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September 1, 2025 32 mins

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

SHOW: 954

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #954 Transcript

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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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