Photo above - Matt Deitke, the 24-year-old guy who is getting paid $250 million by Meta to make their AI work better. Presumably his salary will be pa

Photo above - Matt Deitke, the 24-year-old guy who is getting paid $250 million by Meta to make their AI work better. Presumably his salary will be paid by our user fees to access their Llama 4- Behemoth software?

Anyone who has ever supervised coders (software developers) will recognize this piece of wisdom: “If your project is behind schedule, get rid of the 10-20% programmers at the bottom”. It’s funny because it’s true. The top guys spend half their time answering questions from - and fixing the work of - the bottom guys.

What happens when you add AI to the mix? AI companies predicted projects would be completed 40% faster. The actual result? The projects took 20% longer than with just humans alone. (see link below). Evidently AI software development tools require a lot of handholding and babysitting from their human co-workers.

Granted, we are talking about REAL programs, like building an Obamacare web portal, which famously took the US government nearly a billion dollars and years to pull off. There’s simple stuff AI can already do – create a webpage for your blog, for example. Or post your automated responses to someone else’s social media posts to keep your “response score” high, if that matters more to you than actual thinking.

So are we really going to have a quick and brutal crash of AI stocks, as The Atlantic predicts in its alarmist article? I’m not selling, because I haven’t been a recent buyer. I didn’t load up on Nvidia, which is evidently the company most vulnerable to the chasm between expectations and reality. Expectations are that huge efficiency gains (and reductions in labor expense) will flow from AI. And thus huge profit boosts. And huge unemployment lines?

Apparently the profit part these predictions are behind schedule. Maybe someone should think about firing the bottom 20% of the AI developers at places like Meta and Nvidia?

I’m positive that I have SOME exposure to AI stock risk, since some of my 401K is an S&P 500 ETF (exchange traded mutual fund). The S&P is full of stocks like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. In fact, you ask AI programs like ChatGPT and Claude Llama-4 what stuff should be in your 401K account, they all agree – start with S&P exchange traded fund.

This is like Merrill Lynch recommending that you buy Bank of America stock, its parent company. (This writer and this column are not recommending that readers either buy or sell stocks like BAC, AMZN, MSFT, or NVDA). I am expecting to “get hurt” if the AI bubble does pop. My S&P funds have bled profusely every time a bubble has burst, even though I wasn’t overloaded on mortgage banks, EV startups, or dotcom startups. A falling tide takes all ships lower.

What about the clickbait in my subject line: “Killer drones”?

Ukrainian civilians – including women and kids – are being chased down in the streets and shot by hunter killer drones launched from Russia. Until yesterday, everyone thought Putin was getting these toys from Iran. But Iran still relies on the guidance of Mohammed on tech matters, so where are THEY getting their gear? From China, it turns out. Ukraine shot down a Russian/Iranian/Chinese drone over the weekend. The hard drive contained video of it's training session in China where engineers were practicing their targeting systems on cars at a local highway (sans ammo). Then those cameras and software were sold to Iran, which put them in a radio-controlled drones and sold them to Putin. See the link below.

President Trump - here's my personal advice: instead of arresting a bunch of South Korean poindexters armed only with slide rules, who are helping the USA build a battery factory, why not summon the Chinese Ambassador to the White House and tell him to pack up and leave? Like Biden should have after that “weather balloon” fiasco. What Xi is doing is a war crime.

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

Is this the smoking gun footage that PROVES China's role in Ukraine war? Bombshell drone vid reveals Chinese 'factory' | The US Sun