What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.
Think of all the scientific experiments we could've had with the hundreds of billions being spent on AI. We need a lot more data on what's happening in space, in the sea, in tiny bits of matter, inside the earth. We need billions of people to learn a lot more things and think hard based on those axioms and the data we could gather exploring what I mention above to discover new ones. I hypothesize that investing there would have more benefit than a bunch of companies buying server farms to predict text.
CERN cost about 6 billions. Total MIT operations cost 4.7 billions a year. We could be allocating capital a lot more efficiently.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/data-cent...
It doesn't matter if the AI is any good, you will still pay for it because it's the only way to access more compute power than consumer hardware offers.
What I predict is that we won't advance in memory technology on the consumer side as quickly. For instance, a huge number of basic consumer use cases would be totally fine on DDR3 for the next decade. Older equipment can produce this; so it has value, and we may see platforms come out with newer designs on older fabs.
Chiplets are a huge sign of growth in that direction - you end up with multiple components fabbed on different processes coming together inside one processor. That lets older equipment still have a long life and gives the final SoC assembler the ability to select from a wide range of components.