[Chapter-delegates] New Cory Doctorow book on AI

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

Dear Glenn,

unfortunately I used to enjoy publications from Cory Doctorow, 
enshittification being an enjoyable read.

However, I challenge his concept of the AI bubble bursting, as if the AI 
companies are not making money and are going bust. The paragraph about 
NVIDIA did it for me, because it is exactly the wrong example:

"He cites the case of Nvidia, which lost $600 billion in one day in 2025 
after China released DeepSeek — an AI-powered chatbot vastly cheaper 
than American models. As the maker of expensive high-end chips used by 
AI companies, Nvidia saw its stock lose, as Doctorow describes it, “two! 
thirds! of! one! trillion! dollars!”"

NVIDIA did not lose $600 billion. Its market valuation went down $600 
billion in a day.

The value of NVIDIA bears no resemblance with its actual profits. That's 
an investor problem, not a corporate company problem. NVIDIA's results are:

Annual Revenue Breakdown

Fiscal Year 2026: $215.938 billion (65.47% increase)
Fiscal Year 2025: $130.497 billion (114.2% increase)
Fiscal Year 2024: $60.922 billion (125.85% increase)

Net Income (Profit) Breakdown
Fiscal Year 2026: $120.067 billion
Fiscal Year 2025: $72.88 billion
Fiscal Year 2024: $29.76 billion

NVIDIA is doing very well, thank you.

One often talks of "AI bubble" in the sense of "DotCom bubble" and I 
would argue that these are two very different things. If you look at 
some of the failures resulting from the DotCom bubble ( 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_affected_by_the_dot-com_bubble 
) you can see a lot of completely irrelevant companies with huge 
failures in business cases. These companies disappeared altogether. The 
companies burning through cash at an incredible rate, with no income.

In the current "bubble" are are seeing that some private investors might 
see their savings disappear in the "bubble" bursting. Well - same as the 
Gentech "bubble", and then the Bitcoin/Crypto "bubble". And still, that 
didn't end the world.

Second, he focuses solely on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative 
AI which at present is trained on human-generated data and will likely 
more and more be trained on AI generated data. Garbage in/out. Yes! I 
agree with that! But AI is a lot more than LLMs which are just but a 
very small segment of AI.

And then "Pipeline projects will stall because demand for petroleum will 
fall. "

I stopped reading.
:-)

Kindest regards,

Olivier


On 27/07/2026 13:50, Glenn McKnight via Chapter-delegates wrote:
> Here is an article by Cory Doctorow
> https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2026/07/24/Cory-Doctorow-Predicts-AI-Bubble-Will-Burst/
>
> If interested you can buy the book on Amazon
> https://www.amazon.ca/Reverse-Centaurs-Guide-After-Intelligence-Before-ebook/dp/B0GBZFWCTT
>
>
> Glenn McKnight, MA
> Virtual School of Internet Governance
> Chief Information Officer
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