
In real life, I give presentations to groups of businessmen on some of the aspects of the economy around the sector in which I’m employed, and one of those presentation sets was around AI and its financial future. Let me tell you: after those presentations, every time without fail I’d have several of the old fogeys who made their millions in banking come up to me and tell me “you’re darn right son, this AI thing is a train and I don’t know when it’ll crash, but it’ll crash”. These are guys who are far smarter and more in-the-know than I am, so I’m not too high on my own supply when I say I saw it coming.
Well, over the last few months we’ve had:
- Colossal tech sector stock drops, including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Micron with many drops of up to 20% of value being wiped off the map
- Private equity-funded AI ventures like Character.ai shutting down completely due to low customer revenues and high expenses
- Anthropic losing a hundred billion dollars in 2026 in operating costs over revenue
Stock prices fluctuate and businesses sometimes handle themselves poorly, but if there is real economic viability to be found in AI you’d anticipate it would be in Anthropic, the flagship model makers of the world. Anthropic’s had the worst quarterly report it’s ever had, which is really something when nearly all of its quarterly reports have been the worst quarterly report its ever had. There is simply no viability in AI.
(I know that the American midterm elections played a role in it, and the Democrats won big – and their extremely anti-data center policies are a factor too, but that’s not where I’m going with this).
Part of this is because of how businesses were trying to deploy AI: they wanted to use AI as labor replacement, so they wouldn’t have to pay human beings instead. It’s shockingly uncreative, to be honest. I’d have expected that businesses would be using AI for more creative things, like selling personalized advertising hyper-specific to the individual, or building on existing established products like a Tamagotchi companion. Instead the idiot finance bros in charge of these things said “well, payroll is expensive, let’s replace that” and took their thinking caps off then and there.
AI is most profitable – or rather, least unprofitable – in the sectors where extremely precise outputs are required, such as software engineering and the legal sphere, but as an attorney myself I can tell you that AI is nowhere near good enough to replace a human at it.
When AI comes back into the world at a broad scale, and mark my words that it will come back just like how the internet did after the dot-com bubble, it’ll be most effectively introduced as a mass data interpreter assisting human judgment. Programmers will use it to spot bugs, lawyers will use it to do a lot of the grunt work that lawyers have to do like checking citation forms and page numbers, but you’re not going to see AI replacing the unique creative work that businesses have been trying to replace. At least, I have faith that you won’t see it at first.
