I hope the reckoning of immutable math and economics could come so soon — but curious why you say 6 months?
There’s a few mechanisms behind this part of the story:
- The finance teams of the short sighted CEOs need to raise the red flag. Has happened now in a few places and written about in the news, but the implications haven’t worked their way through the system yet. Those were the canaries.
- The investors calling for profits have to become louder. Once that happened during the streaming wars, it was just a few months before shows got cut.
- Once the profit margin pressure grows, it takes a bit of time for the companies to rejig their pricing and then for users to bail once the party is over. June 15th Anthropic is pulling agentic coding out of the subscriptions, and charge them at full API rates. That will start ripple effects for some of the heavy users.
- The consumer now faces pressure to use AI everywhere. Those using the free versions will have start paying, and those using it more and more will have to upgrade. I’m still on Claude Pro, but there will be point for Claude Max, and I’ve looked into teams and enterprise pricing, since we have multiple subscriptions.
- Microsoft is feeling the pressure. They had bought a lot of Claude Code licenses for their own engineers. But now are cancelling them, because CoPilot is falling behind and they want to force their engineers to eat their own dog food. Clear signs on who is starting to win and loose the race.
- More data centers need to be built if we were to materialize this promised spend and to support the growth curve. But increasing resistance to data centers has put them behind schedule. Not all of this money will be spent. These spends are speculative. Timing matters. The last guy in the rase will loose his shirt.
- The first all-AI feature length movie was shown at Cannes. The first mover and PR moment is spent. The next person doing it will have to pay full rate, as no AI company will sponsor it going forward, as the PR moment is passé. At full rate, we will not see as many. But we will see more of what Ben Affleck has done.
These are all the things you see around this period of a bubble. Gravity is re-asserting it’s dominant role in physics. You can only cheat it so long.
But as others have said, similar patterns played out for most of big technology advances. There was a bubble, it bursts, the ashes smolder, and 5 years later a more modest and sensible version becomes the new foundation.
Spot on. With AI the hype cycle is 10x taller, and the correction equally steep. Same logic.
Bring oxygen tanks, sherpas, parachutes and submarines…
Send lawyers, guns and money.
AI may not be taking your job, but it could tank your entire project.
Highly anticipated film misses Cannes, because Altman’s sudden shutdown of Sora pulled the rug under their pipeline.
Another way the AI Bros can FU over. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Pick carefully.
One OT comment about that film. Filmed sideways with anamorphic lenses. Fucking brilliant. In the first five minutes I realized it and went apeshit. My family was like what the actual fuck is wrong with you.
have Disney laid off staff and replaced with AI last month? I can’t see anyone posted about this so wondered what the opinion of people is?
Sorry, which film? Now I’m curious to see.
Project Hail Mary. The second you see the vertical flares it hits home. First scene I think…
Fraser shot Arri65 in anamorphic and then struck a 70mm interneg from the final DI and then prints from that source for projection.
This article seems very fishy. There’s pretty much zero chance a film like this would play in competition at Cannes festival. Maaaaybe it would be a special screening but this article from Deadline says they don’t even have a cast yet so I would take the non-industry trade article with a huge grain of salt.
Why don’t we just send an ai audience to clap…
I wrote too fast without double-checking it. You are correct that the main competition didn’t allow GenAI this year, but there was another film “Hell Grind” that did play in the parallel Cannes Market event, which I guess where this film was headed to as well.
That aside though, the main point of my comment was that making a feature film project is a long lead time, high investment endeavor. And in the fast moving world of AI with the unpredictable behavior of the AI Bros, that seems even riskier than some assumed.
If you start filming with an Alexa35, and half-way through you have to switch to a RED due to external forces, that’s inconvenient but survivable. If your entire GenAI pipeline collapses because Altman can’t figure out how to stay on roadmap for more than 3 months, that’s much more complicated and a potentially expensive mistake.
yeah, totally agree with you on all points. didn’t mean to sound all “cool story, bro”. I’m just annoyed by all these lazy journalists and AI shills who conflate something playing in the festival at Cannes with the market at Cannes, which virtually anything can get into. But there certainly was a lot of AI stuff going on at the market - including the Doug Liman-directed Bitcoin movie.