Ah, the difference between financials viewed by a public relations person and by an MBA. A striking difference.
24 July 2025 – – Edward Zitron has written a (very) long essay titled “The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble”.
Yes, long. About 14,000 words or so. The length makes clear that considerable work by the author and/or his assistants went into compiling the numeric data about investments by big outfits in artificial intelligence.
The John Milton essay Areopagitica contains about 16,000 words. This puts the cited article squarely in the readership target of an educated readership in 1644. Like Milton’s screed, “The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble” is a polemic.
And as a word of introduction, Edward Zitron is an English technology writer, podcaster, and public relations specialist. He is a major (often quoted) critic of the technology industry, particularly of artificial intelligence companies and the 2020s AI boom. We met about 12 years ago when I was the ripe old age of 61 and he was the ripe young age of 27. A reader had forwarded one of my acerbic, cynical posts about technology and he emailed me saying “You and I are in the same page”. Over the years I have quoted many of his pieces.
He doesn’t hold back. As he notes:
But this isn’t going to be saccharine, or whiny, or simply worrisome. I think at this point it’s become a little ridiculous to not see that we’re in a bubble. We’re in a god damn bubble, it is so obvious we’re in a bubble, it’s been so obvious we’re in a bubble, a bubble that seems strong but is actually very weak, with a central point of failure.
I am alarmed. Alarm is not a state of weakness, or belligerence, or myopia. My concern does not dull my vision, even though it’s convenient to frame it as somehow alarmist, like I have some hidden agenda or bias toward doom. I profoundly dislike the financial waste, the environmental destruction, and, fundamentally, I dislike the attempt to gaslight people into swearing fealty to a sickly and frail psuedo-industry where everybody but NVIDIA and consultancies lose money.
I also dislike the fact that I, and others like me, are held to a remarkably different standard to those who paint themselves as “optimists,” which typically means “people that agree with what the market wishes were true.” Critics are continually badgered, prodded, poked, mocked, and jeered at for not automatically aligning with the idea that generative AI will be this massive industry, constantly having to prove themselves, as if somehow there’s something malevolent or craven about criticism, that critics “do this for clicks” or “to be a contrarian.”
I am not going to create an abstract of the write-up. Impossible. Please read it. It is a Masterclass in narrative with statistical back-up.
However, I will summarize his major points:
• He critiques the generative AI boom, arguing it is an unsustainable financial and technological bubble driven by hype rather than profitability or utility.
• He contends that companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta have spent over $560 billion on AI infrastructure with little to no return, while only NVIDIA profits from the GPU demand.
• Zitron dismantles comparisons to past innovations like AWS (Amazon Web Services), noting that generative AI lacks infrastructure value, scalability, and viable business models.
• He criticizes AI “agents” as misleading marketing for underperforming chatbots and highlights that nearly all AI startups are unprofitable.
• The illusion of widespread AI adoption is, according to Zitron, a coordinated market fantasy supported by misleading press and executive spin.
• The industry’s fragility, he warns, rests entirely on continued GPU sales.
Zitron concludes with a call for accountability, asserting that the current AI trade endangers economic stability and reflects a failure of both corporate vision and journalistic scrutiny.
Do work through the essay. Make it your weekend read.
Most of my readers accept, like I do, that large technology outfits have a presumed choke-hold on smart software. The financial performance of the American high technology sector needs smart software to be “the next big thing”. My view is that offering negative views of the “big thing” are likely to be greeted with the same negative attitudes.
Consider John Milton, blind, assisted by fellow poets/writers, working on a Latinate argument against censorship. He published Areopagitica as a pamphlet – and no one cared in 1644. Screeds never lead. If something bleeds, it gets the eyeballs.
My view of Zitron’s piece is:
• PR expert analysis of numbers is way different from MBA expert analysis of numbers. The gulf, as validated by the Hater’s Guide, is wide and deep and proved.
• PR professionals will not make AI succeed or fail. The palpable need to make probabilistic, hallucinating software “work” is truly important, not just to the companies burning cash in the AI crucibles, but to the U.S. itself. AI is important. But Donald Trump’s press announcement yesterday on the U.S. AI *vision* is so mythical it defies belief. More on that later today in a separate post.
• The fear of failure is creating a need to shovel more resources into the infrastructure and code of smart software. Haters may argue that the effort is not delivering, but believers have way, way too much skin in the game to quit. They are screwed. Not much shames the Tech Bros, but failure comes pretty close to making these wizards realize that they, too, put on pants the same way as other people do.
Bottom line? Zitron’s piece is important as an example of 21st-century polemicism:
• Will Mr. Zuckerberg stop paying millions of dollars to import AI talent from China?
• Will evaluators of the AI systems deliver objective results?
• Will a big-time venture firm with a massive investment in AI say, “AI is a flop”?
The answer to each of these questions is “No”.
AI is here. Whether it is any good or not is irrelevant. Too much money has been invested to face reality. PR professionals can do this; those people writing checks for AI are going to just go forward. Failure is not an option. Talking about failure is not an option. Thinking about failure is not an option.
Thus, there is a difference between how a PR professional and an MBA professional views the AI spending. Never the twain shall meet.
As Milton said in Areopagitica :
A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another, than the charge and care of their religion.
And the religion for AI is money.