Economic moves come in cycles, and it seems so do the memes.
Someone has created a updated version of the 2007 Silicon Valley classic “Here Comes Another Bubble Song”. The original song, a take on Billy Joel’s “We didn’t light the fire”, was released in 2007, and had warned of an upcoming tech bubble, and it sort of materialized with the global financial crisis of 2008.
The song, uploaded on X by user @nextokens, is a play on the original, but with a focus on the current AI climate. So as opposed to talking about Webvan, it talks about Ilya Sutskever’s SSI, which is worth an astonishing $32 billion without having ever released any products or models. The song also pokes fun at other AI startups which haven’t delivered very much given their valuations, such as Humane and Scale AI. The references are also new (‘Grok is this true’), as are the protagonists (Elon Musk and Sam Altman).
The “Here comes another bubble (AI version)” song has already been reposted more than 500 times on X. But while the song is catchy and a solid homage to the original, there do seem to be differences between the current AI phase and other bubbles. AI companies are seeing solid traction in addition to skyrocketing valuations — ChatGPT is now the fifth most visited website in the world, ahead of names like X, Reddit and Wikipedia. Anthropic has an annualized revenue run-rate approaching $7 billion. And several AI-created image trends from the likes of OpenAI and Google have gone viral and become truly mainstream. Perhaps most crucially, it appears that AI has been used to create the AI version of the “Here comes another bubble” song, showing that AI could actually end up being more useful than ideas like Webvan and Pets.com. And while AI valuations could still be out of whack, there seem to be enough people out there who’re thinking about an AI bubble to require a reprise of the “Here Comes Another Bubble” classic from 2007.