Not Boring: the three arguments that AI isn't a bubble are exactly how bubbles form
Not Boring (Packy McCormick) · rss · 2026-11-11
Packy McCormick's essay uses Anthropic's IPO as a lens on whether AI is a bubble. The three standard counterarguments — genuinely useful tech, real fast-growing revenue, proven path to profitability — are precisely steps 1-3 of the classic commodity-bubble playbook (à la Carlota Perez and the Capital Cycle): miracle tech arrives, early suppliers profit from scarcity, capital floods in, everyone overbuilds at scarcity prices, prices collapse, capital flees, and a survivor consolidates into something bigger than all the failures combined. His cautionary case is airlines and Buffett's "Karl Marx couldn't have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did." He lays out two futures for Anthropic — laughing at a $1.4T valuation for a commodity LLM, versus a winner-take-all self-improving leader — and admits nobody knows which comes true, noting "AI is more oil than God": oil doesn't produce its own oil or solve Navier-Stokes.
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