The Price of Progress: Inside the AI Investment Surge

Recently, analysts have theorized a stock market condition named the AI bubble, which would occur by a very significant surge in investments in artificial intelligence industries. However,  with this significant surge, the broader economy would be affected. But the thing is, why would people invest in AI if it would actually affect the broader economy in general? Recently, a lot of industries have been putting the AI label everywhere to make things seem “better” or more “modern” to try to rope in customers. Therefore, since AI is getting a lot of attention and usage in the corporate world, an urge to invest would arise since a lot of people think it’s profitable and useful. However, this isn’t always the case.

 Some people believe that AI is a hoax, with events occurring such as the AI engine on X, Grok, was posting several racist and anti-semetic statements and “opinions” that were also said to be praising the legacy of Adolf Hitler. Due to events like this, a lot of people don’t trust artificial intelligence with these kinds of things, and the theory of the AI bubble works practically the exact opposite way. Another negative effect of AI is that it uses a lot of data servers to operate, which run off of RAM. Computer nerds have recently noticed that the price of a stick of RAM has skyrocketed primarily due to AI. The corporate world has also suffered from AI implementation. For example, the language learning app that we all know and love, Duolingo, has pivoted more towards an “AI-first” content model. Between 2024 and 2025, they offboarded approximately 10% of their employee population, instead replacing the courses they created with AI-generated language courses. While this increased efficiency for the company, it has also created a collapse in customer trust, since the majority of users prefer actual human linguists for language learning. Not all corporate industries have suffered, for example, Coca-Cola has used AI to collect statistics on what the most popular flavor is/what needs to be produced more, and in what certain location. This theory is interesting, and definitely plausible since AI has countless uses that can benefit a wide range of people;

“Like any other tool, they can be used properly and misused. Students of any field tend to misuse advanced tools, whether that be AI for computing or for schoolwork in general.” “I’m not gonna stop teaching programming because AI will not replace me or the junior developers that are graduating every day.” Quote from Computer science teacher at AIS, Mr. Lightcap.