Derek Thompson

And in the last few days, practically everybody I follow and read seems to agree.

I hate this.

I really hate this.

I don't like feeling like my position on any issue is the same position that everybody else has.

It's not just me wanting to not belong to the team that everyone belongs to.

It's my deep-seated hunch that conventional wisdoms are often more conventional than wise.

And I've recently started to wonder, is there a bubble of people calling AI a bubble?

Today's guest says yes.

Azim Azhar is an investor and the author of the wonderful blog, Exponential View.

And before I introduce Azim, let's review why everybody seems so sure that AI is a bubble today.

Go back to the 1960s.

The Apollo program allocated about $300 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars to get America to the moon between the 1960s and the early 1970s.

The AI build-out requires companies to collectively fund a new Apollo program, not every 10 years, but every 10 months.

The hyperscalers, the big tech companies, and the frontier labs are collectively spending three to $400 billion every single year to bring artificial intelligence to life.

This is the most that any group of companies has ever spent to do just about anything.

The hallmark of a financial bubble is tricky financing.

Once you see companies going into debt or devising creative new financial vehicles to build something without a guaranteed return, you should start to be a little bit concerned.

I think we're clearly already there.

As Kudrowski explained in our previous episode, these hyperscalers are creating what are sometimes called special purpose vehicles, SPVs, like black boxes into which they throw some money and then some private capital firm throws some money and then that black box goes off and build a data center.

The fact that they're already moving AI infrastructure off their books makes me a little bit itchy about the possibility that they don't want investors to see just how expensive this thing is to build.