May's tech-hype predictions for 2026 onwards:
- The month after major public pensions and governments buy huge stakes in the AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc), the US AI bubble will start crashing. This will happen in 2026.

- At this point, free access to LLMs will go away. Corporate LLMs will raise their prices by at least 100x to make up for the loss in users and casual revenue.

- Unfortunately, this^ means AI coding /marketing wouldn't go away. It'd just be far, far more expensive and require deeper approvals. Your boss will have AI and you won't be able to summarize it.

- China and the rest of BRICS will take over the free AI market because they can. Perfect opportunity for propaganda and cyber warfare here.

- Many software products that wrap base commercial models will see their operating costs skyrocket. They'll basically need to rip it all out, or embed a cheaper model.

- Essentially, companies who haven't built out a proper data/AI team will fail unless their base non-AI product is still relevant.

- Small companies will die when they fail to transition out of this mess. There will be a wholesale buyout, like the dot com crash. This means deeper consolidation at the FAANG level.

- We've had essentially an entire generation of juniors who had a cheap/free magical crutch for years. How will you train people to read, write and code again across every industry?

- The costs of cloud services will also skyrocket, since they need to pay off their bullshit AI hardware/data centre investments. We may see a return to on-prem/hybrid IT. (This will be REALLY interesting for how software evolves from the current SaaS model.)

- Some people will start hyping quantum, but we're at least 2+ hype cycles away from that.

- (This one's a wild guess.) The next hype cycle is probably going to be in hardware/wearables/physical space, but that's ridiculously expensive to get into. It'll basically just be marketing.

- The techbro doomers will claim to have predicted this the whole time. They'll have more than enough money to start the next hype cycle for the next round of VC/PE hot potato.

- Western governments are still going to try to implement "AI" even after the crash and the prices go up.