Derek Thompson: coding agents may have front-loaded AI demand like Peloton
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-10-25
Gary Marcus retweets Derek Thompson's essay questioning how much external revenue the AI ecosystem actually generates.
- Bull case: older GPU rental prices are up 25% YoY, so compute demand still outruns supply — unlike the dot-com era's 97% idle fiber.
- Bear case: the demand side is opaque — private labs like OpenAI and Anthropic don't report revenue, and AI usage is bundled into Microsoft 365 and Salesforce.
- Core analogy: investors extrapolated Peloton/Zoom's pandemic growth curves; Thompson fears coding agents did the same for AI — Claude Code and Codex were adopted so fast and lavishly that the most valuable AI market is saturated. Doubling revenue again may need a new S-curve in finance, law, or manufacturing.
- One analyst: the market is panicking 'because the market is saying, we don't know.'
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