David Uberti

The picture the Citrini report painted of the future was bleak.

We described it as a doomsday report, and very much so it was.

In the scenario that they outlined, there was something like 10.2% unemployment across the United States, which is worse than what it was in the depths of the Great Recession.

Basically, the question is not whether, like, AI is bearish or bullish for the economy, is that what if it's so bullish that it becomes bearish?

Pretty soon after the market opened on Monday morning, a lot of stocks that we follow in the software space in particular were all flashing red on our screens.

And when something across the entire sector is moving in the same direction, it tends to mean something big is happening.

I think it really articulated a lot of existing fears that people have about artificial intelligence.

I think people who think a lot about this space and the uncertainty around it are looking for ways to understand it.

And this definitely tapped into that vein.

There's a lot of questions about AI companies overinvesting in AI, basically throwing billions upon billions of dollars into data center construction, chips, and more, and that all of that wouldn't actually pan out.

But over the last couple of months or so, there's been a vibe shift of sorts, and it's shifted more.

from this idea that there's a bubble that might burst to this idea that AI might actually pan out.

I mean, when you see people like me who are able to go into Claude with no previous coding experience and do in a couple of hours what trained software engineers would take much longer to do, traditionally speaking, I mean, that's a pretty big development.

And it raises the question of, you know, how quickly can people spin up new pieces of software?

It wouldn't take the type of massive investment that you'd have from a traditional software company that takes billions upon billions of dollars to do this stuff.

The idea being that it's actually much cheaper to do this now.

There's been this sort of deer-in-the-headlights moment on Wall Street of what people should do, and it has left the market in this very herky-jerky, trigger-happy mode.

So it just sort of speaks to how this particular sub-stack post played into an existing trend, and in many cases exacerbated that trend.

So Citrini Research is a small research firm.

They do macro and stock research, which they have published on Substack for the last couple of years or so.