AI boom mirrors past tech cycles: most players won't…

The AI sector is on an exponential growth trajectory, but history suggests the majority of today's AI companies will not make it. The field is simply overcrowded — too many players chasing the same infrastructure, tooling, and application layers with insufficient differentiation.

Survivors will exist, but the path there runs through severe price volatility and consolidation. New entrants will also emerge mid-cycle, as they always do in nascent industries — think the internet's second wave of winners arriving after the dot-com wreckage cleared.

The pattern is not unique to AI. It mirrors the railroad boom, the dot-com era, and the early smartphone ecosystem. Exponential technology adoption and mass corporate failure are not contradictions — they are the same story told from different vantage points.