AI bubble and crypto bear market—these are all noise.

In the past two weeks, the AI ​​bubble has become the hottest topic in overseas tech circles. The related debates are intense and have directly led to a 5% drop in the overall market capitalization of Nasdaq, with AI leaders such as Nvidia, Meta, and Oracle experiencing declines of 10-30%. From the tech to the financial world, many prominent figures have expressed their opinions, with sharply contrasting viewpoints and heated debates. Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency market has also experienced a continuous decline since October 11th, with the entire industry anxiously debating whether the market has entered a bear market.

I've inevitably been asked by some friends for their opinions on the AI ​​bubble theory and the cryptocurrency bull/bear market. To be honest, I don't know, and I'm not particularly concerned. Whether it's AI or cryptocurrencies, there are indeed many uncertainties.

Whether large-scale modeling technology can lead to AGI, whether AI companies are extending depreciation periods to artificially inflate profits, whether a large number of GPUs are sitting idle, and when liquidity in the crypto market will recover—these issues are certainly important to Trump, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and Altman. However, for ordinary people like me, solving these problems isn't necessary to make the right choices. The debates that are crucial for industry giants may just be noise to us. Focusing too much on this noise can blind us to opportunities with certainty. In the modern media environment, a small elite controls the power to set the agenda and hijacks the public's attention. Ordinary people struggle in real life, avoiding confronting issues that are truly relevant to them, yet often expending a great deal of energy trying to address the anxieties and difficulties of the elite. You have to work very hard to shake off the illusion of being a financial tycoon or industry leader, and to constantly realize that their power and wealth are not ours, nor are their problems. Burning your attention on the debates set up by elites is actually letting your mind get lost in their world, causing you to miss out on truly certain opportunities in real life.

Most people over forty have their own stories of missing out on the internet. I often think back to the early 2000s and why I and many people around me missed the best time to join the internet. In hindsight, as early as 2002 and 2003, the success of the internet was already a pre-announced victory: the rapid growth in the number of internet users, the continuous increase in average online time, and the rapid migration of information access and business transactions. What could be a clearer signal than this? What could be a more certain trend than the success of the internet? Why didn't we think to fully commit to it?

In fact, those of us who experienced that period firsthand know that most people weren't blind to these signals; rather, they were consciously or unconsciously caught in wave after wave of debates and remained indecisive. Initially, we debated whether the internet had a viable profit model. Then, after Google established its advertising-based revenue model, we debated whether this model had sufficient room for growth. With the rise of e-commerce, we debated whether payment and return issues would be the Achilles' heel of Chinese e-commerce. With the rise of online games, we debated whether youth addiction to games would ruin the future of our country. With the emergence of social media and online payments, we debated when the government would decisively intervene to clear the market. With the creation of Bitcoin, we debated whether Satoshi Nakamoto was a CIA agent and whether Li Xiaolai was just boasting. Throughout, these issues successfully captured our attention, leading us to identify ourselves as members of internet industry associations, committees for the care of the next generation, bank presidents, and even propaganda and law enforcement agencies. We were constantly hesitant, blind to the obvious certainty of the internet's success, and lost in a pile of unimportant uncertainties. Unfortunately, it's said that the historical records of the Chinese internet are being erased at a record-breaking pace. I suspect that even if today's historians sent AI to conduct archaeological research, they couldn't have imagined how much energy and opportunity cost the general public spent arguing about other people's issues back then. I've seen many records of internet history, which mostly focus on the successful ones, describing them as visionary, intelligent, resilient, and insightful, but almost no one summarizes the lessons learned by "ordinary people." So, while our generation's memories are still fresh, I want to summarize this lesson: Other people's problems may not be your problems; other people's signals may be your noise. Don't get caught up in arguments that don't concern you; simply observe the facts and grasp the certain, overall trends based on those facts. For ordinary people, this is often enough. The reason Wall Street and Silicon Valley are so abuzz with AI today is because almost all of America's credit resources are being allocated to AI, and almost all economic growth is driven by AI investment. It's also because some worrying signals are emerging in the revenue data and financial behavior of the AI ​​industry. Is this a problem? Yes, it is. Whose problem is it? It's a problem for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, perhaps also for the White House and the Federal Reserve, and perhaps for many Asian funds and private firms, but most likely not for you. You're not Jensen Huang, not Altman, not the short seller Berry, and not Larry Ellison's Chinese brother-in-law; whether AI has a bubble is none of your concern. What should you be concerned about? While we don't know if large-scale models are the path to AI, AI's capabilities are already very strong. In fact, AI's current capabilities are far from being fully utilized and mobilized, and the bottleneck lies primarily with humans. A new group of "AI super users" is emerging, who can skillfully combine various AI tools to completely crush their competitors in their respective fields. Are you still just using AI as a search engine alternative? Recently, many products in various AI sub-sectors have generated considerable revenue. To convince investors to continue supporting them, AI giants need to continuously drive user growth and usage, and will be more proactive in incentivizing developers of specific applications. Can you make a contribution in your area of ​​expertise? In the blockchain field, although the market has become increasingly speculative over the past few years, amidst the noise, the blockchain infrastructure has largely solved the performance bottleneck of transaction processing, sufficient to support low latency, high performance, and large-scale on-chain applications. As the largest blockchain application, stablecoins continue to grow in scale and expand their application areas. More importantly, from Wall Street to Hong Kong, more and more traditional financial assets—stocks, equities, bonds, precious metals, foreign exchange, and derivatives—are being put on-chain. This means that the entire financial system will move to the blockchain. So what is my real question? It's not about the short-term price fluctuations of Bitcoin, nor when the crypto market liquidity will recover after the collapse, nor whether Trump still has enough authority to push for crypto legislation, but rather facing this clear future vision: Three to five years from now, people will be able to use stablecoins to invest in various assets around the world on the blockchain and use AI as their investment advisor. With the necessary knowledge and skills, and mastery of the relevant tools, ordinary people can grow alongside the world's fastest-growing companies and industries, without any limitations holding them back. In such a new world, do I have enough knowledge and skills? Can I help more people escape the fate of being slaughtered by chaos and inflation? What opportunities do I have to build valuable products and services? I will constantly remind myself that these are the questions I should truly care about. I admit that the world is becoming increasingly chaotic, with many distressing and worrying problems. Many things that used to be possible with long-term planning and a focus on the long term have now lost their certainty. Whether we like it or not, we are descending the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, moving from an era of pursuing success and self-actualization to an era where many people have to struggle just to survive. This is probably a fact. Often, we feel that instead of adding to our anxiety, it's better to watch a few short videos for a bit of fun. But after the dopamine rush, we still have to face real life. I'm not trying to comfort everyone by saying the world will get better. But I also believe that we don't need to guess everything correctly; it's enough to do the things with certainty right and grasp the trends with certainty. Compared to wasting energy on hesitation and fear, and getting lost in the agendas set by others, things are always better.