Musk warns:
The AI riptide is already underway.
Over the past year, global AI inference token usage has surged 25-fold.
Regarding this, Brett Winton, Chief Futurist at Ark Invest, made a startling statement, describing an unexpected consequence he foresaw:
The payback period for AI infrastructure investment is astonishingly short, and the internal rate of return is absurdly high. Even at an unimaginably large scale, this force will directly push up the cost of capital, dragging a large number of traditional enterprises into the abyss.
Musk reposted this view and expressed the sentiment as above.
Musk's AGI Countdown: The AI Tsunami Has Arrived
To truly understand why Musk used the term "riptide" at this moment, we must first grasp his latest judgment on the ultimate fate of human technology—AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and the Technological Singularity.
The terror of a riptide lies in the fact that the sea surface appears calm, but beneath it, an extremely powerful undercurrent has already formed, irreversibly dragging everything towards the depths or the open ocean.
The "tsunami" Musk refers to is by no means just an upgrade of a few chatbots.
He has issued warnings akin to a countdown multiple times:
In a very short time, AGI will likely become smarter than the smartest human; and beyond that, the total digital computing power on Earth will exponentially surpass the total biological computing power (all human brains).
This is the suffocating "Technological Singularity."
Once this tipping point is crossed, AI will possess the ability for self-iteration and self-evolution. Human technological progress will no longer be driven by humans themselves but will be taken over by super-machines, exploding vertically upwards.
"The AI tsunami has already hit," Musk is confirming the approach of the Singularity.
When everyone realized that AGI is no longer science fiction decades away, but could become reality within the next one to two years simply by piling on computing power, energy, and data, the global flow of capital instantly underwent an extreme distortion.
Under the immense gravitational pull of the Singularity, the "inference token usage" of AI large models has grown approximately 25-fold in just one year.
OpenRouter's total token count doubles every ~11 weeks
Note: it's 25-fold, not 25%.
When "Cathie Wood" predicts that token usage is growing exponentially, permeating layer by layer into the entire economy, likely pushing the annual growth rate of real GDP into double digits, many people and companies simply cannot comprehend it.
Because the vast majority of investors have never experienced "25-fold" growth in their lifetime, when they hear "25," their brains automatically process it as "25%."
In the long river of history, a 25% growth rate is indeed remarkable. But 25-fold exists in an entirely different investment universe: it means 100 units don't slowly increase to 125, but rather skyrocket directly to 2500!
Cathie Wood further points out:
Currently, the world's leading AI labs have seen their annualized revenue explosively multiply 5 to 10 times in just 6 months to 1 year; even traditional mature enterprises on the "right side" of the AI transformation have seen their originally steady revenue growth rates forcibly reaccelerated from 25% to over 30% or even 40%.
Faced with this money-printing level of growth on the eve of the Singularity, countless traditional entrepreneurs are like "deer in the headlights"—vaguely sensing the ground shaking and the blinding light, but their brains simply cannot process information of this magnitude, freezing them in place.
The World's Most Sensitive Nose: Companies Die from "Oxygen Deprivation"
Now that the path to AGI is clear and the countdown to the Singularity has begun,
Next, pure capital's profit-seeking instinct kicks in.
This is the core insight proposed by Ark Invest's Chief Futurist, Brett Winton: Capital Transfer and Crowding-Out Effect.
The global capital pool is limited within a certain period. Where the money flows depends on where the return is highest and the payback period shortest.
Brett Winton points out:
The investment payback period for AI infrastructure is getting shorter, and the internal rate of return (IRR) is absurdly high. As long as this level of return persists, capital will continue to flood into GPUs, data centers, and AI companies.
In today's venture capital (VC) market, unless your business plan is filled with AI and computing power, you simply can't raise money.
Money in the primary market has already formed an extreme "AI syphoning effect." But this is just the beginning; this trend is now spreading wildly downstream.
To welcome AGI, building super AI data centers requires massive funds.
Giants, besides using their own funds, will issue large amounts of debt. In theory, issuing debt requires paying interest. But for AI data center builders, the market is currently in extreme shortage of computing power. Finished computing centers are not hard to sell, and profits are extremely high. Therefore, they can fully bear, and are even happy to accept, higher financing costs.
More surreal, Nvidia's chips have now become "hard currency." As long as the data center purchases Nvidia-system equipment, they can directly use these chips as collateral for debt.
Extremely high returns + extremely strong tolerance for high interest rates + hard-currency-like collateral have turned computing power infrastructure into what Wall Street sees as "a new, more stable, investment-grade asset class."
This is the "capital black hole," devouring not only equity investors' money but also voraciously consuming money from the world's bond markets.
And the global capital pool is limited.
When the AI pump siphons off most of the water from the pond, available capital for other industries is drained in the short term.
Step One: The high returns of the AI sector raise the expected rate of return for the entire market, pushing up financing costs for traditional enterprises, or even making it impossible for them to raise money at all.
Step Two: Funds in the secondary market vote with their feet. Stocks unrelated to AI are removed from institutions' core holdings, valuations are halved, and liquidity dries up.
Step Three: Old debt matures and needs to be rolled over at higher interest rates, interest coverage ratios deteriorate, and companies with fragile cash flows are directly crushed.
Step Four: Where capital flows, talent follows. Traditional industries fall into a spiral of "no money—can't retain people—fall behind in efficiency—even less money."
Musk agrees with this 100%.
Cathie Wood's summary is: Market psychology is shifting from the initial blind euphoria about "AI hype" to a stock-by-stock "Oh NO" versus "Oh YES."
Musk replied below with three words: "You are right."
"I destroy you, and it has nothing to do with you."
In the business world, this phrase is about to materialize into the most real scenario:
AI destroys many traditional enterprises not even because AI knows better than you, but because AI directly sucks dry all the capital oxygen that supports your survival.
Conclusion
Every leap in productivity in human history has never been accompanied by a gentle handover, but rather a bloody reallocation of resources.
When steam engines replaced horse-drawn carriages, not only did coachmen lose their jobs, more importantly, the money invested in stables and feed rushed overnight into railways and steel mills.
When mobile internet exploded, not only did traditional media decline, more importantly, trillions in venture capital fled traditional channels overnight, birthing the giants of the mobile internet era.
Today, the intensity of the AI riptide will be tenfold, a hundredfold greater than that of the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution.
As Cathie Wood said: "Facts are stubborn things."
Capital has no sentiment. It has already made its choice and is voting with its feet at a rate of hundreds of billions of dollars every day.
The tsunami has already been raised, the strong light is already illuminating the night.
References:
https://x.com/CathieDWood/status/2093739536509436149https://x.com/MaxForAI/status/2093775774402969662
https://x.com/wintonARK/status/2093403858890629434
This article is from the WeChat public account "新智元" (ID: AI_era), author: David
