Are we in an AI bubble?

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Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. In these fully connected episodes where it's just Chris and I without a guest, we like to explore some topics from trending AI news or things that are being discussed in the community. Hopefully we learn along the way and our listeners learn along the way and we help you all level up your AI and machine learning game. I'm Daniel Whitenack, I am CEO at Prediction Guard and I am joined as always by my co host Chris Benson who is a principal AI Research engineer at Lockheed Martin. How you doing Chris?

Hey, doing good today Daniel. Just cruising along, chewing some bubble gum, doing my thing.

We, we both, we both needed a a sugary but not sugary caffeinated drink. I think you've got a PIB0, I've got a CO0.

There you go.

It's been a long day of work and now we get to talk about some fun things. Hopefully we won't pop the AI bubble today, but certainly it's okay.

We'll clean up the situation if we have to.

Yeah, exactly. It's interesting, Chris. I was looking around, of course we're always seeing things or people are forwarding us various things in the news related to AI1.1 this week that I saw was maybe an kind of interesting one with a humanoid looking robot. But I'd rather maybe discuss this, this, this other stuff, which I think a couple of these things that I saw connected. And Chris, a little while ago we kind of did a hot takes and debates type episode. I think today there's certainly on this topic, there are various sides of this topic and, and strong opinions about it and we can just talk through some of those. Certainly there is a debate going on and this is really the question, are we in an AI bubble? Which is seems to be talked about all the time. Like people see something in the news and they're like, oh, we're definitely in an AI bubble. Or people are like, oh, this isn't an actual AI bubble. It's different than maybe the dot com bubble. Chris, you hear similar anecdotes and maybe what is your. Maybe just the general concept of bubble. We're not talking about bubble gum, but.

Yeah, I mean the general notion of a bubble is it's really a financial concept where the valuation of an organization exceeds what its actual value is. In other words, what it's putting out in terms of product and services and the returns that are yielded by those. And so you know, and you know, if you were talking for instance about the dot com bubble and for those of you who may not have, depending on if you're in the younger skew of our audience around 2000 ish and that there was all this Internet craze and rage and hype, not dissimilar from the hype we've been seeing in recent years over AI. And a lot of companies came about and new startups and stuff and they got valued very, very high, but they had very little in some cases no revenue and thus no profits available. And so big valuation by the market with absolutely nothing coming out of them of value. And so there's a point where the market kind of realizes that and corrects and, and the giant dot com, you know, facade came falling down and kind of led into a recessionary. Period around the globe. And so it was kind of a big thing over several years. And so through this entire period of AI buildup that's been a concern that has come up regularly. This is not the first time we've been hearing about AI bubbles and stuff. So I don't think there's a year that's gone by that we've been doing this podcast where it hasn't been raised as an issue. What do you think?

Maybe so, yeah. And I think there is genuine concern because previous bubbles that have burst have actually caused real harm, as you mentioned, whether that's economic kind of recession, certainly it distorts the way people invest or maybe what they invest into, which kind of has an effect potentially on retirement or 401ks. There's, you know, a reduction in trust in, in certain types of organizations or financial institutions or technology companies that, that sort of thing. And it could be companies, it could be assets. Like, you know, a lot of times people talk about crypto as an asset that, you know, or I remember not too long ago talking to tons of people about NFTs, right? And this really chaotic time with, with NFTs and there's a lot of people that lost a lot of, a lot of money in that. So it is a, it is a valid concern. And I think the question that's on people's mind is are we in an AI bubble? And one of the interesting articles that I saw this week, Chris, was that Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome POWELL in the U.S. for those that aren't listening or aren't listening from the U.S. that's the federal, Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell often can kind of anything that's said about the economy by whoever's in this position is taken with a lot of weight because. Well, Chris, you, you may, you may have comments on this, but I, I'm not an economist, but generally it is a, it is a sign of, of at least an intelligent opinion on things where, where there's a lot that's gone on or a direction that, you know, the Federal Reserve wants people to think.

So. So the 2 second background without going off on a track is Jerome Powell and his capacity is responsible for a particular committee at the Federal Reserve. And they are responsible for monetary policy, which the Federal Reserve sets, as opposed to what the President and Congress together set, which is fiscal policy. And, and one of the tools, the largest tool that they mainly do that with is through the setting of interest rates which trickles through the entire economy in a whole bunch of different ways. And I don't want to go into any more depth than that. But they, they thus slow down or speed up the economy to either tackle an underperforming economy or inflation on the opposite side. And they're trying to balance it between the two. And so, yeah, Chairman Powell noted that there was actually revenue associated with AI expenditure and thus it wasn't bubble like in his view. And he is certainly an expert in a lot of ways. I think that there are some other considerations in there, but it's definitely a powerful statement coming from that particular individual.

Yeah. Yeah. The title of the article in Fortune, which we'll link is Powell says that unlike the dotcom Boom, AI spending isn't a bubble. And the quote is, I won't go into particular names, but they actually have earnings. Now, I guess we could speculate on this podcast. I don't know what names he's, he's talking about. I'm assuming it's some of these larger names that would be whatever, OpenAI, anthropic cohere, you know, what, whatever the, the ones are that people would think of. I imagine some of those are quote the names, but he says they sort of actually have earnings. The other interesting piece that I saw, Chris, which is maybe on the other side of this argument, and we can talk maybe after this about, you know, the different ways that people argue that we are or aren't in an AI bubble. But this other one was from the New York Times, which, which is reporting that Nvidia is now worth $5 trillion as it. And this is the quote from the article as it consolidates power in AI boom. So it's the subheading. The AI chip maker has become a linchpin in the Trump administration's trade negotiations with Asia. So there's, there's a, you know, some policy and political angle to this article, but the general idea with the article is that this $5 trillion valuation maybe is, is part of an AI boom. So, yeah, that's certainly interesting.

It is. And I think we're seeing that, you know, going back to those names that were left unsaid, you, you named a few of those names. And, you know, I think any of the large cloud service providers that are offering a collection of AI services probably, you know, round out some of those names. One of the things, one of the distinctions that I think is interesting to, to weigh as we talk about this is the fact that while he noted, meaning Mr. Powell noted that some of these organizations have earnings and we are seeing, you know, that reflected in AI related stocks that are just dominating S&P 500 returns to the, to the degree of about 75% of those returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth. I mean, those are phenomenal numbers when you think about that in terms of percentages of total markets that are out there, you know, or of these at least exchanges that are representing markets. So I mean, that's really shocking. But I think one of the things that, is that, that he did not say, and speaking as someone who has nowhere near the economic expertise of Mr. Powell, but did, did have some university studies in economics that, you know, those, those numbers are concentrated in a tiny fraction of companies overall. And so my question that I would ask is for, for some of those giant companies that are, that are making huge earnings from many, many, many thousands of customers spending huge amounts of money on AI growth. We have also talked about the fact that there is, there's also in the media quite a bit of questioning of ROI on a lot of those AI investments at various companies. And so, you know, if you're the cloud provider making bookus of money, that's great. But if you're one of the companies out there that may be, is spending on that, but maybe not seeing an ROI on that expenditure, that is a different story right there. And so, you know, maybe it's boom for one and a bubble for another. Maybe it's not just a universal bubble, but it depends on who you're talking to to some degree.

Yeah, and I guess that's where maybe this is murky is the, some people might define bubble differently. I think that is one of the kind of key arguments for the kind of affirmative of this, that we are in an AI bubble is this kind of valuations and speculation. I mean, we've highlighted a few stories over time the last couple of years of these crazy valuations where essentially there is an unproven revenue model. So I'm looking at, at one source here that's, that's saying over 50% of VC funding in, in Q2 of this year, 25 went into AI companies. And there's, you know, VC is, is risky of course, as, as an investment model, most of those businesses will fail. That's kind of always expected in, in the AI space. But also this year, just from looking around at different folks, you know, raising these companies are getting much, much higher multiples or higher valuations. So for people that need a reminder, sometimes your company might receive a valuation that's a certain multiple of the revenue that you're bringing in. And so that might be 15, 20, 25 x 30 x plus for an AI company where other companies kind of your normal run of the mill SaaS company in tech that's raising is definitely not raising at those multiples right now. So that would be I guess the argument or an argument for that affirmative. Is these kind of speculation and valuation that's maybe reminiscent of that.com era.

Yeah. By the way, another term just to connect kind of that financial world with what we're talking about in terms of observations is those of you who invest, some of you may have heard the notion of a beta, which is essentially a multiple of valuation against your earnings. And so if you have a very high beta, that's saying you're being valued very high against what your actual real life earnings are. And a lower beta, which would be considered less risky would be that that valuation is not so extravagant. And so I guess, and that's another way of, of looking at this is if you're looking at a company's, you know, portfolio analysis, you know, that some analyst is doing and there might be a beta number attached if you're is that, and this was pointed out in some of the articles, is that the betas of today, while high, are not nearly as high as the betas of the dot com era. And so, you know, that's another sign. Well, you know, is there some bubble maybe? Is it as bad in terms of the sheer speculation of the dot com era? Maybe not. You know, that's one metric by which we can evaluate.

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Yeah, Chris, I think you were starting to get into maybe something we've alluded to, which is the other side, the negative side of saying, no, we're not in a bubble corresponding to this first argument of the speculative investing, which is that, you know, maybe the, the earnings or the kind of business fundamentals or the scale is, you know, the diversification is a bit stronger in this particular time than in the dot com time. So, you know, on the one side, Jerome Powell talking about, talking about real earnings, right? Which is maybe different from some of the dot com era. On the other side, there does seem to be a diversified set of revenue streams in the AI space. So it's not just AI models. For example, there's infrastructure related to this. There's chips, GPUs, and even unique types of chips that are being developed for AI. There's service offerings on top of AI. We've talked a lot on this show about how the service providers, the large consultancies are doing quite well in the AI space. And those things are things that are already scaling, whether that's chips or the service offerings, et cetera, cloud offerings around these things. And I guess this is something I wasn't aware of and Maybe it's connected to what you were talking about before, but this, the magnitude of the investment relative to kind of the GDP is still relatively low compared to other kind of, if you want to think back to actual, you know, other transformative revolutions like railroads or electrification and, and that sort of thing. So this, this kind of counterargument would be. No, there's, there's really something more here in terms of the earnings and business fundamentals with a lot of these AI companies where there's earnings, there's diversification and the magnitude of the investment is, is kind of different.

I think I agree with that though once again on kind of, on the other, if you're countering that just a little bit, then I think that you're going to find that there's a selection of companies that absolutely fit that, that profile that you just outlined and stuff. But I think that there's still also quite a few out there to balance that that have no warnings and stuff like, you know, or very little and that the business model is, is still quite questionable and thus leading into kind of that hype based speculation and stuff. So I think I definitely feel like we're seeing both sides of that and it kind of comes back to something I mentioned at the beginning of the call of like, you know, the, the, the bubble esque nature. If we're, if we're, if we're in that kind of.com Internet period as an event, you know, like as our contextual reference that it doesn't quite fit that and it's, it seems to be very much in like how you're engaged and what your, you know, what your ideas do you have customers, are you providing services and thus have earnings that, that support that versus the ones that are not. And, and I think, you know, we've spent so much time on the show over the years really trying to cut through the hype cycle. Sometimes quite literally, you know, we'll get the, it will get the current year published hype cycle and start talking about some of that. And I think if you're deeply engaged as we and our listeners and the people who listen to the show regularly are, it's probably easier to do that. But I also think that there's probably a lot of folks out there that are doing investing that don't have, that don't have as much, much, you know, knowledge of that. I had a conversation earlier today with someone who was that person and was kind of asking about some stuff and I was kind of doing a little bit of mentoring maybe, but I realized just, you know, that there are a lot of people out there that still really don't know much about it and all they hear is the hype and they, they have very little ability to get through it. So, you know, is if they're looking to invest, it's almost a little bit of a flip of the, of the coin on whether or not they look into the profile that you were just describing or that other one where it's a little bit less substantial.

Yeah, I think it's definitely, definitely good points. I think part of the reason here that things are hard to parse through, which we've also talked about on the show, is just that it's kind of hard to pin down at this point what AI means and what is part of what is actually part of what would be considered the bubble and what is not part of that is there's a lot of companies that are trying to ride the hype cycle, right. And their product really is not AI powered at all, but they feel the pressure to tack on this is an AI powered thing. Maybe they have a, you know, a linear regression model or even a rules based thing and it's say this is AI and they're writing that hype cycle. And so on the one side they're kind of writing that, on the other side there's, you know, very sophisticated, whatever, you know, computer vision systems and other things that maybe are not viewed as part of the AI hype cycle because they're not generative AI or something like that. And so it's kind of hard to tell what fits there. And in addition, no one really knows kind of at the application layer what the kind of end, highest value things that are going to come out of the AI world are going to be. You know, we've talked about this on the show. I certainly don't think it's a general chat interface. There's much more valuable things already in terms of some of the agentic and verticalized things. And so there's a lot of just diversification, both in terms of people trying to ride the wave, but also in terms of defining what is AI and what is not. Because it could range from a chip producer that's making a very unique chip that is specialized for AI workloads all the way to a very thin wrapper on top of the OpenAI API, to a proprietary computer vision model that's taken 20 years to develop, to a SaaS platform that has actually no AI component but is labeled AI because it, they can sell it for more money. Right? So maybe that all of that just feeds into this bubble. But also I think it creates a lot of, a lot of confusion, which may maybe is not, I guess in thinking about it, it's not. It is similar to that.com era because it's like everything related to the web.

Right.

And you did have servers, you did have hardware, you did have kind of websites or platforms and that sort of thing.

Yeah, I mean, even then people were buying hardware and platforms and software and you know, left and right, you know, during that period. But again, the kind of, the winners out of that.com era was a fairly small group of companies, you know, that were, that, that were feeding the folks the, the purchase frenzy during that. And I think that is a, that is a similarity we have to today where you have a small group of companies that are, that are providing a lot of, of capability and stuff. I think, you know, when it comes to the others, you know, in, in that like you just identified just, you know, with the, the AI label being so marketable and yet having almost no meaning because of the, the immense diversity of possibilities that you could apply AI to labeling too, it really comes down to solving business problems that are real business problems as opposed to trying to put an, an AI thing out there. You know, and I think I, I know that the, the you and I in our, in our roles hosting the podcast here, we get pitched by a lot of companies a lot. And so we see a lot of, a lot of different, you know, positions and possibilities out there. And I think, you know, if you look at that, probably the ones that really catch our attention are the ones that aren't the most glammy AI things necessarily in terms of how they're marketing, but where you can really see that they're using these technologies to solve business problems in novel ways that hadn't been addressed by before. And I think, you know, that's probably, you know, the basis for our own way of doing these evaluations. I wonder, you know, how the general population, who is not just living and breathing AI every minute of every day, how they're looking at some of these different things that are coming at them in every advertisement and marketing effort. You know, how do they, how do they tell the difference? You know, I think, I think that has a lot to do with bubbles as well. It's just that inability to understand the difference between a great investment and something that is really, really sketchy and risky and not being able to tell the difference between the two.

Yeah, just, just anecdotally it kind of has Gone. I remember. I don't know if you had this similar experience, Chris, but obviously we've been doing this show for quite some time. We talk about AI here. For the. Most of the time of this podcast, we didn't really talk about AI or AI was not a kind of topic of general, you know, general discussion and was not represented kind of, I don't know, in the environments in which you walk through day to day. Like a airport or something. I remember seeing the first. I think it was an anthropic ad when I was in. I forget what airport. It was an airport in Europe somewhere. And I. And I saw an anthropic ad and I was like, whoa, there's an AI. And you know, I don't live in. I don't live in San Francisco. You go like, San Francisco is different. You go to San Francisco. It's all like, on the billboard is advanced monitoring for your Kubernetes cluster billboard, which, you know, wouldn't work anywhere else in the US but outside of. Outside of San Francisco, it's like you don't see that sort of thing, right? And so I. I thought, oh, man, like, this is crazy now. And that was in, like a major airport in some hub in Europe. And I'm like, okay, well, that makes sense. But I just got back from a trip this morning, and as I was walking through the Indianapolis airport, there were multiple billboards and banners that I saw that all had some AI slant related to a product or service. So it's pervasive now, and it is kind of the soup that we live in.

It is. So as we are trying to navigate that world, I think it's funny, you know, you mentioned how long we've been doing this, and a lot of our listeners that have been with us for years going through this evolution with us are probably seeing similar, you know, takes on this and that they're watching it. But I've also come to realize that there's still quite a massive segment of our general population that is only in these last few months really becoming aware of this stuff and are still trying to take it in early on. And so they are. Suddenly I mentioned that conversation I had earlier today, and that individual said this AI thing seemed to have come out of nowhere. And, you know, that's about as far from my experience as you could possibly be. But it made me realize that that's quite common. And more recently I mentioned that. That my mom in her mid-80s, was. Was now talking about AI and stuff. So times are changing quickly.

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Well Chris, I think one, if we just kind of bring out another argument here that people are making at this time and, and curious to know actually your, your opinion on this. We might, might as well give some of our own opinions or else what else are, what else are we doing here? That seems like fun, but the, one of the, one of the arguments for the fact that we are not in an AI bubble is that the kind of rationale, the structural and economic rationale for AI deployment is, is much deeper than previous bubbles. I think the hyperbolic example would be like crypto maybe, but the fact that AI is already being integrated into enterprise workflows, into even, you know, manufacturing and health care. It's not just kind of a technology that is looking for a application, an interesting technology that's looking for an application, but it is actually being applied and across a variety of industries. The second piece of this would be kind of the tie of AI to a very long lead up of scientific research and deep roots that have been going on since the 60s, 70s, 80s and on, and had all of these things leading up to it, which gives it kind of roots in kind of rigorous science and mathematics and that sort of thing. The technology didn't kind of come out of nowhere similar to kind of the revolution of electrification. Right. People had actually been studying these topics or at least thinking about them for centuries. Right? Thinking about these, these phenomena, even though maybe they weren't fully understood and then kind of there were breakthroughs that created this electrification of the world, right?

It totally, you know, one of the things to your point right there that actually gives me a little bit of confidence maybe that we're not in a classic bubble, at least in the dot com context, is the fact that the fundamental underlying algorithmic technology that we're looking at here today in 2025 as we do the show is actually about 40 years old, is the basis being neural networks. And while we don't use that phrase as much as we used to anymore, we call everything AI these days. But fundamentally the AI that is powering everything that is of significant value of today is fundamentally neural networks that have been enhanced and embellished and designed further and next iteration, that kind of thing. And so we're building on a 40 year history of this particular line of algorithmic technology. And so that's a great point you raised there a second ago there that this is not fly by night. That there has been the majority for me, the majority of my lifetime, this has been around for listeners just as a two second thing for listeners who may not have followed the show for years, because I know I've mentioned this before, but my parents were working on neural networks back in the early 90s and that actually was my first exposure to this when I was in college. And so this is not new stuff, it's evolved. And I think the biggest piece of it is you've had Nvidia's come about able to make GPUs that could support the continuing evolution of the technology. It is thoroughly embedded in a bunch of industries and some implement like anything, some implementations are better than others. But yeah, great point you're making in terms of that this is not a solution in search of a grounding and in search of a market to use it.

Yeah, yeah. And I also tend to agree. Now of course I'm biased on this show and maybe my bias is not that surprising. I think some of the valuations and the way people are treating investment in this area is crazy. Not to say that you can't invest in prediction. Guard and I'll talk to you. But I do think that generally, like there have been many examples of craziness there. At the same time I think that, that those crazy investments are partially founded. Maybe not in kind of the, the earnings or like a proven business model, but in a kind of deeper understanding that this technology is actually shifting how work is done and is fundamentally transformative for many industries. And that actually is going to happen. And so it's not, it's maybe speculative in a certain way, but I think there are real kind of foundations to that speculation that I don't know.

I.

Would almost use the metaphor, it's kind of like when people go out and look for gold or, or oil, right. The concept of gold or oil is known and it's known that there is value if you get this material out of the, out of the ground. Right? But there's speculation and risk in trying to figure out where that is here. It's not like you're trying to discover a new precious metal or a new thing that's not known to anyone, right. You know, this thing exists, it's a matter of finding it. And certainly many people lose a lot of money in that speculation.

Here.

It's, it's similar. There is a kind of known or there is at least a feeling and an intuition that there will be very transformative companies that will be long lasting and this technology will be long lasting and it will be impactful. It's not that, that that's maybe doubted, but the crazy valuations are in some case are driven by that because, you know, who knows who's going to survive this AI craziness? But the technology, it seems, will be kind of pervasive and long lasting and transformative, I think.

So I think I'm going to throw a wild card into the mix here for a moment. And one of the, I think the things that no one really knows where things are going for sure, and we sure talk about it a lot is the fact that at this point you have a lot of, of companies, especially some very large companies such as Amazon, who are doing massive layoffs, you know, and they're doing that on the notion in Amazon's case, 14,000 middle managers. And that's just one, that's just one organization, one very large organization, but one, and this is, is happening in a lot of places is that, you know, we're definitely seeing the replacement efforts by companies to use technology to replace humans in that. And, and this has been something we've talked about for years, you know, certainly coming and that would be happening. And you know, where would the balance be between a synergy between AI and humans and a competition between AI and humans? And so we've had many conversations over the years about this, but you know, we're definitely at that point right now where a lot of companies are beginning to bet on AI technologies. But it's also happening at a time when, as we talked about, some of those ROIs on different efforts are not, are not yielding, you know, meaningful results. And so aside from what happens with that when you have unemployment rising from AI induced layoffs, that will affect the economy too. So there's, it's not just Whether or not the investment in these particular companies is wise or speculative and based on their fundamentals and their earnings, but also as we have groups of folks in the economy being laid off and therefore their purchasing power is reduced, how does that play back in. I've seen a lot in the news about like all of this together, not only the ROI and speculative nature or lack or, you know, whether it's a bubble or not, going back to our kind of original phraseology, but also whether or not this is going to affect work faces. So it's, it is quite a complex thing. And when we look back on dot com, it seemed there were complexities there, but I think the raw speculation of that era made the bubble. It was a little bit more of a black and white thing as you looked back on it historically after we had lived through it and looked back and kind of said, well, yeah, I guess with 2020 hindsight we can see that coming. As we've noted here, it kind of depends on who you are and how you're doing and what you're claiming is your AI and whether you're solving a real business problem on whether or not you're in that bubble group or not in a bubble group. So as we see the mixture pouring through the economy, it will be definitely interesting to see how this plays out in the weeks, months and years ahead here.

Do you think that because we also talked recently on the show about almost the both cognitive and emotional, you know, change and shift or even manipulation that some of these, these systems are doing? You know, across the population, if you look at it, there's people having, you know, romantic relationships with AI systems or, you know, using these systems maybe for therapeutic purposes rather than their therapist. And cognitive load of work is changing because you're, you know, vibe coding and all of these things. So do you think that that sort of cognitive and emotional, almost like lifestyle shift is more impactful with this technology or with something like the dot com era and people kind of all coming.

Online, you know, dot com era was. And sadly I was well into adulthood, you know, as we hit that, you know. You know, for those who don't realize that I'm getting a little bit older than I like to imagine, but like fundamentally we went through the bus because of all the speculation, but eventually everything kind of, you know, we, we did realize what it was going at. It just wasn't on a timeline. And the, in what you could achieve in that short a time given the valuations just wasn't real. But it was real in the long Term. And I think here what we're seeing is something a little bit different in that you weren't having relationships with your, with your ISP at the time. You know, it wasn't that kind of a relationship that you had with that wave of technological innovation. This one, it's a little bit worrisome. Like, I don't believe in vibe coding being a great strategy. Personally. I think that thinking of AI as a pair programming partner is a much sounder way of approaching it in terms of turning out, continuing to turn out very good software products that you understand and that you can maintain over time and that you have humans that, that understand how their business is working. So I'm a little pure vibe coding where someone who doesn't really know what they're doing is just asking the system and then they end up with something, you know. So it kind of depends on what you're doing with it. I see there's also been some research and we may have an episode coming up on it that was done recently about the human dependence on AI causing basically degradation. Like they were measuring brain activity and the subjects that were in this study that were using their AI for everything were showing decreased brain capability over time. And so like, it worries me that we're giving up some of what makes us so wonderfully human at the same time that maybe we're creating a strong dependence that we have in these ways that didn't exist in previous revolutions. So I think that there's a real risk here of, I think how you use AI capabilities today makes a difference on what your own personal human future is going to be. And I very specifically choose how I use AI capabilities in a way that enables me versus kind of creates a crutch for me. So that's, that's kind of how I would answer. That's a little bit roundabout way of answering that. But I think the way you use AI has a lot to do with its long term effect on, on your, your own personal life and as an individual.

Makes sense. Yeah, I think that's a, that's a great way to look at it. Well, as we close out here, Chris, what would you say? Are we in an AI bubble or not? What's your, what's your vote? Yes or no?

I'm going to say no in the classic bubble analogy, I think. And I, I came into this conversation not really knowing. I think it's this us talking it through. So I would say no in the classic bubble context like.com bubble, but yes. And that there might be instead of one big bubble. There might be lots of little bubbles.

Yeah, fizzy, like our, like our pip0 and coke0 that we, that we started with. Talking about the fizz.

Yeah, there you go. The fizzy economy. You heard it here first, folks.

The fizzy AI soup on my end, I would tend to go with the. No, I definitely think that compared to some other technologies and cycles, this is already kind of at a level of utility and permeating many, many enterprises and that sort of thing. And I do think that creates a trickle down of things that we will have to deal with and learn how to cope with, you know, workforce wise and emotionally and otherwise. But yeah, I'll go with no as well. So, so you heard it here, New York Times. You can quote us if you like. We are not in an AI bubble because Dan and Chris said so. I'm glad that. I'm glad that we put that one to rest. Chris.

Yeah. Well, there we go, solving world problems one episode at a time.

Well, I guess until next time we can, we can solve the next world crisis in, in the next episode. Chris, for chatting.

Absolutely. Talk to you next time.

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