3 Reasons the AI Bubble is Failing: Why You’re Doing It Wrong
I’ve watched founders burn $50k a month on API credits for tools nobody uses. I’ve seen enterprises hire "Prompt Engineers" who are just creative writers with a ChatGPT Plus subscription.
Most people are treating LLMs like a magic 8-ball. They ask a question. They get a mediocre answer. They call it "innovation."
It’s not innovation. It’s a glorified Google search with more hallucinations.
1. The Prompt Engineering Lie
Stop putting "Prompt Engineer" on your LinkedIn. It’s embarrassing.
Prompting is not a career. It is a temporary bridge. It exists because the interface between humans and machines is still clunky.
Early computers required punch cards. Then we got command lines. Then we got GUIs. Now we have natural language.
I spent three months testing "perfect" prompts. I built 40-page libraries of instructions. Do you know what I found?
The model changed. The update rolled out. My "perfect" prompts became garbage overnight.
If you are optimizing words instead of workflows, you are building on sand. You don’t need better prompts. You need better logic. You need to understand how the data flows, not just how the sentence sounds.
The "experts" are just people who spent more time talking to a bot than talking to their customers. That is a losing strategy.
2. The "Wrapper" Graveyard
They call it "AI for Lawyers" or "AI for Real Estate." It’s the same GPT-4 API. It has the same biases. It has the same limitations.
I call these "Thin Wrappers."
They have no moat. They have no proprietary data. They have a nice UI and a high monthly subscription.
The moment OpenAI or Anthropic releases a feature update, these companies die. I’ve seen $10M seed rounds vaporize because of a single "Dev Day" announcement.
If your business can be killed by a software update from someone else, you don't have a business. You have a feature.
Venture capital is waking up. The "AI-first" hype is cooling. Investors are finally asking the only question that matters: "What do you have that the Big Three can’t just build tomorrow?"
Most founders don't have an answer. They have a "vision." Vision doesn't pay the server bills when the churn rate hits 40%.
Stop buying subscriptions to wrappers. Use the raw models. Build your own systems. Own your data.
3. The Intelligence Debt
Most companies have broken workflows. They have bad data. They have lazy employees. They think adding a chatbot will fix the culture.
It won’t. It just generates more noise, faster.
Why? Because the 40 posts were soul-less. They were "optimized" but not "valuable." They were building "Intelligence Debt."
They were flooding their own ecosystem with average content. They were training their customers to ignore them.
You cannot automate quality. You can only automate volume.
If you haven't mastered the "boring" version of your job—the version involving spreadsheets, hard conversations, and manual labor—AI will only help you fail at scale.
The bubble is failing because we are using high-tech engines to drive in circles. We are obsessed with the "how" and we’ve completely forgotten the "why."
The Insight: The "Mid-Wit" Trap
It makes the bottom 25% of performers look like the middle 50%. It helps the person who can’t write a coherent email sound professional. It helps the junior dev write a basic script.
But it is a ceiling for the top 1%.
The real winners over the next 24 months won't be "AI Companies." They will be "Invisible AI" companies.
They won't have a chat box. They won't mention "LLMs" in their marketing. They will just solve a specific, painful problem 10x faster than humans ever could.
Stop playing with the toys. Start building the plumbing.
The CTA