The "AI Bubble" Bubble | EP.51

Is the AI bubble narrative itself a bubble? Billions of dollars are flowing into chips, data centers, and frontier models. From the outside, it can look speculative. But from inside the industry, the signal looks very different. In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by Michael Wharton and Dr. ZZ Si to discuss what it actually feels like to build with AI today. They explore rapid advances in model capabilities, the growing power of coding agents, and why many organizations are still struggling to absorb the productivity gains AI already enables. They also examine the massive capital investment in AI infrastructure and debate what signals would actually indicate the industry has hit a plateau. 00:00 – Is the AI Bubble Narrative Itself a Bubble? 03:00 – Rapid Advances in AI Model Capabilities 05:35 – Coding Agents and the Changing Development Workflow 09:30 – Benchmarks Showing AI Capability Acceleration 16:20 – Verifying AI Outputs and the Limits of Evaluation 18:20 – CAPEX, Chips, and the Dot-Com Bubble Comparison 21:50 – What Would Actually Signal an AI Bubble 26:30 – Why AI May Become a Utility