Investors, engineers, and skeptics are clashing over whether AI’s golden age is ending before it truly began.
Scroll through X for sixty seconds and you’ll trip over a fresh hot take about artificial intelligence. But in the last three hours, something shifted: the cheerleaders went quiet and the critics got loud. Suddenly everyone is asking the same question—have we reached peak AI hype? Below, we unpack the arguments, the stakes, and why your timeline is on fire.
The Chart That Broke the Camel’s Back
Spencer Hakimian, a venture investor with a knack for viral data-viz, dropped a simple line graph at 9:12 a.m. UTC. It showed AI-related stock indices sliding for four straight weeks. The caption read, “The air is leaking out faster than we thought.”
Within minutes, the post racked up 2,400 likes and 600 quote tweets. Gergely Orosz, ex-Uber engineer turned newsletter sage, retweeted it with the blunt addendum: “We’re funding AI mattresses now. Peak absurdity confirmed.”
The subtext? Investors once threw money at anything labeled AI. Today, they’re asking for revenue, not roadmaps. That pivot from blind faith to hard numbers is why your feed feels different.
From Moonshots to Mattress Startups
Remember when a smart ring that tracks your REM cycles raised $50 million? Or the AI-powered toothbrush that promised to optimize your brushing angle? Those headlines now read like parody.
Critics argue the funding flood turned into a sprinkler system for half-baked ideas. Proponents counter that experimentation is the price of breakthroughs—every revolutionary tech looks silly at first.
Yet even insiders admit the bar has moved. One VC told me, “We used to ask, ‘Can it scale?’ Now we ask, ‘Will anyone pay?’ That single question is bursting more bubbles than regulation ever could.”
What Happens After the Confetti Settles
History offers two paths. Path one: the dot-com crash of 2000 wiped out paper tigers and left Amazon and Google standing. Path two: the crypto winter of 2018 froze ICO nonsense but birthed real DeFi infrastructure.
AI could follow either script. Skeptics warn of mass layoffs, zombie startups, and a public backlash that chills legitimate research. Optimists predict a cleansing fire that redirects capital toward climate modeling, drug discovery, and other life-or-death use cases.
The wildcard? Regulation. If governments step in with strict liability for overpromising, the hype cycle may end with courtroom drama instead of a gentle correction.
Your Move in the Next 90 Days
Whether you’re an investor, founder, or curious onlooker, three actions matter now.
1. Audit your AI exposure—stocks, ETFs, even that SaaS subscription promising 10x productivity.
2. Follow the money flows; when Series B rounds start shrinking, the dominoes begin to fall.
3. Place small, calculated bets on companies solving boring but valuable problems—think fraud detection, not AI toothbrushes.
The loudest voices on X will keep swinging between euphoria and despair. Your job is to surf the middle—curious, skeptical, and ready to move when the dust settles.
