Cargo cult

"'[This is] a systemic, strategically mediated form of intra-industry risk-splitting,' says Francisco Sercovich, of the University of Buenos Aires, who sees this as an extreme version of how 'the Sematech consortium of the late 1980s and early 1990s pooled corporate and federal capital to stabilise US semiconductor R&D against Japanese dominance.'

"But even if this risk-splitting model does eventually justify itself, we cannot forget the cargo cult problem —or the casualties that will arise when the bubble bursts and magical thinking ends.

"What might spark that? There are many possible causes: 

• Rising interest rates; 
• Supply chain disasters; 
• An energy crunch; 
• New innovations, like neurosymbolic AI, that leapfrogs the transformers (probability-based) AI systems or just 
• Cheaper versions of existing AI, like that from DeepSeek.

"Either way, anyone engaged in this AI frenzy needs to watch out for that hairball of interconnections, hedge their bets —and read up on those Melanesian cargo cults."