HAS THE PENNY FINALLY DROPPED?

Has the penny finally dropped?

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 22-01-2026
Online Games Bay

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, dropped a bombshell while speaking at World Economic Forum 2026 Annual Meeting. According to him, AI is at risk of becoming a bubble. Wow, if we all had such insightful minds... Oh, wait, we do!

After about 2 years of pushing AI into EVERYTHING possible, no matter if it makes sense or not, now the CEO of Microsoft, had a sudden change of hearts. During the World Economic Forum he suddenly started to doubt if AI in fact has a bright future or is it just a bubble that will soon burst. Yeah, if there was just one person that would sound that alarm earlier... or millions that already had.

Now, Satya Nadella was quoted saying that unless the benefits of AI will be "much more evenly distributed", the whole project could become just a bubble that will burst like several economic bubbles before.

"I am much more confident that this is a technology that will, in fact, build on the rails of cloud and mobile, diffuse faster, bend the productivity curve and bring local surplus and economic growth all around the world", he said. Or to translate this to English, they have no clue how to monetize AI and if they won’t find a way, it will be an economic disaster for everyone involved.

Another "visionary", Sam Altman, who not long ago was sure the product is ready to enter the market (contrary to opinions of other people involved in its development), now is desperate enough to consider running adds on ChatGPT and still believes that pumping few more billions in next few years will be worth it.

AI, just like similar technologies in the past (like f.e. virtual reality) are good tools, but with very limited applications and with huge caveats applied. And decades later, the virtual reality is still a solution desperately searching for a problem to solve. It is a good way to f.e. train surgeons, has limited use in entertainment, but other than that, it is still hard to imagine how it could be profitable, what is the market for it.

And AI, in a way, is following the same footsteps. As a tool, it can be useful to f.e. speed up some processes in IT, it can be useful in translations, etc. but it is not yet as revolutionary as Satya Nadella, Sam Altman and others, thought it would be. Unless you will call generating images a good explanation for the mass amounts of energy it requires to work. But still, who would like to pay for those images as much as it would cover the costs?

22-01-2026