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chART's avatar

There’s a certain kind of confidence that shows up late in a cycle, when productivity gains are real, visible, and undeniable, and people begin to assume that because something works, it must be correctly priced. That’s usually where things start to drift.

The distinction he draws between individual leverage and institutional stagnation is sharp, but it also hints at the imbalance underneath. When a tool is genuinely transformative, it doesn’t just improve output, it attracts capital, and capital rarely arrives with discipline. It builds excess. It overfunds the obvious winners. It assumes linear adoption where reality tends to be uneven. That’s where bubbles are born, not from useless technology, but from useful technology priced as if its impact is already fully realized.

What’s compelling here is the split he describes. One operator with AI replacing entire workflows isn’t just a productivity story, it’s a structural shock. And markets struggle to price structural shocks in real time. They oscillate between disbelief and overcommitment. First they ignore it, then they extrapolate it too far.

So the question isn’t whether AI is real, it clearly is. The question is where the expectations have outrun the economics. Because when that gap closes, it rarely does so gently. The infrastructure remains, the capability compounds, but the capital that chased it often gets cleared out along the way.

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