When the AI Bubble Met Reality (And My Super Fund)
Right, so there I was this week, watching over a trillion dollars evaporate from Big Tech stocks like water down a drain, and I had one of those moments where you’re simultaneously vindicated and absolutely terrified. You know the feeling? When you’ve been quietly skeptical about something everyone else was losing their minds over, and then reality catches up?
The AI bubble is showing some serious cracks. Not popping yet—let’s be clear about that—but definitely making some ominous creaking sounds. A trillion dollars wiped off Big Tech valuations is apparently just “a bit of volatility” these days. Which tells you everything you need to know about how detached from reality this whole situation has become.
What really caught my attention in the discussions around this sell-off wasn’t just the numbers—though those are eye-watering enough—but the almost palpable sense of “oh shit, maybe we got a bit carried away.” The fascinating part? Apple, which everyone was mocking for completely fumbling their AI rollout, ended up being less exposed to the downturn precisely because they half-arsed it. There’s something beautifully ironic about that. They marketed “Apple Intelligence” with all the fanfare of a new iPhone launch, it failed to materialize, and now they’re sitting pretty while everyone else is panicking. Accidentally brilliant, or just lucky? Probably a bit of both.
Look, I’ve been banging on about this for a while now. The AI hype has always felt like one of those moments where everyone collectively decided to ignore the laws of physics—or in this case, economics. Someone in the discussion put it perfectly: it’s not about whether the technology is impressive (it is), but whether the investment required to make it consistently useful actually justifies the returns. And increasingly, the answer seems to be “not really.”
The thing that really gets under my skin is how this plays out for regular people. Not the tech bros with their stock options, but the developers, the support staff, the people who’ve been told their jobs are secure because their company is “leading the AI revolution.” When these bubbles burst—and they always do—it’s not the executives who suffer. They’ll land softly on their golden parachutes. It’s the workers who get “right-sized” to appease shareholders.
Someone mentioned that for every 1% increase in unemployment, there are roughly 40,000 additional deaths. I don’t know if that specific statistic holds up, but the broader point is undeniable: when the economy tanks, real people suffer real consequences. It’s not just numbers on a screen.
And let’s talk about what we’ve sacrificed for this AI gold rush. The power consumption alone is staggering. These models are drinking up electricity and water at rates that would make a climate scientist weep. All so we can have chatbots that confidently tell us things that are completely wrong, but sound plausible. It’s like we’ve built a massively expensive machine to generate Dr. Always-Wrong on an industrial scale.
The timing of this is particularly nasty too. We’ve got tariff wars looming, consumer spending on non-essentials has dropped off a cliff, and foreign investment in the US is declining. The AI bubble isn’t happening in isolation—it’s just one more domino in a line of dominos that are all wobbling simultaneously. The dotcom bubble was mostly contained to tech companies. This one? This one’s got its tentacles in everything. Nearly half the market is tethered to AI either directly or indirectly.
There’s a part of me that wants to see these overinflated valuations come crashing down. These companies have been playing fast and loose with reality for too long, burning through capital and resources like there’s no tomorrow, while laying off thousands of workers to maintain their margins. The hubris has been breathtaking.
But then I remember that when this properly unravels—and it will—it won’t just be the guilty who pay. It’ll be people like those I work with in IT, people trying to pay mortgages in one of the most expensive cities in the world. It’ll be the grad who just landed their first proper job, or the mid-career developer who’s been too busy keeping systems running to notice the ground shifting beneath them.
The smartest play might actually be what Apple accidentally stumbled into: wait it out, let everyone else burn through their cash, and then cherry-pick what actually works when the dust settles. Not exactly revolutionary thinking, but then again, sometimes the boring approach is boring for a reason—it works.
What we really need is a conversation about what we actually want technology to do for us. Because right now, it feels like we’re building incredibly expensive solutions to problems that either don’t exist or could be solved much more simply. And we’re doing it at tremendous cost—financial, environmental, and social.
The optimistic take? Maybe this correction will force some much-needed pragmatism back into the tech industry. Maybe companies will stop throwing billions at moonshots and start focusing on things that actually improve people’s lives in measurable ways. Maybe we’ll get a bit more honesty about what AI can and can’t do, rather than breathless marketing about how it’s going to revolutionize everything.
The pessimistic take? We’ll lurch from this bubble into the next one, learning absolutely nothing, while regular people continue to bear the brunt of our collective inability to resist get-rich-quick schemes dressed up in technological jargon.
Either way, keep an eye on your super. This ride’s probably going to get bumpier before it gets smoother.