AI Companies Are in a Race Against Time
AI Companies Are In a Race Against TimeThey may disemploy us; they may wipe us out. We still think so, and, if anything, our concerns have deepened.It’s not just that the gap between the industry’s spending and investors’ returns on that spending looks characteristic of a financial bubble, as we initially argued. It’s that the gap has widened, such that the revenue flows needed to close it look implausibly large.
- ▪AI Companies Are In a Race Against TimeThey may disemploy us; they may wipe us out.
- ▪We still think so, and, if anything, our concerns have deepened.It’s not just that the gap between the industry’s spending and investors’ returns on that spending looks characteristic of a financial bubble, as we initially argued.
- ▪It’s that the gap has widened, such that the revenue flows needed to close it look implausibly large.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,494 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://econjared.substack.com/p/ai-companies-are-in-a-race-against |
| Publication time | Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:01:18 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-25T22:10:24.061Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-25T22:10:24.061Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | AGqV4vC8voed · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI Companies Are In a Race Against TimeThey may disemploy us; they may wipe us out. But right now, their lack of profitability underscores our bubble case.Jared Bernstein and Ryan CummingsSep 25, 2026652117Share[Apologies for the longer-than-usual post—fair bit to unpack here.]AI doomerism is top of mind these days, but we have a different and more prosaic question: when will AI firms start making money?The answer is a key input into a case we made last year in the NYT: that AI is in a financial bubble. We still think so, and, if anything, our concerns have deepened.It’s not just that the gap between the industry’s spending and investors’ returns on that spending looks characteristic of a financial bubble, as we initially argued.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hacker News (AI / LLM)
