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Hi, I'm Ed Zittron, and this is the second part of this week's Better Offline.

Better Offline. As ever go to the episode notes, buy some merch, get the challenge coin, subscribe to my newsletter, if you like it, go premium. Either way, you've got this episode for free if you can stand the ads, which many of you can.

Anyway, the thrust of this two part is that the AI trade is going to, as you probably guessed by now, end badly.

And as I'll also explain, I believe we're now set up for potentially economic and market-wrecking

consequences of this hysterical investment bubble.

Today we're going to go beyond just startups and into how the poison of the bubble has

crept into our economy and how dangerous things are getting as a result. In the first installment,

we talked about cursor, the AI coding startup that despite having no mode and zero sustainability,

has somehow earned a valuation of $10 billion, and then asked why none of these generative AI

companies are being

acquired, at least not in the traditional sense. And no, I'm not including the acquisitions where a

big company snags the talent and leaves barely breathing bodies of startups in their wake.

This matters because if these AI companies can't get an exit, go public or get bought, it raises

serious questions about how any of this ends.

Cursor is the best example, and the fact that Anthropic is hopelessly dependent on Cursor for revenue,

despite doing everything they can to kill it, makes the entire situation feel a little bit weird.

Cursor's paths to viability seem, frankly, to be non-existent, and the collapse of cursor will inevitably

result in a vast chunk of Anthropics revenues going up in smoke, which again will also make its

collapse seem inevitable, as how can it fundraise an evaluation over its previous one when its biggest

...