Episode Details
Back to Episodes
A study says AI advice makes you confidently wrong — AI Brief July 20
Description
Good day, humans. The AI reckoning showed up from five directions at once today. Scott Galloway says the bubble is already hissing air, a new study finds AI advice makes people confidently wrong, and “Dr. Doom” Nouriel Roubini thinks the whole story ends in universal basic income. Also on the docket: Google’s AI inventing a fake bio for a real reporter, and ChatGPT going dark for much of the planet on a Sunday. Let’s get into it.
Scott Galloway Says the AI Bubble Is Leaking
Source: No Mercy / No Malice
* What happened: Scott Galloway published “1999.AI,” arguing today’s AI frenzy rhymes with the dot-com peak — and that the unwind has already started. He points to circular deals between AI firms and their own suppliers, and to enterprise budgets that are snapping: one unnamed company burned $500 million on Claude licenses in a single month, and Uber reportedly torched its entire 2026 AI budget in four.
* Why it matters: When a market-watcher with Galloway’s megaphone calls the top, people who move real money listen. If AI spending is running this hot while returns stay this thin, a correction wouldn’t just dent the chipmakers — it would hit the cloud bills, hiring plans, and roadmaps of nearly every company that bet the farm on AI.
* What everyone’s saying: Galloway cites the Economist’s estimate that corporate AI spend jumped 13x from 2025 to 2026, and notes even believers wince at the circular financing — chipmakers investing in the startups that turn around and buy their chips. DoorDash, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce are all reported to be reining spend back to proven use cases.
* My read between the lines: Galloway teases a “twist ending” the dot-com crash never had — the infrastructure might actually get used this time. But the real tell is the mood. When the far right and the far left agree the whole thing’s a con — and right now they do — that’s historically the exact moment the smart money starts edging toward the door.
📖 Further reading: We Fired Intercom the Week Salesforce Bought It — what it actually looks like when a company stops paying for AI it can’t tie to a result.
A quick word from today’s sponsor. If Galloway’s right and the AI bubble is deflating, the survivors will be the teams that made AI do real work instead of demos. That’s Viktor — an AI agent that lives in your Slack (or Teams) and plugs into 3,000+ tools to actually ship: pull the report, build the dashboard, run the campaign, write the code. Not a chatbot you babysit — a coworker you hand things to. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →
AI Advice Made People Wrong — and Proud of It
Source: The Next Web
* What happened: Researchers at French and Italian universities gave people AI advice on a batch of questions and watched their accuracy collapse from 27% to 9% — three times worse — while their confidence roughly doubled. The share of people willing to admit “I don’t know” fell off a cliff, from 44% to 3%.
* Why it matters: This is the failure mode nobody puts in the ad. The tools didn’t just occasionally get things wrong — in this study they made humans more wrong and more sure of it, which is the worst possible pairing for anyone making real decisions off a confident-sounding paragraph.
* What everyone’s saying: The finding lands on a growing pile of “critical-thinking erosion” re