The collapse of the bubble is inevitable. No bubble can grow forever. It can grow only until its surface can withstand the atmospheric pressure, and it appears that we are drawing dangerously close to such a time.

Here are 6 factors that have been driving air into the AI bubble that everyone’s talking about.

1. Paper-thin AI Companies: Super-fat Valuations

A Stark Streak Cartoon - Two friends talking about how the AI company got a 1 Billion Evaluation.

Companies that are built on providing “services” that are merely an API call to Open AI or Anthropic, are receiving sky-high valuations. Apps that are providing AI summaries are being valued as several times more valuable than they are. Even companies that are working on foundational models and are losing money, are being valued for tens of billions. Investors are chasing this big AI dream and putting ridiculously serious money into it.

2. The AI-Milkmaid Syndrome

Companies are panic-buying GPUs and hoarding them for the future. Remember the milkmaid who thought that she’d sell the milk and then do one business after the other, until the prince proposes to her? Well, the CXOs all around the world are dreaming of providing AI services to customers they don’t yet have. Now that 95% of the Gen AI projects are “failing” AI is in the dock again.

3. The Mushrooming AI Coaching Industry

A Stark Streak Cartoon - AI Coach using AI to coach herself on prompt engineering.

Influencers/coaches with no track record or know-how selling courses and ebooks on prompt-engineering (like the crypto-gurus before them and web-gurus before them…and so on.) Everyone’s climbing the train that’s chugging away into an unknown future. Since nobody knows much anyway, everyone’s hyping up AI and offering courses and training programs that didn’t exist the night before.

4. Everything under one AI Roof!

Existing corporations are offering AI-empowered everything (AI-empowered learning, food-ordering, customer-service, dating service, and so on), but they are actually hunting hard-to-find talent to get their AI projects off the ground.

5. AI-AI Everywhere!

Content companies are flooding the Internet with AI-written articles, posts, comments, and white-papers. Companies are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire Chief Prompt Officers who can make AI dance to their tunes. Human-written, original content (such as this post) is vanishing from the Internet. What we have now is AI-written summaries and synopses, even prose and poetry.

6. Comb your hair, powder your nose! AGI’s Coming!

A Stark Streak Cartoon - CEOs discussing the AGI Timeline.

Some CEOs, including Elon Musk, have been hinting that AGI is just around the corner. This, too, has been hyping up the AI scene quite a lot. Every investor, venture capitalist, AI-coder, API-developer, content creator, and their neighbor wants to have a slice of the AGI pie – if and when it comes out of the oven.

The Ground Reality of AI today?

The bubble isn’t formed around the AI technology, which is promising and growing at a rate that’s comfortable for it. The bubble is formed around the madness that surrounds AI. It’s in the breathless frenzy with which individuals and organizations are pumping it up.

Oddly, several writers and commentators are laying the blame for this expected impending collapse at the door of AI. Articles about ChatGPT 5’s launch being a damp squib and a study stating that 95% of the organizations that used AI aren’t too happy about it – are insinuating that the bubble will explode because AI isn’t delivering.

The issue however, is that the hype around AI was built, and is still being built, in a vacuum. Most of this hype is steam, which when cooled will lead to the collapse of this thin-skinned bubble anyway.

Wherever the blame may lie, it doesn’t lie with this guy here.

Li'l Bit says, AI is not responsible for the AI bubble burst.



Interesting times ahead.

Note: The Stark Streak Cartoons are an output of human-AI collaboration and are free for anyone to use. View the Stark Streak Cartoons Collection here.