Taylor Lorenz’s Power User
Taylor Lorenz’s Power User
Taylor Lorenz
[SUBSTACK/PATREON PREVIEW] The Brutal Truth Behind The AI Bubble w/ Garrison Lovely
8 minutes Posted Sep 28, 2026 at 10:00 am.
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Is AI really a massive bubble waiting to burst, or are we underestimating how durable the AI boom actually is?

For this months Power User bonus episode, Journalist Garrison Lovely, author of the new book Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us, (out this week!!) joins me to break down the case for and against the AI bubble.

We dig into the staggering amount of money flowing into artificial intelligence, Nvidia’s central role in the AI economy, OpenAI and Anthropic’s business models, the economics of running large language models, massive data center spending, Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek and Kimi, and whether AI companies can ever justify their enormous valuations.

Garrison argues that believing the entire industry will eventually collapse can be a comforting story, but it risks distracting us from the very real effects AI is already having on jobs, wealth, surveillance, privacy, war, and power.