There's a pattern to American financial manias, and it goes like this: first the venture capitalists pile in, then Wall Street upgrades everything to "buy," then the Super Bowl becomes a showcase for the frenzy, and then somebody loses a trillion dollars.
This past weekend was Stage Three.
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Nearly a quarter of all Super Bowl LX commercials featured artificial intelligence – that’s 15 out of 66 ads. Google demonstrated Gemini helping a child redecorate a bedroom. OpenAI sold Codex to software developers. Anthropic aired four separate spots. Amazon hired Chris Hemsworth to make jokes about Alexa+ trying to kill him. Meta put AI sunglasses on Spike Lee. Matthew Broderick encouraged America to skip work Monday and let an AI handle it. A vodka brand brought a robot to a house party.
Yes, the Seahawks beat the Patriots 29-13. But the real competition was between tech companies burning cash at historic rates to convince you their product is the future.
I think historical parallels make this moment so eerie. In January 2000, fourteen dot-com startups bought Super Bowl XXXIV ads, representing about 20 percent of the broadcast's spots. That game is now known as the "Dot-Com Super Bowl." The Nasdaq peaked weeks later and cratered 78 percent. Pets.com, which debuted its sock puppet mascot that night, was dead within nine months. In 2022, crypto companies colonized the broadcast -- think FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com -- and the industry absolutely imploded before Thanksgiving, with FTX going bankrupt less than a year later. The Super Bowl doesn't predict crashes, but rather, it photographs the euphoria right before them.
AI excess offers a warning
And there are other warning signs if you care to look. Time magazine named the collective "Architects of AI" as its 2025 Person of the Year. Historically, when Time puts a CEO or business trend on that cover, stocks in the associated sector have declined within a year seven out of eight times. If cultural indicators were a batting average, that would be Hall of Fame territory.
But these indicators only confirm what the business fundamentals are already screaming. Just four companies -- Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft -- have committed approximately $650 billion in AI-related capital expenditures for 2026. To grasp how abnormal that figure is, consider that Bloomberg calculated the combined 2026 capex of America's 21 largest automakers, railroads, defense contractors, wireless carriers, and retailers at $180 billion. Four software companies are outspending twenty-one industrial giants by a factor of nearly four!
The poster child for this excess is OpenAI, which is reportedly in discussions for a funding round valuing it at $830 billion. The company projects $14 billion in losses this year and $115 billion in cumulative losses through 2029. Boosters compare it to Amazon, which also lost money before becoming dominant. But I think that comparison falls apart under three seconds of scrutiny. Amazon's total cumulative losses when it finally turned profitable in its tenth year amounted to $3 billion. OpenAI reportedly burned $11.5 billion in a single quarter. Is this company genuinely worth more than Coca-Cola, Chevron, or Costco? Only under the “Greater Fool Theory”, that is, the conviction that someone less careful will pay an even higher price tomorrow.
The deepest irony of generative AI is that it may be the fastest-growing technology in history if you measure users, but among the most destructive if you measure profits. The more customers these platforms attract, the more money evaporates on inference costs. Investors have recently noticed, as these four tech titans have shed over $900 billion in market value in the past week alone, punished for spending plans their own shareholders now suddenly can't stomach.
I am not saying AI is fake
Now, I want to be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying AI is fake. I run an AI company. Through our work at CareYaya, we use practical machine learning to coordinate over 50,000 healthcare student caregivers serving elderly Americans nationwide. We're building the first AI-powered dementia caregiver training program YayaGuide, that’s been funded both by the NIH and by Johns Hopkins for its social impact. Last year, we launched industry-leading AI tools through Counterforce Health to help patients across America fight health insurance denials. And recently, we launched a voice AI-powered social robotic companion Yaya Bear that helps older adults preserve their memories. I think that AI is a genuine, practical, life-improving tool. What it is not, and what no technology has ever been, is worth infinite money on an infinite timeline with zero profits.
The dot-com crash didn't destroy the internet. By 2005, the web was more transformative than anything the 1999 evangelists imagined. The housing correction didn't eliminate homeownership, but it did eliminate the people who confused leverage with wisdom. The underlying thing often endures, but the speculation always burns.
So let me state my prediction without equivocation: within two years, multiple well-known AI companies (not just startups) will be completely bankrupt. Many AI-linked stocks will trade 50 to 80 percent below today's prices. Hundreds of billions in investor capital will be gone. And artificial intelligence itself will be quietly, usefully woven into American life in ways that have nothing to do with dancing robots selling vodka during a football game.
Bookmark this article. I'll see you in 2031.
Neal K. Shah is a health care researcher specializing in caregiving, workforce innovation, and artificial intelligence. He is an NIH-funded Principal Investigator on the YayaGuide AI for Caregiver Training project that he started at Johns Hopkins, and the Co-Principal Investigator on the University of Pennsylvania-funded Counterforce Health project on artificial intelligence for health insurance denials. Neal also serves on North Carolina's Steering Committee on Aging. He is CEO of CareYaya Health Technologies.