From extreme ups to startling downs, every week can feel like the peak of expectations and the trough of disillusionment for AI. SHOW: 954 SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #954 Transcript SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSORS: [DoIT] Visit doit.com (that’s d-o-i-t.com ) to unlock intent-aware FinOps at scale with DoiT Cloud Intelligence. [VASION] Vasion Print eliminates the need for print servers by enabling secure, cloud-based printing from any device, anywhere. Get a custom demo to see the difference for yourself. SHOW NOTES: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF AI - THE CONSTANT HYPE CYCLE Healthy Competition [YES] Consumer and Enterprise Markets [YES] Market leader(s) [YES, sort of] Well-Defined, profitable business model [NO] Open, lower-cost alternative emerged [YES/NO] Usage patterns emerging [YES/NO] [ups] Constant high-profile VC, Sovereign wealth, hyperscaler funding of AI startups [ups] Constant high-profile CAPEX spending by hyperscalers, model builders, data center builders [ups] Rapidly growing user-bases [ups] Growing revenues at some companies (NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic) [downs] Growing losses at high-profile companies [???] Frequent, high-profile movement by key people at high-profile companies (engineers, leadership) [downs] Frequent, partial acquires of founders and key engineers, but not entire companies [downs] Secondary market scales of startup shares, bypassing traditional secondary and public markets [downs] No “NetFlix of AI” company [downs] No “AI Agent” success stories [???] Consumer “winner-take-all” mindset from AI companies [downs] Enterprise companies struggling to create ROI+ projects (in early days) [???] Enterprise “bundles” raising prices (CoPilot, Gemini, etc.) [downs] Unclear if new frontier models are getting better than previous versions (e.g. GPT-5) [???] Are inference prices coming down ? [ups] Consumers have many excellent AI choices It’s unclear if AI companies have created any moats yet; it’s unclear if LLMs can be differentiated Chatbots, developer-assistants and document management are use-cases. What else? Are agents ready to be mainstream yet? Pick-axe providers are making the money right now (NVIDIA, Broadcom, etc.), but is there moat entirely on super-premium HW? User-experiences are still being understood Will AI + Ads (business model) be a big bang event, or happen gradually? FEEDBACK? Email: show at the cloudcast dot net Twitter/X: @cloudcastpod BlueSky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.social Instagram: @cloudcastpod TikTok: @cloudcastpod
