The company that built Ask—IAC—is "sharpening its focus." Translation: the search business stopped justifying the engineering overhead. A quarter-century of servers, indexing pipelines, licen
Title: AI Snake Oil: The End of the Gold Rush?: A roadside preacher in Oklahoma claims his elixir can fix your carburetor. That's the energy around AI agents right now. The promise of AI-powered algorithmic trading platforms is being oversold, and the resulting disillusionment could slow down adoption significantly.
The big tech companies are pouring billions into AI infrastructure, and GitHub is alight with open-source agent frameworks. But there’s a problem with this thesis. All that developer enthusiasm overlooks the critical role of regulation. A major security breach affecting financial infrastructure (a Sha1-Hulud sequel, say) could trigger a regulatory crackdown, setting back AI in finance for years. It only takes one high-profile wipeout to make algorithmic trading a political target.
The Fed Funds Rate and Treasury yields paint a picture of continued stability and growth. But that assumes no geopolitical shocks or unexpected economic downturns. A single black swan event could force the Fed to reverse course and lower rates, invalidating assumptions about continued stability. I suspect this is precisely why the algorithmic trading space is so popular right now — it's a bet on continued conditions that might be overly optimistic.
The current wave of excitement will crest in the next 6-12 months, followed by a period of disillusionment and regulatory uncertainty that slows adoption. The biggest risk is assuming exponential growth will simply continue. The path is rarely a straight line. I expect a correction.
The big unknown is how regulators will react. Will they create a sandbox for AI in finance, or will they kill it with a thousand cuts?