Mina Kimes

It certainly, if this happens the next 18 months, transforms the 2028 election picture because any incumbent party running on an economic procession is facing an enormous risk.

Or it's not a bubble.

And for it to not be a bubble, when these companies are spending $700 billion a year, requires that the AI companies make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the next 24 months.

That would be the fastest growing business in history.

And already...

By some measures, OpenAI and Anthropic are the fastest businesses to take their annualized run rate to $30 billion collectively.

They're already maybe the fastest growing businesses in modern capitalism.

So if that happens, if the revenue actually does keep up with the spending...

I mean, for this economy to find half a trillion dollars per year in extra spending that's going to something that's competing with labor, well, that's the biggest story of the decade.

So from my standpoint, there's no off-ramp here for AI being the most important story of the decade.

It's either a bubble in which case you have to pay attention or it's not a bubble in which case you have to pay attention.

I think, Derek, what I find so tricky about the bubble or not question and like the actual economic impact, which goes back as a business journalist was something I thought about a lot.

I didn't work at Fortune during the dot com, but we had all of the issues from that period prominently displayed the pets dot com.

And then I did join during the financial crisis, which is a very different kind of bubble.

I think what I find so tricky here is if AI and the actual impact on the technology is more akin to what they call a normal technology, right?

There's the famous piece that I think it was in the Columbia Review written about AI being normal technology.

If it's neither personal computing in terms of being a transformative, completely revolutionary thing that's going to affect everything and make things better, but it's also not NFTs where it's just, you know, bullsh**t.

If it's somewhere in the middle, which is kind of where I land based on my reading, but valuations right now in the markets are so out of whack.

What does that actually mean for the next 10 years, both from an economic perspective, certainly, but also an industry perspective, right?

Like if this thing is actually useful and it's important and it's threatening, but it's not that, what does that mean if we've so dramatically overvalued?