Every Week Feels like an AI Gartner Hype Cycle

From extreme ups to startling downs, every week can feel like the peak of expectations and the trough of disillusionment for AI.  

SHOW: 954

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SHOW NOTES:

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF AI - THE CONSTANT HYPE CYCLE

Healthy Competition [YES]

Consumer and Enterprise Markets [YES]

Market leader(s) [YES, sort of]

Well-Defined, profitable business model [NO]

Open, lower-cost alternative emerged [YES/NO]

Usage patterns emerging [YES/NO]

• [ups] Constant high-profile VC, Sovereign wealth, hyperscaler funding of AI startups
• [ups] Constant high-profile CAPEX spending by hyperscalers, model builders, data center builders
• [ups] Rapidly growing user-bases
• [ups] Growing revenues at some companies (NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic)
• [downs] Growing losses at high-profile companies  
• [???] Frequent, high-profile movement by key people at high-profile companies (engineers, leadership)
• [downs] Frequent, partial acquires of founders and key engineers, but not entire companies
• [downs] Secondary market scales of startup shares, bypassing traditional secondary and public markets
• [downs] No “NetFlix of AI” company
• [downs] No “AI Agent” success stories
• [???] Consumer “winner-take-all” mindset from AI companies
• [downs] Enterprise companies struggling to create ROI+ projects (in early days)
• [???] Enterprise “bundles” raising prices (CoPilot, Gemini, etc.)
• [downs] Unclear if new frontier models are getting better than previous versions (e.g. GPT-5)
• [???] Are inference prices coming down? 
• [ups] Consumers have many excellent AI choices
• It’s unclear if AI companies have created any moats yet; it’s unclear if LLMs can be differentiated
• Chatbots, developer-assistants and document management are use-cases. What else?
• Are agents ready to be mainstream yet? 
• Pick-axe providers are making the money right now (NVIDIA, Broadcom, etc.), but is there moat entirely on super-premium HW?
• User-experiences are still being understood
• Will AI + Ads (business model) be a big bang event, or happen gradually? 

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