Is AI Lying to You, or Are You Lying to Yourself?

Fifty-five billion dollars. That's the entire AI industry's real revenue right now, every company combined. Four hundred billion dollars is what the seven biggest tech companies on earth are spending this year alone just to build the data centers behind it.

That gap is sitting in actual filings. It's why Ed Zitron sat down across from Steven Bartlett on Diary of a CEO and called generative AI "a con" — and it's why the clip went everywhere.

I'm not writing this from the sidelines. I sell enterprise technology for a living. Cloud networking, security, infrastructure — real budgets, real Fortune 500 boardrooms. I had a deal that would've closed in a single call eighteen months ago sit in review for six weeks this year, because somebody finally asked, "show me the return, not the roadmap." That's not a rumor. That's Tuesday.

Here's the part most people skip past when they pick a side in this debate: Zitron's numbers are real. OpenAI and Anthropic together raised $217 billion in the first half of this year and will need roughly $150 billion each next year just to keep running. Nvidia invests in the labs, the labs buy Nvidia chips with that money, Microsoft invests in OpenAI, OpenAI runs on Microsoft's cloud paid for with Microsoft's own money. Follow the dollar far enough and it walks in a circle.

And at the same time, I use Claude, GPT, and Perplexity every single day, not because someone told me to, but because they make me faster at my actual job. Both of those things are true at once. The financing can be a house of cards, and the tool in your hand can still be the sharpest edge you've got.

The question I actually think matters more than "bubble or not" is one nobody's asking: AI is getting smarter every single month — self-learning, self-correcting, no human touching the code by hand. Are we? I've watched smart people stop reading the fine print because the AI said the contract looked fine. That's the real bubble I worry about, the one in our own heads.

Whichever way this breaks, the lesson doesn't change. You don't control the market, the headlines, or what happens in Silicon Valley next. You control whether your own money is sitting somewhere that wins no matter which way it goes — which is the entire reason my wife and I built DisruptorsCode.com around money that grows tax-free when markets rise and doesn't lose a dime when they crash.

So here's the question I'd actually ask you to sit with: when's the last time you turned the same scrutiny you'd apply to a two-hundred-billion-dollar company's numbers onto your own thinking?

Listen to the full episode: "Is AI Lying to You, or Are You Lying to Yourself?" on The Carlos Inspire Show.