Every few weeks someone asks me if AI is a bubble, usually hoping I will pick a team. Yes or no, hype or real, tulips or telephones. I find the question a little boring, because the honest answer is that it is obviously both, and the useful conversation starts only after you accept that.
Two things that are both true
There is almost certainly a financial bubble. Valuations are wild, half the startups slapping AI on a slide will not exist in three years, and a lot of money is going to evaporate spectacularly. There is also a genuinely transformative technology. The tools are real, they do real work, and they are already woven into how a lot of people think and build. These are not contradictions. Bubbles form around real things all the time. The railways were a bubble and also, you know, the railways.
The internet was a bubble that popped and also changed everything. Both facts are in the history books, on the same page.
Why the bubble question is a distraction
Asking "is it a bubble" is really asking "should I care," and it smuggles in a false choice: if the finances are frothy, the technology must be fake. That does not follow. When the current froth clears, and it will, the useful tools do not disappear. They get cheaper, more boring, and more embedded. The companies that vanish will mostly be the ones that had a logo and a pitch deck and no product. The technology underneath keeps working the morning after.
The question worth asking instead
Not "is AI a bubble" but "which parts are real for me." Does it do work I actually need done? Does the cost make sense for the value? Am I building on something durable or renting hype? Those questions survive the pop. The bubble question is a spectator sport. The real question is a builder one, and only one of them helps you decide what to do on Monday.
Where I stand
I expect a painful financial correction and I expect the technology to matter more, not less, afterward. I am using these tools every day precisely because their usefulness has nothing to do with anyone valuation. When the bubble deflates, I will still have a model that untangles a bug in ninety seconds, and that will still be worth having. Root your judgment in the work, not the stock chart, and the whole bubble debate stops being interesting, which is exactly where it belongs.