Interviews

Ed Zitron said the AI bubble would collapse in 2027

The tech critic told Diary of a CEO that generative AI was a con and that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion last year.

Ed Zitron said the AI bubble would collapse in 2027 and that generative AI was, at its heart, a con. He said ultra-rich tech leaders had sold it as magic while misleading the world.

Zitron hosts Better Offline and writes the Where's Your Ed At newsletter. He has spent 16 years in the tech industry and obtained leaked OpenAI financial statements that major outlets reviewed in June.

On Diary of a CEO, the host ran through myths Zitron says the AI industry promotes. The first was that AI is creating enormous economic growth. Zitron said it was not, that major labs run at horrifying losses, and that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion last year.

Leaked documents Fortune reviewed showed about $21 billion in losses against $13 billion in revenue. Ars Technica reported that audited statements put revenue at $13.07 billion in 2025 while research spending still outpaced sales.

Zitron said costs rise in line with revenue and that the labs had no path to better margins. He argued OpenAI would delay going public until 2027 because the market would not swallow the valuation executives wanted.

He described the buildout as circular financing, with trillions of dollars flowing into data centers that serve NVIDIA, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and Meta. Zitron pointed to Mark Zuckerberg's push to build tens of gigawatts of AI infrastructure as part of a capex race that outran demand.

The host pressed him on AGI timelines. Zitron said large language models were not the future and that Anthropic faced the same broken economics as OpenAI.

Zitron said AI companies would soon struggle to raise money and that a financing failure at OpenAI or Anthropic would mark the turn. He called the rollout the largest non-consensual push of technology in history.

Source video: The Man Who Calls BS On AI: They’re LYING About AI, 2027 Is When It All Breaks! | Ed Zitron