AI Bubble or Founders Playground?

Why founders who keep tinkering with these tools will be the ones left standing.

In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. Pets.com vanished. Webvan imploded. Trillions evaporated. And every serious person in the room declared that the internet had been overhyped.

They were wrong, obviously.

The internet did not stop getting better. Not for one single year after that crash. Email went from clunky to instant. Video went from buffering nightmares to streaming in your pocket. Connectivity got faster and cheaper every year. Online shopping went from a novelty to how most people buy things. We got maps that knew where we were, tools that let anyone build a website, video calls that replaced flights, and eventually, entire businesses that ran from a laptop on a kitchen table. The bubble popped, but the technology kept compounding, quietly and relentlessly, no matter what the stock market did.

I think about this constantly right now, because the AI bubble conversation is everywhere, and the numbers people are throwing around are genuinely wild.

Gartner says worldwide AI spending will hit $2.5 trillion this year. OpenAI has committed $1.4 trillion over eight years on data centers while generating about $13 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, a February 2026 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 90 percent of firms reported zero measurable impact of AI on productivity. MIT said 95 percent of organizations investing in generative AI were getting zero return. Software stocks have been hammered. Oracle and Microsoft are down 22% and 14% this year, respectively.

So is AI overhyped? Are we in a bubble?

We can debate public company hardware capitalization rates all day long, but the whole question misses the point! The AI beneath all that noise is on the exact same trajectory as the internet after 2000, just much faster. Models are getting dramatically more capable with every release. Costs are plummeting. DeepSeek and Kimi proved that frontier performance is achievable at a fraction of the expected cost. And this month, Anthropic released a model so capable that software stocks cratered because investors feared AI might disrupt the entire enterprise software sector.

The fear is no longer that AI does not work; it’s that it might work too well!

Look at the human adoption

Here is what gets lost in the Wall Street noise: 800 million people use ChatGPT. 750 million use Google’s Gemini. They are planning meals, helping kids with homework, drafting emails, researching health questions, learning new skills, and a thousand other things that have nothing to do with data center capex or enterprise ROI. This thing only went mainstream 2 years ago!

And it keeps pushing further. OpenClaw, an open source AI agent that started as a weekend project a few weeks ago, already has over 145,000 GitHub stars and is being adopted from Silicon Valley to China. It runs on your own machine, connects to WhatsApp and Telegram, and manages your email, calendar, and web browsing autonomously. One developer called it “what Siri should have been, built by one guy and a repo instead of a $3.6 trillion company.” Too early for mainstream, but the trajectory is clear. Personal AI agents that actually do things for you are arriving fast.

Nobody went back to paper maps after Google Maps. Nobody went back to encyclopedias after Wikipedia. You cannot unadopt a technology that hundreds of millions of people have already woven into their daily lives, (although the concept of nostalgic jobs will be very real). The stocks can do whatever the stocks do. That part is irrelevant to the underlying momentum.

Some AI startups will struggle

We already saw this in 2025, when ChatGPT wrapper startups built on commoditized models started to drop. Builder.ai, once valued at $1.2 billion, filed for bankruptcy. Dozens more quietly disappeared.

The companies that survive will be the ones that build real vertical businesses, not thin layers on top of someone else’s API. At FOMO.ai, we took an entire industry, marketing services, and rebuilt it as a technology platform with humans layered in for quality and client confidence. We generate real revenue from real companies, we have established trust, we have solved for distribution, and we have a moat of years of human experience studied and translated into our DNA. That is a fundamentally different business from a startup that raised $20 million to put a nice interface on GPT and hoped for the best.

Bet on the Founder more than the model

Here is what I keep coming back to. Founders are uniquely suited to this moment, and I do not think enough people are saying it loudly enough.

You have complete control over your tools, your stack, and your processes. You do not need to submit a proposal to a steering committee or wait for IT to approve a new vendor. You do not need to run a six-month pilot program or build a business case for the CFO. You can just try things. Today. Right now. And that advantage is enormous, because the founders who are tinkering with these tools constantly, testing new models, integrating AI into their workflows, rebuilding how they operate every few months as the capabilities improve, those founders are building a compounding advantage that will be nearly impossible to catch later.

I see this in my own company every week. At FOMO.ai, we are constantly reworking how we use these tools, not because we are chasing shiny objects but because the models genuinely get meaningfully better on a regular basis, and the founders who are not keeping pace with that are going to get left behind. The gap between a founder who adopted AI eighteen months ago and kept iterating, and a founder who is still “waiting to see how this plays out,” is already enormous. In another year, it will be insurmountable.

You do not need to wait until you have a massive budget to start. You need curiosity and a willingness to keep showing up. Pick one or two tools, learn them deeply, and when the next model drops or the next capability unlocks, be the founder who is already there experimenting on day one. That is the muscle that separates the companies that thrive from the ones that vanish, and it has always been the muscle that matters most. We are wired to just get on and do it. This is our moment to do exactly that.

And don’t lose sight that if you’re an early stage, your investors are choosing YOU, not necessarily your business plan. All our businesses will evolve quickly now, and it’s our job to show others that change is what we thrive on, and no matter where this thing takes us, we’re going to keep turning into a real, growing business.

Dax is the Co-Founder & CEO @ FOMO.ai, and the author of 84Futures.com. This post was helped by Hello Gordon, the easiest way to articulate your expert knowledge.

Leave a comment and tell me how you’re thinking about the topic of the bubble. And if you know another founder grinding through funding decisions, feel free to forward this along.