Well, I did NOT expect this..

The DLSS 5 conversation keeps developing and it keeps revealing something important about the AI market that a lot of people are refusing to acknowledge. The verdict is still out. I’ve said it over and over and I’m going to keep saying it because it’s true. The market has not decided what role AI is going to play in people’s lives, what consumers are willing to pay for, or whether the economics behind these companies even work long-term.

Too many people are hyper-focused on capability alone. They point to things like how much AI-generated video has improved since that Will Smith spaghetti clip and act like the conversation is settled. But capability is only one piece of the equation. The bigger questions are whether customers are willing to pay for it and whether the companies building it can actually turn a profit. Right now, OpenAI isn’t making money. Anthropic isn’t making money. Very few of the major AI companies are seeing real returns on investment. This is still a speculative market built on projections, not results.

Nvidia sits prettier than most because they’re in the hardware business and everyone building data centers has to come through them. But even Nvidia is catching heat over DLSS 5. They’re already walking it back with clarifications — saying it’ll be up to developers, that users can toggle it on or off. When the company pushing the feature has to immediately start managing expectations, that tells you something about where the market sentiment is heading.

What’s happening here is something you see in a lot of markets when massive amounts of capital get thrown at something. Companies feel pressure to innovate because too much money is on the line to sit still. But that pressure inevitably leads to creating things the market doesn’t actually want. And when that pushback comes from people who were already on your side, that’s a signal you can’t ignore.

We saw this with the dot-com bubble. The internet was absolutely a transformational technology. But a lot of companies didn’t survive to the other side. A fundamental technological advancement doesn’t guarantee that every company, every product, and every feature built around it succeeds. The market still gets to decide. And right now, it hasn’t decided yet.