Selling Shovels for a Mine that Only Produces Hallucinations

While every startup on the planet is burning through cash to build the "Uber for Hamsters but with AI," two companies are laughing all the way to the bank: Nvidia and Broadcom. They are the "Golden Shovel" sellers of the AI era. It doesn't matter if the AI actually works, as long as the world believes it might work, they have to buy the chips. Wall Street analysts are calling them the "indispensable backbone" of the digital age, which is a nice way of saying "they have a monopoly on the sand that thinks." The stock prices of these companies have reached levels that defy the laws of physics, economics, and common sense. Every time a CEO mentions "AI" in an earnings call, Jensen Huang gets another leather jacket and a few more billion dollars. The irony is that the AI we are building with these chips is being used to predict the stock price of the companies that make the chips. It’s a perfect, closed-loop system of wealth creation that produces absolutely nothing of value for the average person, but it does allow for some very impressive 3D-rendered charts. In the end, we might not get "General Intelligence," but we will definitely get some very expensive heaters disguised as server racks.