> This is actual, real, shipping physical product: not vapor, not something that will disappear, not something that will "crash" suddenly.

Tulips were real shipping physical products. Railways were real. Housing was real. Whether or not the demand is speculative is largely disconnected from the actual subject of the bubble.

> NVIDIA is legitimately forecasting demand of $1 trillion in their chips+memory by the end of 2027.

Forecasts do not make it so.

> but that is not the majority of demand, inference is 65-80% of demand.

Inference is massively subsidized. The demand is fictitious just because of that. Once prices go up, especially once free or cheap inference dries up, demand will collapse.

But it's not even just the subsidies. AI is forced onto the workplace top-down. Executives demand AI be used before careful evaluation. That's all demand that can collapse at any moment if public opinion sours.

> The world has changed.

It hasn't. For all the claims that AI has made any given job so much easier, developers who claim "It'd have cost me a billion years to do so" (next time bring a counterfactual), the actual economic benefit appears to be a big fat zero. We're right back to the Solow paradox.

Except AI companies are dumping trillions of dollars into this, expecting tens of trillions in return ... from where? Where will these tens of trillions come from if the aggregate economic benefit doesn't exist? Joe Slopman making a dozen CRUD apps a week for half a million in revenue, but there ain't a million of him.

So much of the demand for inference is driven by hype. Companies using AI in the expectation of an ROI that has not materialized, and in many places, is very unlikely to. In no small part because any "efficiency" or "productivity" gains realized by AI immediately drives down the cost of the good or service produced.