If one of the world’s most famous macro investors is calling AI an early-stage bubble, what does that mean for your job, your startup, and the tools you’re betting on?
Ray Dalio just called the current AI boom “the early stages of a bubble,” and honestly, that’s the first mainstream take that feels emotionally accurate to what it’s like watching AI Twitter right now.[3] Stocks tied to AI have been ripping for years, US indexes hit record highs, and everyone and their dog has an “AI strategy.”[3] When someone who lives and breathes macro cycles says the word bubble, devs should at least raise an eyebrow.
Here’s what actually happened: Dalio posted that AI-fueled US tech stocks are frothy, while non-US stocks, gold, and emerging markets quietly had a killer year.[3] In other words, the hype is concentrated, not universal. He also pointed out that with the new Fed leadership likely biased toward lower rates, that could inflate bubbles even more.[3] Cheap money + AI narrative = casino mode. As developers, that means a lot of what we’re seeing funded right now may not be sustainable once sentiment turns.
From a dev perspective, I don’t think “AI bubble” means “AI is fake” — it means valuations and expectations are insane, not that the tech is useless. We’ve seen this movie before with the dot-com era: the internet was real, the Pets.com stock price was not. For us, it’s a good reminder to focus less on which AI stock is going to the moon and more on which problems are still going to matter when the market sobers up.
So here’s the real question for you: are you building things that only make sense in a zero-interest-rate, hype-fueled world, or stuff that will still look smart when the AI party ends and the lights come on?
Source: BusinessWorld / Reuters