Totally get it. The content generation capability is… an adjustment. We humans don’t “throw the book at it” every time in conversation. AI does. It’s overwhelming even when I asked for it!
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Those are market caps, running at P/E ratios of 50, n/a (because of losses), and 255 respectively.
The internet was real. Cisco was real. In 1998 it had a P/E of 40, which one source says went to almost 200. Once it fell it has never recovered, adjusted for inflation, in the succeeding 25 years.
AOL was real, it was profitable, and then it collapsed.
Microsoft was real, it was software and internet, and it took 17 years to come back after the dot.com fiasco.
Yahoo!, Netscape, MapQuest, and lots of others were real, and fell hard and fast. Heck, Amazon took a decade to reach the same share price it had at the peak in the late 90’s. eBay was luckier, it only took them three years.
Nobody is saying AI isn’t real, Tesla isn’t real, NVDA isn’t real. Some of us are saying that they’re farther out over their skis than current assumptions justify. Bubble are real, right up until they’re not.
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Historical Parallels
Dot-Com Bubble (1999-2002):
- Cisco peaked at 35x sales, fell 89% over 2.5 years
Qualcomm fell 80% despite fundamental business strength
Recovery to peak valuations took 15+ years
Cloud Infrastructure Bubble (2021-2022):
- Cloud stocks (SNOW, NET, DDOG) fell 60-75% despite strong growth
Even AMZN and MSFT fell 50% and 35% respectively
High growth doesn’t immunize against multiple compression
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I mean, that’s sort of the main problem, in microcosm - right? AI can do some incredible stuff - but it’s off by just enough that it’s not entirely convenient (or reliable) to just work.
That’s why so many companies report that current AI products don’t really improve their worker efficiency. AI can’t just do the thing for you. It can do most of the thing, but the part of the thing it doesn’t do ends up taking a lot of time.
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More than 25 years have passed. You guys keep on crying about Cisco and old examples. Keep crying.
Meanwhile, an entire generation has gotten rich slowly, funded their kids education, healthcare and retired comfortably. Now the AI and Crypto investors are accumulating wealth.
TL:DR
Please don’t post paragraph after paragraph of AI “stuff”.
DB2
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Artificial ‘Intelligence’ R&B Persona Scores $3M Deal
Xania Monet, an AI-crafted R&B persona operated by Mississippi poet Telisha Jones, has landed a reported $3 million record deal from Hallwood Media after a rapid rise on streaming platforms and Billboard charts. Her five-song catalog has attracted millions of on-demand streams and generated industry attention as labels weighed bids for the project.
The signing has intensified an already heated debate over AI in music, with performers and industry groups warning that generative systems trained on existing catalogs could undermine creators, complicate copyright and royalty flows, and devalue years of human craft. High-profile artists voiced fierce objections on social media, arguing that AI-driven releases crowd out emerging musicians and raise questions about authorship and fairness.
Business supporters of the deal and Jones’s team point to the music’s authorship of the lyrics and to a blend of human direction with AI production as justification for commercial rights and label investment, while labels and litigators scramble to reconcile contracts with unresolved legal rulings and ongoing lawsuits against AI music platforms. The outcome of those disputes will likely shape whether Xania Monet becomes a template for future releases or a flashpoint that prompts new artificial music business / industry standards and regulation.
DB2
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Elon is paying billions to Nvidia for GPUs to accelerate FSD and Optimus.
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ChatGPT is set to hit 700 million weekly active users, with usage growing 4X year over year.
- OpenAI now counts five million paying business users, up from three million in June, as enterprises and educators embrace artificial intelligence tools.
- The milestone follows news last week that OpenAI secured $8.3 billion from top investors, including Dragoneer Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.
- Anthropic’s significant revenue growth in 2025:
- At the beginning of 2025, Anthropic’s revenue run rate was approximately $1 billion.
- By May 2025, that figure had tripled to a $3 billion run rate.
- The run rate hit $4 billion by July 2025.
- And grew to over $5 billion by August 2025.
- Enterprise customers: Anthropic serves over 300,000 business customers.
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@GDavenport - I noticed that AI thinks CoreWeave is Private. CoreWeave had its IPO in March 2025. Shares started trading @ $40/sh and took off. Price doubled, … tripled, … quadrupled, during the first 2.5 months of trading. Share price subsequently gave up much of its gain (about $90/sh in gains). But, CRWV share price is back over $100/sh again
https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/CRWV
An interesting story from earlier in the month - CoreWeave plans to set up a venture subsidiary to invest in … yup, AI
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4493263-coreweave-launches-ventures-arm-to-invest-in-ai
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Yep. The data from all of those price/market cap statements is dated to the last training run from the markets.
I’d say may/march appears to be the date for most values, but, inexplicably, Palantir has a quote from prior periods.
Even if you believed every aspect of that summary (apology to all who found it long - too long!), much of that continues to be rapidly priced in.
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And how many times were we told on Saul’s board that “this time is different”? “Companies NEED this new technology, it will be the last thing they cut when times get tough”. That aged like sour milk.
I’ll say it again, both of these statements are true: AI is real and useful. AI is a bubble.
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Sure - people are paying some money for AI. And obviously business like Tesla and xAI (to say nothing of GOOG and AAPL and others) are paying a ton of money to NVDA to buy chips.
It’s a question of magnitude. The amount of revenue that AI will have to generate in order to justify the many hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment will have to be beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. That AI will have to yield $2 trillion in revenue within the next five years, which makes that Anthropic number look like pocket change. That’s more than the combined revenue of the Magnificent 7 combined. It’s 5x the entire global subscription software market.
Maybe that happens. But so far, there’s too little apparent increase in productivity on the paid side to make it seem likely. Certainly enough that you can see a few tens of billions in additional revenue coming on line every year or so - but that’s an order of magnitude or two lower than what’s needed to justify how much money is being spent to develop this stuff.
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This is what seperates naysayers from optimists. The careful always err on the side of caution. Old people tend to be more “defeatists”.
Young people tend to be more optimistic and naive, at least until their dreams and hopes are crushed by reality.
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Very True.
Because the tariff policies are 1890 stuff. The 2002 stuff is not appropriate to use for comparison.
1921 maybe.
If the US defaults more like 1929, but the market will slink away not crash immediately.
We are getting false unemployment numbers out of the Red states. We might get false unemployment numbers out of the Federal government. Watch the Blue states’ unemployment numbers. This is going to get horrendous. The Blue states are the majority of the economy.
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Do either of you with your demographic discussions see anyone discussing the actual economics? I am it. Talk econ. Talk what tariffs actually do. Talk about the unemployment and deflation the FED sees on the other side of the horizon. Talk about wishes to default on the debt and strip away the welfare society.
Talk about where to store you money when many financial instutions are gone and there is no FDIC.
Because unless you secure your wealth…well the FDIC was only set up for the day I am talking about. Such days occur.
Start talking $37 tr in debt. Growth of debt per year of $2 tr plus. The coming rapid shrinkage of the tax base. That can only mean default.
Btw the Dems may win in this government shutdown but it will rush the GOP to default on the debt and then take away all the programs.
The la di da days are long gone.
Yes, dreaming big and inventing new things comes with calculated risk and adventure. Life is to be lived.
I guess you don’t recommend US Treasuries as an investment. 
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Old people also have different time horizons - they’re supposed to shift the balance between asset appreciation and asset preservation.
No one here is arguing against optimism in general - just whether it’s warranted in this particular context. Lots of people were very optimistic about blockchain (as distinct from any particular cryptocurrency), and that didn’t turn out especially well for them.
I had a colleague here at the firm who was a thriving real estate attorney but decided that blockchain was the future of all real estate and contracts. He shifted his practice to solely concentrate on the exciting and rapidly emerging area of blockchain law. He was very optimistic, and briefly got the firm to designate a Blockchain group for his new specialty. But it ended up being the worst decision he ever made. We didn’t see contracts and real estate transactions (or really many other transactions) migrating to blockchain, because the arguments that realists (naysayers in your construction) were making ended up being correct. Blockchain didn’t actually solve any real problems in contracts or transactions or real estate title, so it ended up not being adopted to any great degree. He eventually had to give it up and restart his RE practice, though it never really recovered.
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I have no one I hate that much. LOL
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