5 days ago
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ARTICLE AD BOX
It was a stark contrast, one that got my attention. Usually, U.S. Route 101 North from San Francisco International Airport is sporadically lined with billboards of aspiration —new cars, real estate developments (both promising easy financing), local businesses in search for growth, and tech companies with shiny products often poking fun at each other. This familiar stretch of asphalt has always served as Silicon Valley’s unofficial welcome mat, especially welcome after a long flight. But a few weeks ago, whilst being driven towards Sunnyvale, I noticed the billboards were telling a different story. May well be a broader Silicon Valley shift, but I didn’t have time to verify.
A new overarching theme was clear, that is tech companies advertising AI in their products. Most seem to be an urgent call to action, such as the one I managed to photograph at high speed through the Uber’s windshield (respecting road etiquette of not slowing down or rolling down the window to poke the phone out of it). But you get the message. These billboards scream AI. Not whisper it. In large fonts the size of duplex houses. AI-powered. Built with AI. Your AI assistant. AI for everyone. Don’t get left behind by AI. The subtext has become the main text. An urgency is no longer implied but emblazoned across forty feet of vinyl and LED lights.
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This is new. And if you know anything about advertising, you’d get the sense this urgency at this scale means something has shifted. When tech companies move from clever to desperate, from exclusive to inclusive, from “join us if you’re cool enough” to “please, everyone get on board” — that’s when you know the game has changed.
What strikes me most isn’t the ubiquity of these ads, though that’s remarkable enough. It’s the tone. These billboards don’t feel like invitations to the future. They feel like warnings about the present. One about numbers. They want you to somehow sign up. Get on board. It’s about metrics, monthly active users, subscriber counts.
I can’t help but think of another technological moment that felt like this: the early 2000s, when every company suddenly needed to prove it had a “web strategy.” Remember when corporations would plaster “.com” after their names like a talisman? That moment felt similarly frantic, similarly universal. But there was a key difference. The internet had already proven itself. By the time the billboards went up, we knew what the internet was for. We understood—at least broadly—how it worked and why we might need it. With AI, that’s absolutely not the case. AI is different.
Consumers still can’t quite articulate what it does beyond the trick bundle that includes chatbots, image generators and AI videos. Even that has led to AI slop littering social media timelines and raising serious questions about whether AI companies have any respect for copyright content. Businesses too aren’t seeing much success beyond the excitement — a recent MIT report pointed out that 95% of AI pilots in the corporate environment have failed.
We’re being sold the infrastructure hype (and a nice dose of financial engineering because is money is all that matters to Big AI), before we’ve identified a true need. Everything we’re told about, the agents, the great replacement and whatnot, is essentially hot air, till AI stops getting high school maths wrong. We can then start any conversation.
I am no advertising guru (and neither do I have any intention of being one), but this billboard blitz seems to be one that is fixated on manufacturing inevitability, even when there may be none. It’s trying to market a momentum, as peer pressure at societal scale, and that’s what bothers me most. The old Route 101 billboards were capitalist without doubt, but they were honest about it. The car ads wanted to sell you a car. The real estate ads wanted you to aspire enough to part with a lot of money for a condo. Straightforward transaction, where you could calculate 1+1=2. But these AI billboards aren’t really selling products. They’re selling a world view. An idea that Big AI has created, and now wants everyone to fall in line.
They want to scare you, that you’re already behind, that the future already arrived last Tuesday, and your relevance depends on an immediate adoption of tools you didn’t ask for and don’t fully understand. That is when you’ll quickly hand over some money for a subscription. But what for exactly?
The car ads, often annoying to look at when energy reserves are low, at least promised a tangible step forward — a better engine, new aesthetic, improved mileage, more comfort and so on. Same for the real estate or smartphone billboard. They all hinted at an aspiration, a societal standing and generational improvement.
But what does Fin’s “The #1 AI agent for customer service” screaming at me in a white font on a black coloured billboard tell me? If I am a business owner, I’ll probably immediately begin to wonder, am I falling behind? Or what the ‘Redis for AI’ advert which I managed to capture hurriedly tells me with the words, “My boss really wants you to know we’re an AI company”. To do what? There’s desperation to be seen aboard the AI train. There’s desperation to sell you something, anything AI. There’s desperation to boost valuations, and therefore funding.
The risks of an AI bubble are becoming clearer by the day. Circular money movement to keep the hype ship afloat (recently featuring OpenAI starring Sam Altman, Nvidia featuring Jensen Huang, Oracle featuring Larry Ellison and guest appearance by Lisa Su of AMD) isn’t fooling anyone.
In a recent note, analysts with Oxford Economics research group warned that “The experience of a quarter of a century ago (when the dot-com bubble burst) won’t necessarily be repeated, but the scale of recent investment increases by tech firms already indicates that they are taking significant risks”.
We can keep saying “this time seems different” but if this bubble bursts, the repercussions may well be much worse. Research firm MacroStrategy Partnership in a note to its 220 institutional clients, also raises an alarm that this has very much become an AI bubble, one that is 17 times the size of the dot-com bubble. Remember what happened then? The Nasdaq Composite stock index, which included many tech stocks, fell by 77% and wiped out billions of dollars in market value. It took 15 years (on April 23, 2015 to be specific) before the Nasdaq returned to the highs of March 2000 before the crash — a closing high of 5,056.06 on April 23, 2015 to surpass the 5,048.62 previous closing high set on March 10, 2000.
I’ll point out something the analysts wrote, specifically about large language models’ task completion and scaling limits. “We don’t know exactly when LLMs might hit diminishing returns hard, because we don’t have a measure of the statistical complexity of language. To find out whether we have hit a wall we have to watch the LLM developers. If they release a model that costs 10x more, likely using 20x more compute than the previous one, and it’s not much better than what’s out there, then we’ve hit a wall,” they say.
Hasn’t it already happened? OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 cost $50 million to develop, ChatGPT-4 cost $500 million to develop and train while ChatGPT-5, which cost $5 billion to fully ready was also significantly delayed, and when released wasn’t exactly much better than the version before it. A dawning of reality happened this summer, around the time GPT-5, hyped in the months leading up to the release, as something with PhD-level intelligence.
I can’t help but feel we’re all bit part players in someone else’s business plan. These billboards aren’t talking to us. They’re talking past us, to investors. And to a future Big AI is trying to will into existence through sheer insistence. I am not sure if this is a word worth spreading. They’re just trying to convince us we need this now. Why? That apparently we must figure later.
Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor at HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice versa. The views expressed are personal.
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