Derek Thompson

In the 20th century, radio was a bubble.

The dawn of automobiles and aviation companies, also quite bubblicious.

In short, if AI's boosters are right with their comparison of AI to the greatest technology of the last 150 years, their own analogy anticipates that their product too will pass through a calamitous crash on the way to changing the world.

This should absolutely scare you if you care about the US economy.

Half of GDP growth comes from infrastructure spending on AI, on data centers, chips, and energy.

More than half of stock market appreciation in the last few years comes from companies associated with AI.

If you open up the hood of these biggest companies, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, AI infrastructure spending, or CapEx, accounts for, you guessed it, nearly half of their revenue.

If the AI spending project blows up in the next few years, as our next guest says it might, the implications for technology, the economy, and politics would be immense.

Paul Kudrowski is an investor and writer.

Today we talk about the AI boom, how it works, who's paying for it, and how they're financing it.

We put the AI build out in historical context, and then we spend a great deal of time walking through what could go wrong and when it might go wrong.

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plain English.

Paul Kudrowski, welcome to the show.

Well, you should know your newsletter doesn't just go out to hedge funds.

It also goes out to podcast hosts, which is one reason why you're on this show.

Yes.

One thing I find so interesting about your analysis is that artificial intelligence is sometimes talked about as being the technology of the future.

And I'm trying to ring the bell very loudly that AI is the most important economic phenomenon of the present.

It is here.