Trigger for the market popping will be based on my subjective experience as a consultant dealing with tech start-ups and established businesses every day.
Significant movement of tech stocks tied to an abandonment of AI, AI becoming a dirty word and everyone pivoting away from that branding (See: Web3.0), total loss of interest in AI in the venture capital space, this is a non-extensive list of things that would contribute to me considering the bubble popped.
If, however, AI slowly fades into the background of everyone’s lives, with no significant evaluation adjustments associated with it failing in prominence, would not constitute a bubble popping (see also: the smartphone/app boom of the early to mid 2010s, no one gives a shit about apps any more, they are not cool, they are not the next big thing, but the hype died quietly and gracefully, and they just became a ubiquitous part of billions of people’s lives)
If the market is still going strong in 2030, I will resolve this to no pop, otherwise, I’ll keep adding new options as required until then.
Update: 2025-10-16:
We already have naysayers claiming a hot startup from a couple months ago is dead, on account of them having made a lot of noise, but having a non-functional product they cannot maintain
Twitter thread will be keeping track of what they claim to be the bubble’s collapse, which raises another interesting failure mode: people who fundamentally do not understand the technology they are working with, and who cannot discern what it is and is not capable of off the shelf, promising the world, raising capital, without any understanding of how to actually build that product
“Oh, all these startups we invested in don’t actually know how to build what they promised, and uniquely, don’t even know if what they promised is even technically feasible today”
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