The Story Hasn’t Caught Up
AI may not be a bubble at all. This time, technology is ahead of our stories—and human imagination is struggling to catch up.
Everyone keeps asking me if we are in an AI bubble… actually, we have the opposite problem.
During the dot-com era, the stories were ahead of the technology. People imagined what Amazon, eBay and PayPal could do! They imagined what could come next and valuations for everything skyrocketed. Great story. The technology just couldn’t deliver it yet. The future story had been sold but it could not be built in time. Poof! Bubble bursts.
That’s how you get a bubble.
AI feels entirely different. This time, the technology is ahead of the story. We already have more capability than most people know what to do with. The constraint isn’t compute. It’s our ability to imagine what the compute makes possible. The limit is human brain plasticity — not hardware or software.
Now, are some AI companies overvalued? Maybe. Not yes! Maybe. Important technologies still produce stupid investments, but that doesn’t mean the technology itself is overvalued.
It may be grossly undervalued.
In the dot-com bubble, technology couldn’t catch up to people’s stories. With AI, people’s stories haven’t caught up to the technology.
