American Hubris: The AI Bubble that Popped

At President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the tech bros of Amazon, X, Facebook, TikTok, and OpenAI all joined in a $500 billion rallying cry to build god-tier artificial intelligence (called “AGI”, or artificial general intelligence). But a Chinese app running from someone’s backyard, using dated hardware, just popped the American dream of AI supremacy.

Called DeepSeek, the Chinese ChatGPT-killer made Silicon Valley look especially unintelligent. Americans were betting on “bigger is better”, wher...