This follows the late-90s script perfectly. The market sell-off doesn't mean AI is dead, it just means the phase where VCs throw a hundred million bucks at any pitch deck with the words large language model is finally wrapping up.
When the dot-com bubble burst, the internet didn't vanish. It just stopped being this weird, optimistic playground and matured into a hyper-monetized corporate utility. We survived the Pets.com collapse only to end up with tracking cookies, paywalls, and SEO-optimized garbage.
That is exactly the worse place we are heading toward with AI.
The financial bubble popping won't stop the tech itself. It just pivots the industry from wow look what this can do to how do we squeeze every fractional cent of efficiency out of this to satisfy shareholders. Get ready for the grind era of AI.
First, the VC-subsidized honeymoon is over, so say goodbye to useful free tiers. Second, AI features are going to be aggressively baked into every piece of software you already use just to justify a thirty percent subscription price hike. Third, the web is already getting flooded with cheap AI content farm filler meant to farm ad clicks, making actual search even more useless. And finally, companies are still going to try replacing human workflows with good enough automated systems to cut overhead, even if the quality plummets.
The tech is going to become ubiquitous, invisible, and deeply annoying. We are leaving the fun hype phase and entering the mundane, extraction-focused corporate integration phase. Welcome to the new normal.