Is the A.I. Bubble Bursting? | 2025 in Review

What Next

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Daily News, News

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

All this week, What Next and What Next: TBD are re-airing some of our favorite conversations from throughout the year and checking back with the people in those conversations to see how things have – or haven’t – changed. This episode originally aired in September.

We’ve been told that artificial intelligence can write, code, generate images—it can do everything…except feasibly turn a profit. But investing in A.I. has nevertheless become a pillar of the U.S. economy. Where is this leading us?

Guest: Ed Zitron, author of the newsletter Where’s Your Ed At and host of the podcast Better Offline.

If you want to support more of this reporting, in 2026 and beyond, consider signing up for Slate Plus. You’ll enjoy ad-free listening across the Slate network, early access to tickets for live events, and you’ll never hit the paywall on the site.

We’re on a mission to get 100 people to join Slate Plus before the new year—and we’re even offering a 50-percent-off deal to folks who join us right now. Visit Slate.com/whatnextplus and use the code WHATNEXT50 to get a year of Slate Plus for $59.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone, it's Lizzie. All this week, we've been listening back to some of our favorite shows from this year. And a lot of them, you may have noticed, are conversations. Not with reporters or talking heads, but with people on the ground, living the news day in, day out. If you want to hear from the kinds of people we're listening back to this week, subscribe
0:21.7	to Slate Plus. We are on a mission to get 100 people to join Slate Plus before the new year.
0:28.6	We're even offering a 50% off deal to folks who join us right now. Go on over to slate.com
0:34.9	slash TBD Plus. Use the code TBD50. That is TBD 50 to get a year of
0:42.7	Slate Plus at half off. It's a full year of Slate Plus for 59 bucks, which is like, I don't know,
0:48.3	16 cents a day. That is less, way less than the cost of a cup of coffee. If you want to make sure what next and TBD are around next year,
0:57.6	and the year after that and the year after that, subscribe to Slate Plus.
1:01.7	Okay, here's the show.
1:04.4	Covering tech news in 2025 means covering one subject over and over and over.
1:12.4	I am talking about AI.
1:15.1	Right now, it is not an exaggeration to say that AI is the engine driving the U.S. economy.
1:21.9	The stock market broke multiple records this year thanks to AI.
1:25.7	Tech companies are pumping billions of dollars into building data centers and microchip
1:30.2	plants to power the boom.
1:32.6	But almost from the word go, this boom has invited whispers of a bust.
1:38.1	And one of the biggest believers in that coming bust is Ed Zittron.
1:43.5	No one's really seeing the bump from an AI anymore.
1:46.7	When we spoke to Ed earlier this year, he was pretty unequivocal. The bubble would burst.
1:53.1	Now, he says, it is bursting. Sort of.
1:57.1	Oracle has lost all of the stock value it got from signing a $300 billion deal that Open AI couldn't pay.
2:03.6	AMD's seen the top come off there. Even Nvidia's stock really isn't running quite as crazyly as it would.
2:10.6	So I think the air is coming out from the side of the bubble rather than it being popped right now.
	...

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