Aren't you conflating the technical side of it with the economic one?

A bubble doesn't necessarily mean that the the underlying tech/innovation isn't useful. It's a financial and economic phenomenon that is pretty well understood and researched:

- During the hype cycle, investors tend to overestimate the short to mid term effects and underestimate the long term effects.

- It's near impossible to pick the winners in advance, and research has shown that investors underestimate how many losers there will be.

- The financial system/market works very well when there are localized issues with debt. Those get seemingly automatically detected and repaired. But broad increases in credit not so much. Those spread into the whole system in non-obvious and complex ways and destabilize the whole system, which can lead to very large corrections.

etc.

Thanks for clearing this up, as I don't work in that area.

Personally I'd say that it's a problem that prices of consumer goods go up that far to satisfy this part of the market. We could need a more sensible way to advance the technology.

Two things can be true at the same time:

- AI is a genuinely transformative technology on par with the internet and on track to probably surpass the smartphone

- The inflated valuations, the circular flows of money (or "money"), and the financial cup-shell game mean that the players of the game are all a few bad weeks away from catastrophe. This is, of course, nothing new for SV -- but the scale this time is new. Some believe it will soon collapse -- "bubble," thus.

> Anyone working this stuff...

Things look different from within a bubble, you need an outside perspective.

Correct. This place is a cesspool.