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Greetings! Phewww. That was a close one. Tech stocks narrowly avoided another large, painful sell-off on Monday as investors continued to look at the uncertainty around President Donald Trump's trade agenda. The Nasdaq ended the day down 0.1%, but at different points in the day, trading seemed much grimmer, and the index was down more than 2% at one point. This kind of thing keeps happening. The index has fallen nearly 13% since Trump's inauguration, and it's one of several indicators that suggest the country could tip over into a recession—along with significant recent downturns in consumer confidence and a substantial decline for the S&P 500, which has fallen more than 7% since Trump took office. March was its worst month since 2022. People haven't clamped their wallets shut yet—consumer spending did increase ever so slightly last month—but that will happen shortly if the markets have a few more bloody Mondays. When consumers cut back, businesses do, too, and I wonder if one of the most intriguing outcomes of the Trump tariff era will be a pressure test of the AI economy. Right now, many, many AI companies are seeing tremendous growth. (Perhaps the ne plus ultra of that trend is Anysphere, the startup behind the buzzy Cursor code-editing software, which my colleague Natasha wrote about last week.) But how durable is that growth? No one is quite sure. Companies have certainly rushed to get in on the boom and add AI to their businesses, but there's the persistent fear in Silicon Valley that their interest will wane: It's why such metrics as net revenue retention rate, a measure of how well a company holds on to its customers and increases their spending, have become crucial yardsticks for assessing whether someone actually has a real business in AI. People are jittery over just how real the AI economy is. It's why CoreWeave stock continued to slide today—declining more than 7%—as investors sat around and asked themselves whether the company represents a bubble (building AI data centers) within an even larger bubble (AI in general). Let's say all those bubbles burst. The markets will continue to feel the pain. Businesses will reduce spending, as inevitably happens in a recession, and they will start by paring back on the nonessentials: things like free food at the office, middle managers and maybe the AI software no one actually needs. Then again, if a recession doesn't zap AI growth, the industry's resilience will be one of the most concrete signs yet of its enduring nature. The Ghiblification of ChatGPT has gotten out of hand! As people have rushed to fool around with the chatbot's improved image-generation skills, OpenAI is seeing what appears to be its greatest period of user growth so far: At one point today, it added a million users in a single hour, CEO Sam Altman wrote on X. For perspective, when ChatGPT initially launched and caused a stir two years ago, the startup added a million users over a five-day span. What exactly do I mean by Ghiblification? Well, one major internet trend has been to use ChatGPT to make images in the style of the famed Japanese animation studio. It's produced a lot of cute memes—and more than a few cringe ones, too. Publicly, Altman has struck a tone of disbelief over how taken people are with the images. Last Thursday, he said the company's GPUs were "melting" after the surge in interest began—suggesting it hadn't anticipated such extensive demand. And a day ago, he wrote on X: "can yall please chill on generating images this is insane our team needs sleep." I find Altman's surprise a touch unsettling. I would have expected him to have a better sense at this point of how the public will react to an OpenAI product. And how they might use it. Dealmaker was named the "Best in Business" newsletter for its insightful coverage of private technology and the AI hype cycle. Start receiving the newsletter here. |
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