I really get the feeling that the economy is being artificially propped up at the moment and the key event I suspect they're being propped up for is the midterm elections. Post election, I feel like the cracks will start to show and we'll start to get a correction which will lead to a crash, similar in size to 2008.
That's just my feeling and it isn't necessarily backed on too much but significant amounts of resources have been poured into "AI" and I really don't feel the payoffs are going to pan out. Once that becomes the mainstream view, everything built around it crumbles.
Re AI: Can you describe to me the business use case for it? how does a business monetise AI in a way they can profit from?
That's the issue with AI, it can't be monetized for long. It will become commonplace and free like a .rar extractor program.
I think AI companies have realized this and their only ploy is create an AI that demands so much hardware power to make that it can't be emulated for free but I have a feeling this bet is going to fail, which is why their second hedge seems to be to buyup all the hardware so people can't even run dedicated AI for free even if they wanted to. This may extend the timeline for how long they can charge for AI use but soon enough the information will be there for people to make and run their own free dedicated AI programs, which will be preferable because they won't be censored or tracked; however, the lack of control scares the government so they'll do all they can to make this not a reality.
The purpose of the current push for AI is to replace labour costs, either by outsourcing directly to AI or by using AI to prop up your previous outsourcing scam by making your Indians less incompetent. There are other use cases - machine vision, machine translation, etc - but that's small fry in comparison.