Situation: A Bear Miss

A trenchant, satirical analysis of the current AI boom that frames the scene as a debt-fueled bubble: distressed AI assets are being scooped up at fire-sale prices, data-center buildouts and power contracts form a fragile ouroboros, and a handful of well-informed institutional players (invoked by name) have situational awareness while most executives and pundits remain euphoric. The piece rejects simplistic extrapolations from GPT-4 to “AGI by 2027,” argues that recent model gains are often marginal and increasingly expensive, and coins the escalation of systemic dysfunction as rising "OOFs." It predicts a near-term collapse of marginal costs for memory and power by 2029-2030, plus large-scale bailouts and deleveraging efforts that will further entrench incumbents even as technological progress continues.

The author then sketches a counterintuitive future in which edge-hosted, cheap local AIs proliferate: hundreds of millions of "almost-AGIs" on phones and devices will handle banal labor, ads, and personalization, while frontier models grow costlier with limited returns and "superintelligence" remains perpetually distant. This decentralization could both enable dystopian make-work and surveillance responses (including large forced consolidations) and liberating outcomes - local scraping, DRM-free services, and self-sovereign microtransactions that restore parts of the internet’s original openness. The tone is cynical but oddly hopeful: the path out of centralized rent-seeking is plausible if edge AI wins.