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

AIMPACT News, May 18 (UTC+8): According to Dongcha Beating Monitoring, independent research firm Citrini Research—which published the “AI End-of-Day Report” in February this year and triggered volatility in U.S. stocks—today publicly criticized the recent surge of “bottleneck investors.” They throw money into deals without even being able to figure out what the industry will look like after the computing bottleneck is cleared up; it’s nothing more than blind men riding a blind horse.

Citrini, which is always good at extreme endgame scenario analysis, points out that the AI industry’s current technical roadmap is now facing fierce polarization. The market could either fall into a memory shortage lasting up to 10 years, or it could just as easily be forced into foundational technology innovation by a collapse in demand—directly bypassing existing hardware bottlenecks. This extreme uncertainty is spreading from infrastructure to the basic structure of the entire market.

The biggest mystery is where the enormous profits will ultimately end up. On the current chessboard, large labs like Anthropic have every chance to take charge of the entire chain—from underlying infrastructure to applications. But an equally reasonable scenario is that foundational models end up as low-margin commodities, with the industry’s core value shifting entirely to application-deployment vendors higher up the stack, or even to brand-new ecosystem innovators that have yet to emerge.

In early 2023, “shovel sellers” who avoided endgame projections and instead directly bet on infrastructure were seen as the safest strategy. But Citrini emphasizes that the situation today is not only failing to clear things up—it has become even more murky. Faced with complex, dynamic games, if investors give up independent endgame projections and simply follow the linear “bottleneck” narrative, they will face substantial investment risk.

(Source: BlockBeats)