But what ARE these investments right now? It seems to me they are well 
established companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google. NVIDIA has existed 
and will exist should AI revenue dry up, just like it outlasted Ethereum 
mining. 

The new players aren’t yet public companies. OpenAI has a longer path to 
profitability, but Anthropic (technical users) is already making good progress 
@ $7B. AI has already penetrated education and will likely spread more. People 
will become dependent on it like they are dependent on cars. 

From: Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Prof David West 
<[email protected]>
Date: Monday, November 17, 2025 at 5:14 AM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The coming AI crash-worse than the Dot Com stock 
collapse? 

Marcus and Jon are not incorrect. I do see a problem that they do not, the fact 
that the vast majority of users/adopters of AI are dramatically less 
technologically compentent than either of these gentlemen. The manager that is 
positive that AI will eliminate most if not all of his human employees, the 
student using an LLM to "cheat," the social media addicts taken with the latest 
AI fad bots, etc. etc. almost certainly will become disillusioned and turn away 
from AI. 



Perhaps more importantly, all the capitalists who see immediate—not long 
term—return on investment are not going to remain invested. Lot's of other 
peoples money will be lost as a byproduct. 



The market of Jon Marcuses is not large enough to sustain all the current 
investment. Maybe one large AI company will survive (ala Amazon that lost tons 
of money for a long long time). 



davew 





On Sun, Nov 16, 2025, at 3:51 PM, Jon Zingale wrote: 

I mostly agree with Marcus' sentiment. The dot com analogy may be apt, but it 
also smells too easy an analog. I find the K-shaped AI adoption to be bizarre. 
Personally, I do not believe LLMs, nor any particular architecture, to be the 
be-all-end-all. I suspect we will see a transition away from throwing money at 
developing the most general form and a move toward more idiosyncratic 
instantiations. For instance, I continue to think that Deepmind did meaningful 
work going the RL path with AlphaGo/Atari games and it has yet to come to my 
attention what happens when Transformers attempt to replicate these successes. 
Almost every LLM I have met is really really bad at go. This said, AI in their 
current form, and from this perspective, has been here for a decade. Some have 
adopted it and use it to surprising effect, others treat LLMs as nothing more 
than a robust database querying language. What people do with it and how they 
perceive it will undoubtedly have an impact. In the meantime, I am excited to 
see what happens as programmers learn to use formal type theories as pidgins 
and LLMs become more amenable to compositionality. 


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