AI
Navigating AI Investments: Learning from the Dotcom Bubble
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm in recent years. From self-driving cars to chatbots that can hold human-like conversations, the capabilities of AI are expanding at an astonishing rate. As a result, there is a growing interest in investing in AI companies, with many trying to pick the next big AI winner. However, before diving headfirst into the world of AI investments, it’s important to remember the lessons from the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. Just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to the collapse of many overhyped internet companies, the AI industry may face a similar reckoning if investors are not careful.
In this blog post, we will explore the parallels between the dot-com bubble and the current AI frenzy. We will also discuss the factors that investors should consider when navigating the AI landscape to avoid making the same mistakes that were made during the dot-com era.
The Dotcom Bubble: A Lesson in Hype and Speculation
The dot-com bubble, which occurred from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, was characterized by a massive surge in investment in internet-based companies. Investors were drawn to the promise of the internet, believing that any company with a “.com” in its name was destined for success. This led to a frenzy of speculation and a rush to invest in internet startups, many of which had little or no revenue.
The bubble burst in 2000 when it became clear that many of these internet companies were overvalued and could not deliver on their promises. Stock prices plummeted, and countless companies went bankrupt. The dot-com bubble serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of investing in hype and speculation without a solid foundation.
Parallels with the AI Hype
Today, we are witnessing a similar frenzy of excitement around AI. AI technologies have the potential to revolutionize countless industries, from healthcare to finance to transportation. As a result, there is a rush to invest in AI startups, and the market is flooded with companies claiming to be at the forefront of AI innovation.
Just as in the dot-com era, there is a danger of overhyping AI and investing in companies that may not live up to their promises. Many AI startups are pre-revenue or have limited traction, yet they attract significant investment based on their potential. This has led to concerns that the AI bubble could burst, much like the dot-com bubble did.
Factors to Consider in AI Investment
While there are parallels between the dot-com bubble and the current AI hype, it’s important to note that AI is not the same as the internet. AI has the potential to bring about profound changes in various industries, and there are genuinely innovative companies in the space. However, investors should approach AI investments with caution and consider several key factors:
- Technology and Product Maturity: Before investing in an AI company, assess the maturity of its technology and products. Are they still in the experimental stage, or do they have a well-defined and tested solution? It’s crucial to differentiate between companies that have a promising concept and those that have a proven, market-ready product.
- Market Fit: Evaluate whether the AI technology addresses a genuine market need. Does it solve a problem or create value for customers? Companies with a clear understanding of their target market and a validated product-market fit are more likely to succeed.
- Team Expertise: The team behind an AI startup is often a critical factor in its success. Look for companies with experienced AI researchers and practitioners who have a track record of delivering innovative solutions.
- Data and Scale: AI models rely heavily on data. Consider whether the company has access to high-quality, diverse data sources and whether they can scale their solution to meet the demands of their target market.
- Regulatory and Ethical Considerations: AI technologies are subject to increasing scrutiny and regulation. Assess whether the company is mindful of ethical and regulatory concerns and has a plan in place to navigate potential challenges.
- Competitive Landscape: Research the competitive landscape to understand how the AI company differentiates itself from competitors. Being a first mover in a space doesn’t guarantee success, but having a unique value proposition can be a strong advantage.
- Financial Health: While not all AI startups need to be profitable from day one, it’s essential to evaluate their financial health and sustainability. Understand their burn rate and funding runway to assess whether they can weather potential market downturns.
- Long-Term Vision: Consider whether the company has a clear long-term vision and a strategy for staying relevant as the AI landscape evolves. Technology trends change rapidly, and successful companies must adapt.
Conclusion
The current excitement surrounding AI is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, but it’s crucial to approach AI investments with a more measured and informed perspective. While there are undoubtedly groundbreaking AI innovations happening, not every AI startup will be a winner.
Investors must conduct thorough due diligence, focusing on factors like technology maturity, market fit, team expertise, data availability, regulatory considerations, and financial sustainability. By learning from the lessons of the dotcom era and making informed decisions, investors can navigate the AI landscape with greater confidence and reduce the risk of being caught in an AI bubble that may burst. AI has the potential to bring about transformative changes, but wise and cautious investment is key to realizing its full potential without repeating the mistakes of the past.
AI
Nvidia Earnings Power AI Boom, Stock Faces Pressure
NVDA earnings beat expectations, fueling AI momentum, but Nvidia stock price shows investor caution.
Nvidia’s latest earnings report has once again underscored its central role in the global AI revolution. The chipmaker, whose GPUs power everything from generative AI models to advanced data centers, posted blockbuster results that exceeded Wall Street expectations. Yet, despite the strong NVDA earnings, the Nvidia stock price slipped, reflecting investor caution amid sky-high valuations and intense competition. According to Yahoo Finance, the company’s results remain one of the most closely watched indicators of AI’s commercial trajectory.
Key Earnings Highlights
For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, Nvidia reported record revenue of $39.3 billion, up 78% year-over-year. Data center sales, driven by surging demand for AI infrastructure, accounted for $35.6 billion, a 93% increase from the prior yearNVIDIA Newsroom. Earnings per share came in at $0.89, up 82% year-over-year.
On a full-year basis, Nvidia delivered $130.5 billion in revenue, more than doubling its performance from fiscal 2024. This growth cements Nvidia’s dominance in the AI hardware market, where its GPUs remain the backbone of large language models, autonomous systems, and enterprise AI adoption.
Expert and Market Reactions
Analysts on Yahoo Finance’s Market Catalysts noted that while Nvidia consistently beats estimates, its stock often reacts negatively due to lofty expectations. Antoine Chkaiban of New Street Research emphasized that five of the past eight earnings beats were followed by declines in Nvidia stock, as investors reassess valuations.
Investor sentiment remains mixed. On one hand, Nvidia’s results confirm its unrivaled position in AI infrastructure. On the other, concerns about sustainability, competition from rivals like AMD, and potential regulatory scrutiny weigh on market psychology.
NVDA Stock Price Analysis
Following the earnings release, NVDA stock price fell nearly 3%, closing at $181.08, down from a previous close of $186.60. Despite the dip, Nvidia shares remain up almost 28% over the past yearBenzinga, reflecting long-term confidence in its AI-driven growth story.
The volatility highlights a recurring theme: Nvidia’s earnings power is undeniable, but investor sentiment is sensitive to valuation risks. With a trailing P/E ratio above 50, the stock is priced for perfection, leaving little margin for error.
Forward-Looking AI Implications
Nvidia’s earnings reaffirm that AI is not just a technological trend but a revenue engine reshaping the semiconductor industry. The company’s GPUs are embedded in every layer of AI innovation—from cloud hyperscalers to startups building generative AI applications.
Looking ahead, analysts expect Nvidia’s revenue to continue climbing, with consensus estimates projecting EPS growth of more than 40% next year. However, the company must navigate challenges including supply chain constraints, intensifying competition, and geopolitical risks tied to chip exports.
Outlook
Nvidia’s latest earnings report demonstrates the company’s unmatched leverage in the AI economy. While NVDA earnings continue to impress, the Nvidia stock price reflects investor caution amid high expectations. For long-term shareholders, the trajectory remains promising: Nvidia is positioned as the indispensable supplier of AI infrastructure, a role that will likely define both its market value and the broader tech landscape.
In the months ahead, Nvidia’s ability to balance innovation with investor confidence will determine whether its stock can sustain momentum. As AI adoption accelerates globally, Nvidia’s role as the sector’s bellwether remains unchallenged.
Business
5 Disruptive AI Startups That Prove the LLM Race is Already Dead
The trillion-dollar LLM race is over. The true disruption will be Agentic AI—autonomous, goal-driven systems—a trend set to dominate TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
When OpenAI’s massive multimodal models were released in the early 2020s, the entire tech world reset. It felt like a gold rush, where the only currency that mattered was GPU access, trillions of tokens, and a parameter count with enough zeroes to humble a Fortune 500 CFO. For years, the narrative has been monolithic: bigger models, better results. The global market for Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM-powered tools is projected to be worth billions, with worldwide spending on generative AI technologies forecast to hit $644 billion in 2025 alone.
This single-minded pursuit has created a natural monopoly of scale, dominated by the five leading vendors who collectively capture over 88% of the global market revenue. But I’m here to tell you, as an investor on the ground floor of the next wave, that the era of the monolithic LLM is over. It has peaked. The next great platform shift is already here, and it will be confirmed, amplified, and debated on the hallowed stage of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
The future of intelligence is not about the model’s size; it’s about its autonomy. The next billion-dollar companies won’t be those building the biggest brains, but those engineering the most competent AI Agents.
🛑 The Unspoken Truth of the Current LLM Market
The current obsession with ever-larger LLMs—models with hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters—has led to an industrial-scale, yet fragile, ecosystem. While adoption is surging, with 67% of organisations worldwide reportedly using LLMs in some capacity in 2025, the limitations are becoming a structural constraint on true enterprise transformation.
We are seeing a paradox of power: models are capable of generating fluent prose, perfect code snippets, and dazzling synthetic media, yet they fail at the most basic tenets of real-world problem-solving. This is the difference between a hyper-literate savant and a true executive.
Here is the diagnosis, informed by the latest ai news and deep-drives:
- The Cost Cliff is Untenable: Training a state-of-the-art frontier model still requires a multi-billion-dollar fixed investment. For smaller firms, the barrier is staggering; approximately 37% of SMEs are reportedly unable to afford full-scale LLM deployment. Furthermore, the operational (inference) costs, while dramatically lower than before, remain a significant drag on gross margins for any scaled application.
- The Reliability Crisis: A significant portion of users, specifically 35% of LLM users in one survey, identify “reliability and inaccurate output” as their primary concerns. This is the well-known “hallucination problem.” When an LLM optimizes for the most probable next word, it does not optimise for the most successful outcome. This fundamentally limits its utility in high-stakes fields like finance, healthcare, and engineering.
- The Prompt Ceiling: LLMs are intrinsically reactive. They are stunningly sophisticated calculators that require a human to input a clear, perfect equation to get a useful answer. They cannot set their own goals, adapt to failure, or execute a multi-step project without continuous, micro-managed human prompting. This dependence on the prompt limits their scalability in true automation.
We have reached the point of diminishing returns. The incremental performance gain of going from 1.5 trillion parameters to 2.5 trillion parameters is not worth the 27% increase in data center emissions and the billions in training costs. The game is shifting.
🔮 The TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Crystal Ball: The Agentic Pivot
My definitive prediction for TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is this: The main stage will not be dominated by the unveiling of a new, larger foundation model. It will be dominated by startups focused entirely on Agentic AI.
What is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI systems don’t just generate text; they act. They are LLMs augmented with a planning module, an execution engine (tool use), persistent memory, and a self-correction loop. They optimise for a long-term goal, not just the next token. They are not merely sophisticated chatbots; they are autonomous problem-solvers. This is the difference between a highly-trained analyst who writes a report and a CEO who executes a multi-quarter strategy.
Here are three fictional, yet highly plausible, startup concepts poised to launch this narrative at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield:
1. Stratagem
- The Pitch: “We are the first fully autonomous, goal-seeking sales development agent (SDA) for B2B SaaS.”
- The Agentic Hook: Stratagem doesn’t just write cold emails. A human simply inputs the goal: “Close five $50k+ contracts in the FinTech vertical this quarter.” The Agentic AI then autonomously:
- Reasons: Breaks the goal into steps (Targeting $\rightarrow$ Outreach $\rightarrow$ Qualification $\rightarrow$ Hand-off).
- Acts: Scrapes real-time financial data to identify companies with specific growth signals (a tool-use capability).
- Self-Corrects: Sends initial emails, tracks engagement, automatically revises its messaging vector (tone, length, value prop) for non-responders, and books a qualified meeting directly into the human sales rep’s calendar.
- The LLM is now a component, not the core product.
2. Phage Labs
- The Pitch: “We have decoupled molecular synthesis from human-led R&D, leveraging multi-agent systems to discover novel materials.”
- The Agentic Hook: This startup brings the “Agent Swarm” model to material science. A scientist inputs the desired material properties (e.g., “A polymer with a tensile strength 15% higher than Kevlar and 50% lighter”). A swarm of specialised AI Agents then coordinates:
- The Generator Agent proposes millions of novel molecular structures.
- The Simulator Agent runs millions of physics-based tests concurrently in a cloud environment.
- The Refiner Agent identifies the 100 most promising candidates, and most crucially, writes the robotics instructions to synthesise and test the top five in a wet lab.
- The system operates 24/7, with zero human intervention until a successful material is confirmed.
3. The Data-Moat Architectures (DMA)
- The Pitch: “We eliminate the infrastructure cost of LLMs by orchestrating open-source models with proprietary data moats.”
- The Agentic Hook: This addresses the cost problem head-on. The core technology is an intelligent Orchestrator Agent. Instead of relying on a single, expensive, trillion-parameter model, the Orchestrator intelligently routes complex queries to a highly efficient network of smaller, specialized, open-source models (e.g., one for code, one for summarization, one for RAG queries). This dramatically reduces latency and inference costs while achieving a higher reliability score than any single black-box LLM. By routing a question to the most appropriate, fine-tuned, and low-cost model, they are fundamentally destroying the Big Tech LLM moat.
🏆 Why TechCrunch is the Bellwether
The shift from the LLM race to Agentic AI is a classic platform disruption—and a debut at Tech Crunch is still the unparalleled launchpad. Why? Because the conference isn’t just about technology; it’s about market validation.
History is our guide. Companies that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt didn’t just have clever tech; they had a credible narrative for how they would fundamentally change human behaviour, capture mindshare, and dominate a market. The intensity of the Startup Battlefield 200, where over 200 hand-selected, early-stage entrepreneurs compete, forces founders to distil their vision into a five-minute pitch that is laser-focused on value.
This focus is the very thing that the venture capital community is desperate for right now. Investors are no longer underwriting the risk of building a foundational LLM—that race is lost to a handful of giants. They are now hunting for the applications that will generate massive ROI on top of that infrastructure. When a respected publication like techcrunch.com reports on a debut, it signals to the world’s most influential VCs—who are all in attendance—that this isn’t science fiction; it’s a Series A waiting to happen.
The successful TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 startup will not have a “better model.” It will have a better system—a goal-driven Agent that can execute, self-correct, and deliver measurable business outcomes without constant human hand-holding. This is the transition from AI as a fancy word processor to AI as a hyper-competent, autonomous employee.
Conclusion: The Era of Doing
For years, the LLM kings have commanded us with the promise of intelligence. We’ve been wowed by their ability to write sonnets, simulate conversations, and generate images. But a truly disruptive technology doesn’t just talk about solving a problem; it solves it.
The Agentic AI revolution marks the transition from the Era of Talking to the Era of Doing.
The biggest LLM is now just a powerful but inert, brain—a resource to be leveraged. The true innovation is in the nervous system, the memory, and the self-correction loop that transforms that raw intelligence into measurable, scalable, and autonomous value.
Will this new era, defined by goal-driven, Agentic AI, be the one that finally breaks the LLM monopoly and truly disrupts Silicon Valley? Let us know your thoughts below.
NASA
Blue Origin’s New Glenn: Redefining Space Access and Launching NASA’s Mission to Mars
The commercial space race is heating up, and at its epicenter is Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos. All eyes are on their massive heavy-lift vehicle, the New Glenn rocket, as it undertakes a pivotal mission—NASA’s groundbreaking ESCAPADE mission to Mars. This launch isn’t just a technical feat; it’s a statement about the future of reusable rockets and Blue Origin‘s challenge to the industry’s established giants.
Why the New Glenn Launch Matters
The New Glenn launch (specifically the NG-2 mission) marks a critical second flight for the colossal, 320-foot-tall rocket. Named after the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn, this vehicle is foundational to Blue Origin‘s vision of millions of people living and working in space.
Here’s what makes this event so significant:
- NASA’s ESCAPADE Mission: The primary payload is NASA’s twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) probes. These small spacecraft, nicknamed “Blue” and “Gold,” are headed to Mars to study how solar wind interacts with the Red Planet’s magnetosphere, an essential step for future human missions. This is New Glenn‘s first operational flight for NASA, demonstrating critical confidence in the burgeoning commercial launch sector.
- The Reusability Challenge: A key objective of the mission is the propulsive landing of the first-stage booster on the “Jacklyn” landing platform vessel in the Atlantic Ocean. The reusable first stage, powered by seven BE-4 engines, is designed for a minimum of 25 flights. A successful landing would be a huge leap for Blue Origin, positioning it as only the second company to achieve this feat with a heavy-lift orbital rocket, directly challenging the cost efficiency of competitors.
- Clearing the Backlog: Following its maiden flight in January, which successfully reached orbit but missed the booster landing, a successful NG-2 mission is vital for Blue Origin to accelerate its launch cadence. It is crucial for tackling a reported multi-billion-dollar backlog of customer contracts, including missions for satellite constellations like Amazon’s Project Kuiper.
The New Glenn Rocket: A Closer Look
The New Glenn is a giant, two-stage-to-orbit vehicle meticulously designed for maximum performance and cost-effectiveness:
Component Key Features Height & Diameter 98 meters (320 feet) tall, 7 meters wide First Stage Reusable, powered by seven high-performance BE-4 engines (methalox-fueled). Second Stage Expendable (currently), powered by two BE-3U engines (hydrolox-fueled), optimized for high-energy orbits. Payload Capacity Over 45 metric tons to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Fairing Volume Seven meters wide, offering twice the volume of traditional five-meter class fairings for large payloads.
The commitment to reusability is the core of Blue Origin‘s strategy. By recovering and reflashing the most expensive part of the rocket, the company aims to dramatically lower the cost of accessing space, making frequent and sustainable launches a reality.
The Road Ahead: Blue Origin and the Future of Space
The impending Blue Origin launch of New Glenn is more than just a single event; it’s a testament to the tenacity of the private space industry. With a successful launch and, more importantly, a recovered booster, Blue Origin will prove the operational maturity of their technology.
The success of the ESCAPADE mission will cement Blue Origin’s role as a trusted partner for deep-space exploration, demonstrating that commercial providers can reliably handle complex interplanetary missions for NASA and other global customers. As the countdown continues from Cape Canaveral, the space community holds its breath, waiting for New Glenn to further solidify its place in the history of spaceflight.
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