BIG by Matt Stoller

Only, it turns out there are no real use cases for crypto except for money laundering and fraud, and little real interest beyond “number go up” speculation. It’s not a very interesting technology, with AI taking the spotlight and legalized gambling and future markets taking the froth. Even some of the big crypto firms, like Coinbase, have given up on crypto and are just trying to become less regulated dollar-based banks. I suppose there’s still the possibility of a bailout or something, but at this point everyone knows that crypto is a legal way to gamble that is more boring than other ways to legally gamble. And that’s all it’ll ever be.

Still, financial markets can go down, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. So is the fear reasonable that AI will undermine the viability of many software companies? Software company CEOs think, by and large, the answer is no. At least one Wall Street analyst said the selloff is overdone, that he doesn’t think “every company will hereby write and maintain a bespoke product to replace every layer of mission-critical enterprise software they have ever deployed.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks that replacing all software with AI is dumb, akin to re-inventing the screwdriver rather than just buying one that already exists.

Anyone who has used the new AI tools to do research or code knows they are good at getting you 85% of the way there, but they get significant things wrong. That said, I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons you might expect