In December 2023, just as ChatGPT marked its first birthday, Politico asked Signal president and tech critic Meredith Whittaker which tech trend she thought was most “overhyped.” The role of a critic, the interviewer seemed to assume, is to draw a line between promise and reality, between hype and fact.

Whittaker, however, decided to sidestep the question. Rather than pointing to any particular technology, she suggested that “the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype.”

Today hype is nowhere more ubiquitous than in the world of artificial intelligence. From superintelligence to outer space data centers, AI certainly seems to inspire ever wilder fever dreams. Every PR stunt is followed by a debunking, and every stellar revenue prediction countered by a bubble warning, and yet the hype trend — despite recent doubts from famed short sellers like Michael Burry — seems to only go in one direction: up.