AI Bubble: How AI's push towards IPOs became a death drive | Ed Zitron

The AI industry faces a severe crisis of sustainability as corporations struggle to justify the mounting costs of large language models. Without clear metrics for return on investment, companies are implementing "token austerity," capping usage as they realize these tools often produce verbose, low-quality code that increases technical debt. This reliance on AI, driven by executive incompetence rather than genuine productivity gains, has left many organizations with unstable, rotted codebases. Meanwhile, AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic are aggressively pursuing IPOs to provide exit liquidity for investors, despite lacking viable business models or profitability. These companies mirror the failed economics of WeWork, attempting to socialize massive losses while operating on the assumption that they must grow at an unsustainable pace to reach trillion-dollar valuations, a trajectory that remains disconnected from actual market demand and operational reality.