Welcome, humans.
Wimbledon, the world’s oldest and most prestigious tennis tournament, was caught (probably) using AI to write player descriptions and publish them on its website without proofreading.
They wrote that Emma Raducanu was the top-ranked British woman, even though her singles ranking was 135 at the time. Awkward. Either the British are terrible at tennis or the AI they used can't do math (spoiler: it's the latter).
Here’s what you need to know about AI today:
- Sequoia's hot take: "The AI bubble is reaching a tipping point."
- Target is testing a Q&A chatbot for its employees.
- Cloudflare launched a new free tool to help websites block content-scraping bots.
- We're sharing 7 awesome tools to boost your productivity at work!
Is the AI bubble about to burst?!
Between 1995 and 2000, the NASDAQ skyrocketed 800%. Then it nose-dived 78% over the next 2.5 years (source: Perplexity!).
Now, Sequoia, the crème de la crème of venture capitalist firms, is wondering if AI's headed for the same fate.
Their logic? It's all about ROI. Think of building AI like renovating a house—you need the home's value to increase more than what you spent on those fancy upgrades.
For AI, that magic number is $600B. That's how much the AI ecosystem needs to generate in revenue to justify its current spending on GPUs and data centers, which is how AI gets built.
The Economist did some related number-crunching: investors have added over $2T in market cap to the big five tech stocks, projecting an extra $300-400B in revenue each year.
Reality check: OpenAI's annualized revenue is $3.4B. Impressive, sure, but it's not $600B—which, BTW, is more than Apple makes in an entire year.
Adding to the concern, OpenAI actually makes more money selling its AI models than Microsoft, which added a trillion dollars in market cap over the last year.
Why it’s a biggie: It's not that people aren't using AI—a Microsoft/LinkedIn study found that 75% of global knowledge workers use it. The problem? They're not spending enough to justify what investors are spending to build it.
TL;DR: Most folks are just mooching off the free chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
For AI to justify its current valuation, more people and companies would need to start seeing serious impacts to their bottom line (think more zeros in the profit column). Otherwise, we might be in for a reality check in the next 1-2 years.
It's like we're all at a fancy AI party, but someone's got to foot the bill sooner or later.
Is AI in a bubble? 🤔
- Nah, we're just getting started
- Maybe, but it'll keep growing for now
- Yep, and it's about to pop
- What bubble? I'm still using Clippy
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Around the Horn.
- Target is piloting a chatbot for employees that can answer questions about processes and procedures.
- Cloudflare launched a new, free tool that websites can use to prevent AI bots from scraping their content.
- OpenAI is joining a software lobbying group called BSA.
Treats To Try.
- *Attention’s army of AI agents—Sales Manager, Data Analyst, and Sales Ops—helps your company win more deals and hit its revenue goals. Hire them here.
- Magic Insert lets you do a “style-aware” drag-and-drop that matches people to the style of the images they’re dropped into.
- Qolaba lets you switch between multiple premium models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Mistral) in a single chat.
- Syntfhlow builds AI voice assistants that make outbound calls, answer inbound calls, and schedule appointments 24/7 (raised $7.4M).
- Redactive AI offers tools that set guards in place for what information AI tools can talk about. (raised $7.5M).
- Websim allows you to create games, whimsical web pages, and randomness from a single text prompt.
- Artificial Analysis is an excellent benchmarking site for comparing the top AI models by quality, speed, price, and more.
*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.
Monday Meme.
A Cat's Commentary.
