[PREDICTION 2026] The #Artificial Intelligence bubble talk that dominated tech discourse in 2025 will continue all year long. We shouldn’t be surprised if there are some spectacular flameouts next year, particularly if models from the frontier labs improve enough that businesses can deploy them directly and not pay $50 per user per seat per month for some AI startup’s product. And some public companies will undoubtedly lose tens of billions of dollars trying to catch up to the leaders. (The odds of Meta catching up are long, and growing longer.) But I predict that 2026 ends more or less as 2025 did, with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and mayyyyybe xAI jockeying for prime position. As the analyst Benedict Evans recently wrote: “The fact that AI is working really, really well, and has no signs of hitting a wall, and will change the world… Does NOT mean that there cannot also be a bubble in AI. In fact, that’s generally the kind of thing that *causes* bubbles.” If you want to prepare yourself for 2026, internalize that point. #Data is beautiful #The Most Important Thing