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, the independent research institution Citrini Research, which released the “AI End-of-Day Report” in February and triggered turbulence in the U.S. stock market, today publicly took aim at the recent surge of “bottleneck investors”: after they manage to break through compute bottlenecks, they still can’t make sense of what the industry will look like, yet they dare to throw money at it—purely like blind men riding on blind horses.

Citrini, which has long been adept at extreme endgame scenario analysis, said that the AI industry’s current technological roadmap is now facing a sharp bifurcation. The market could either fall into a memory shortage that lasts for as long as ten years, or it could be driven by a collapse in demand into forcing innovation in the underlying technology directly—bypassing existing hardware bottlenecks altogether. This extreme uncertainty is spreading, moving from infrastructure to the market’s basic structure as a whole.

The biggest suspense is where the huge profits will ultimately end up. On the current table, major labs like Anthropic have every opportunity to cover the entire chain—from underlying infrastructure to applications. But an equally plausible case is that foundational models are completely reduced to low–gross margin commodities, with the industry’s core value shifting entirely to application deployment companies higher up the stack, and even to entirely new ecosystem innovators that have not yet emerged.

In early 2023, “shovel sellers” strategies—avoiding endgame forecasting and betting directly on infrastructure—were once seen as the steadiest approach. But Citrini emphasized that the situation today has not only failed to clear up; it has grown even darker. Faced with complex dynamic games, if investors give up independent endgame forecasting across multiple extreme outcomes and simply follow the linear “bottleneck” narrative, they will face significant investment risk.

(Source: BlockBeats)