If you were around in the late 90s, or if you have ever seen a documentary with people wearing khakis and excitement, you know that the early internet had its own spectacular bubble. The .com bubble exploded like a piñata full of company stock and shattered dreams. People honestly believed every idea, no matter how weird or useless, was going to be the next big thing because it had the word 'internet' attached to it. I personally worked for an internet radio station because radio was still huge back then and everyone figured it would just make the move to the “Information super-highway”. Meanwhile, the things that actually shaped the future were the ones nobody saw coming. Instant messaging, for example. In 1999 the idea that humans would voluntarily type messages to each other seemed ridiculous. And look at us now. You probably typed something today that could have been solved with a phone call, but here we are.
That’s what bubbles do. They clear the stage. They show you what was hype and what was real. They burn the money, the noise, the bad ideas and leave the actual technology standing.
AI is no different. Right now everyone is throwing billions at whatever their personal AI dream is. AI search. AI groceries. AI toothbrushes. AI girlfriends. Companies are shoving AI into products that absolutely do not want AI in them and hoping something sticks. This happens when a new technology moves too fast for anyone to properly understand what it is or what it’s actually for. So instead of figuring that out, everyone bets on everything. And just like every casino on Earth, most people lose.
So yes, the AI bubble will burst. And it should. It needs to. It’s how you separate the tools that matter from the toys that were never going to survive outside a PowerPoint deck. The burst isn’t the end of the industry. It is the beginning of clarity.
When the dust settles, you finally get to see which parts of AI are actually stable enough and useful enough to stay. Just like the .com crash didn’t kill the internet, the AI crash won’t kill AI. It will kill the nonsense around AI. It will kill the hype companies that thought generating 400 million low quality images a day was a business model. It will kill the products built on vibes and venture capital instead of utility.
And once all that noise is gone, you’ll be left with the real shape of what AI is going to be in our lives. Not the fantasy. Not the fear mongering. Not the “robots will take my job unless I scream on Reddit” narrative. The actual thing.
So don’t panic about the bubble. The bubble is the easy part. The interesting part is what survives after the burst.
