Ars Live: Is the AI bubble about to pop? A live chat with Ed Zitron. (arstechnica.com)

Ars Technica’s senior AI reporter will host a live Ars Live conversation with prominent AI critic Ed Zitron on October 7 at 3:30 pm ET (streaming on YouTube) to tackle the burning question: Is the generative AI boom — fueled since ChatGPT’s launch by massive investment and infrastructure buildouts — a bubble about to burst? Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast and CEO of EZPR, has been vocal about the sector’s shaky economics in his newsletter Where’s Your Ed At, arguing companies may be losing money on AI projects, that GPU rental markets mask true costs, and that OpenAI’s funding needs approach trillion-dollar scale — framing the situation as a potential "Subprime AI Crisis." The discussion matters for the AI/ML community because it moves beyond hype to economics: if model training, inference, and GPU provisioning aren’t delivering proportional business value, firms could sharply cut AI spending, slowing research, data ops, and cloud-GPU markets. Expect a debate on return-on-investment metrics, the sustainability of current infrastructure scaling, signs of a hype peak, and what cost-sensitive deployment strategies or product pivots might look like. The session promises a candid, critical look at where financial realities and technical ambitions meet — useful context for engineers, product leaders, and investors navigating AI’s next phase.