This is how the bubble pops.

I've been thinking the AI bubble wouldn't pop, because even the AI advances we've already seen can change the majority of industries if it is carefully integrated with existing technology. But if there's a mass movement to use older and/or smaller models, then yeah, all the money going into newer bigger models will pop.

Or, maybe the training datasets getting polluted with AI slop will mean that new models are worse than old models. That would pop the industry.

Or, maybe the GPT-4 era was the golden era for AI, and making them bigger and better is just overfitting (in the classical machine learning sense of the word) and is both worse and more expensive. This would pop the industry too.

I guess there's a few ways for the industry to pop, but this trend of using older models makes me especially skeptical of AI.

It's important to remember that coding is ~5% of total LLM usage, at least with OpenAI.

50% of usage is guidance and seeking information.

Since the day GPT-5 released, I've felt quite confident that the GPT-4 era was the golden era for AI.

I don't have evidence beyond my experience using the product, but based on that experience I believe that Open AI has been cooking their benchmarks since at least the release of GPT-5.