Citrini Research criticizes "bottleneck investors": AI value flow is becoming increasingly obscure, blindly betting on computing power is extremely dangerous

AIMPACT News, May 18 (UTC+8) — According to Dongcha Beating Monitoring, an independent research organization, Citrini Research, which released the “AI End-of-Day Report” in February this year and triggered turbulence in the U.S. stock market, today publicly criticized the recent surge of “bottleneck investors”: they dare to throw money at the problem without even being able to figure out what the industry will look like after the computing bottleneck is solved—purely like a blind person riding a blind horse.

Citrini, known for its extreme endgame projections, noted that the current technological roadmap of the AI industry is now facing intense polarization. The market may either fall into a memory shortage lasting as long as 10 years, or it may also be completely forced to drive innovation at the underlying technology level due to a collapse in demand, thereby going straight around the existing hardware bottlenecks. This extreme uncertainty is spreading from infrastructure to the basic structure of the entire market.

The biggest suspense is where the enormous profits will ultimately settle. At the current table, large labs like Anthropic have every opportunity to take charge of the entire chain—from underlying infrastructure to applications. But an equally plausible scenario is that foundational models will end up as low–gross margin commodities, with the industry’s core value shifting entirely to upper-layer application deployment companies, or even to entirely new ecosystem innovators that have not yet emerged.

In early 2023, “selling shovels” strategies—avoiding endgame projection and directly betting on infrastructure—were widely regarded as the most reliable approach. But Citrini emphasized that the situation today has not only failed to clear the fog; it has become even darker. Faced with complex dynamic games, if investors give up independent projections of multi-polar endgames and simply follow a linear “bottleneck” narrative, they will face substantial investment risk.

(Source: BlockBeats)