Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it’s a bubble and it’ll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company’s performance, so no need even to know.

Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet’s major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.

Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn’t risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.

And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.

Just a conspiracy theory, don’t treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.