Jeffrey Funk

Jeffrey Funk is the winner of the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award and the author of six books including his most recent one: Unicorns, Hype and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding and Exploiting Investment Bubbles In Tech.

Archives

Even the Tech Bros Are Turning Against AI

_{Some claim the problem is AI slop}_{Jeffrey Funk
July 20, 2026}

Some tech bros are even questioning the corporate benefits from generative AI, a year after academic analyses started questioning them.

Is AI’s Low Success Rate a Management or AI Failure?

_{Cory Doctorow’s new book sheds light on AI’s failure}_{Jeffrey Funk
July 2, 2026}

The frequency of AI slop is too high for AI to be successful and there are few solutions, except to wait until the labs produce better AI products.

AI and the extraordinary claims made without extraordinary evidence

_{Nobody should be using AI tools just for the sake of using them}_{Jeffrey Funk
June 2, 2026}

Will the bubble pop or is the pullback another false alarm? In any case, the extraordinary claims will likely continue and perhaps even accelerate as AI startups push their IPOs and companies become fearful of the bubble popping.

AI Startups are Measuring their Revenues in Likely Fraudulent Ways

_{These companies are creating higher valuations out of thin air!}_{Jeffrey Funk
May 8, 2026}

Companies charge their customers enough money for them to pay their suppliers, and for those suppliers to pay their suppliers but this isn’t happening in AI.

The Great AI Experiment Continues

_{When will the disappointing results be recognized?}_{Jeffrey Funk
April 14, 2026}

“The maximum hype you have right now, which is that AI is replacing people, is not true. But it’s also not true that AI will never threaten jobs. It’s going to be complicated.”

Will AI End Deep Thinking?

_{AI usage can prevent older people from developing critical thinking skills.}_{Jeffrey Funk
March 17, 2026}

They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements.

AI Hype Explodes Again:

_{Even as Cracks in AI Bubble Get Bigger}_{Jeffrey Funk
February 12, 2026}

AI related companies have accrued at least $200 billion in debt and the figure is likely considerably higher because that estimate doesn’t count undisclosed private deals.

Why isn’t the AI bubble ‘Common Knowledge’ and Pop?

_{Profits and revenues have been replaced by new metrics}_{Jeffrey Funk
January 16, 2026}

People often invest in companies not because they think the companies will succeed, but because they think others will invest.

The Generative AI Bubble Has Begun to Pop

_{From hype to hard realities in the age of artificial intelligence}_{Jeffrey Funk
December 17, 2025}

Recently, talk of a bubble has increased as it has become clear that OpenAI, and likely other AI software companies, may never become profitable.

A Lack of Transparency Threatens AI — and the American Economy

_{Even the Wall Street Journal does not appear to understand the nature of the looming problems}_{Jeffrey Funk
November 18, 2025}

AI software startups should be required to release audited numbers so that we can at least understand the current state of the AI economy.

Different Bubbles, Different Methods of Detection: What of AI?

_{Circular financing is one of the signs. Even the media are beginning to catch on}_{Jeffrey Funk
October 15, 2025}

Circular financing is the last gasp for OpenAI and the cloud services. They need it to maintain the mirage of an economic boom despite big losses and small revenues for AI software.

Why OpenAI Will Collapse: LLMs Are Not Economical

_{If a model is not refreshed every few months, it quickly turns from a helpful assistant into a debt generation machine with outdated knowledge}_{Georg Zoeller, Jeffrey Funk
September 24, 2025}

Companies can apply OpenAI’s models to a limited set of data and questions, creating a smaller model that is cheaper to train, update, and run.

AI Is a Long Way From Replacing Software Coders

_{Despite C-suite claims, they are not likely to take our jobs any time soon because they do not understand what words mean and how words relate to the physical world}_{Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith
August 4, 2025}

LLMs excel at simple coding tasks but are still too unreliable to use without extensive human supervision on complex tasks where mistakes are expensive.

AI in Education: Is the System Being Gamed — or the Student?

_{AI makes it easier to game the system, but many users are also being gamed}_{Jeffrey Funk
July 30, 2025}

Users, whose output is used to train the AI systems, will pay higher electricity costs on account of them while experts eventually earn top salaries.

Is Microsoft’s New AI System Better Than Doctors? Probably Not.

_{A critic notes that Microsoft’s AI system didn’t solve the problems, but merely repeated the solutions that it was trained on}_{Jeffrey Funk
July 3, 2025}

Trying to understand the rationale of big monopolists such as Microsoft and Google is often a fool’s errand.

The Job Market is Telling Us Something About AI and Jobs…

_{But it’s not telling us the same things as the AI hypesters are telling us}_{Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith
July 1, 2025}

The job market for recent college grads may be warning us that participation trophies for college and ChatGPT use have long-run costs.

AI Productivity Hype: The New “Cargo Cult Science”?

_{Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term to describe imaginary scenarios for success based on simple misunderstanding of realities}_{Jeffrey Funk
June 18, 2025}

The tech sector can push AI hype that resembles cargo cult science to its investors because of changes in media resulting from 30 years of the internet.

AI’s Contradictory Impact on Productivity: Squeezing a Balloon

_{AI appears to give support workers a big revolution in productivity. But it is somewhat like a child squeezing a balloon; the air pushes out someplace else}_{Jeffrey Funk
May 26, 2025}

Individual workers may claim huge productivity gains for their work, ignoring the impact of AI on the work of downstream employees within the same process.

University Science War: Ideas vs “Dollars per Net Square Footage”

_{Katalin Karikó, obscure and mistreated at the University of Pennsylvania, won the Nobel Prize. Shouldn’t we have some questions?}_{Jeffrey Funk
April 11, 2025}

Karikó’s story, as outlined in her book, highlights a big problem with universities: ideas matter less than sheer numbers of papers published.

Today’s Startups Are Doing Much Worse Than Those of the Past

_{The percentage of startups profitable at IPO time has steadily declined since the 1980s and most valuable ones take longer to become profitable}_{Jeffrey Funk
March 17, 2025}

We should certainly stop making overly optimistic claims about America’s system of startups, science, and technology.