Citrini Research, the independent research firm that rattled US markets in February with its AI doomsday report, is now taking aim at a new breed of what it calls 'bottleneck investors.' These are people who pour money into AI compute without even knowing what the industry will look like once the compute bottleneck is supposedly cleared. It's like a blind person riding a blind horse, the firm says.
https://twitter.com/citrini/status/2056210761538490519
Known for its extreme endgame scenarios, Citrini points out that AI's technology roadmap is now facing a dramatic divergence. On one hand, the market could be stuck in a decade-long memory shortage. On the other, demand could collapse, forcing fundamental innovation that simply bypasses today's hardware bottlenecks. That extreme uncertainty is spreading from infrastructure to the entire market structure.
The biggest question is where all the money will end up. In the current game, a big lab like Anthropic could absolutely sweep the table — owning everything from infrastructure to application. But it's equally plausible that foundation models become low-margin commodities, with all the value shifting to application-layer companies, or even to entirely new ecosystem players that haven't surfaced yet.
Back in early 2023, skipping the endgame analysis and betting directly on infrastructure — the 'pick-and-shovel sellers' — seemed like the safest play. But Citrini stresses that the situation now isn't getting clearer; it's actually murkier. In a complex dynamic game, abandoning independent endgame analysis in favor of a simple 'bottleneck' narrative is an extremely risky investment bet.