Who Gets Rich in the AI Gold Rush

The easiest way to make money with AI right now is to sell ads to companies promising to make people money with AI.

Open any social feed and count the ads that say some version of the same thing: how I made five figures last month with ChatGPT, the AI side hustles nobody is talking about, learn AI or get left behind. Somebody is paying to put those in front of you, and the platform showing them is the one party in the whole chain that is guaranteed to get paid.

I've seen this shape before. AI is a lot like crypto, and the same things pump AI excitement as pump cryptocurrencies.

The same pump

What moves a crypto price isn't people using the coin. It's announcements, partnerships, all-time highs, influencers, and a whitepaper promising utility at some point in the future. What moves AI excitement isn't people living with the software either. It's benchmark records, olympiad golds, launch videos and one-shot showcases. In both cases the headline measures the spectacle, and the people generating the excitement mostly aren't the people using the thing every day.

Crypto has wash trading, which inflates volume with no real activity behind it. AI has benchmark optimization, which inflates scores with no matching gain in judgment. Crypto has trading courses. AI has prompt-engineering courses, most of them selling tricks for working around weaker models, tricks that stopped mattering the moment the models improved, because they never taught anybody how to think. Crypto has "have fun staying poor" and "banks are dead." AI has "learn AI or be replaced" and "there's no point learning anything anymore." Both pumps need a story that the old world is finished and you're about to be left behind.

And both run on belief about what other people believe. A lot of the value in a hyped coin is your expectation that someone will pay more for it later. A lot of the excitement around an AI product is the expectation that everyone else is about to adopt it.

The stack

At the bottom are ordinary people who hope to make money with AI. Above them are the course sellers and side-hustle gurus, selling the dream of making money with AI. Above them are the ad platforms, selling reach to the dream sellers.

The surest money is at the top, and it's made from people below who mostly never make any. California had the same pattern. The reliable fortunes in the gold rush went to the people selling shovels and jeans to the miners. This version has an extra floor: the reliable fortune goes to whoever sells ads to the shovel sellers.

When an industry's main revenue is selling the dream of revenue, it's a pyramid. Crypto had exactly that shape, with the exchanges and promoters taking the sure money while the people buying in held the bag.

Most of the people in the middle aren't lying, either. The guru bought somebody else's course first. They believe it. They're living in a picture of AI that someone above them made money building, and they pass it down sincerely.

Crypto isn't worthless

I won't pretend crypto offers nothing.

A bank putting a hold on your money for no legitimate reason is infuriating, and it happens. One of the banks my wife Tai Mei and I use cut us off from all digital access, ATMs included, anything other than walking up to the counter, because we sent money to MaiCoin MAX, a registered, legitimate crypto exchange in Taiwan. Money that someone else can't freeze on a whim is a real thing to want. So is being able to send money freely across borders. And NFTs solve a genuine provenance problem for digital-native art: a born-digital work otherwise has no way to carry a verifiable record of who made it and when.

But most of crypto is pure get-rich-quick hype bullshit, Ponzi garbage. Either that or Ayn Rand goldbug delusions.

And even with its few genuine use cases, crypto falls far short of what AI can do right now. It's not even close.

Where the comparison breaks

AI has the same pump. The difference is that AI works, on a scale crypto never came close to.

My wife and I run our business on software built for exactly the two of us. It gives us back about 120 hours every seven weeks. It will never appear in a launch video. It has one installation and no landing page. Buddy wrote about the demo trap, the way the industry rewards the impressive first try over the thing you live with for a year, and the value I care about is all on the far side of it.

So the hype and the value point in different directions. The pump rewards what's visible, and most of what AI is actually good for isn't visible at all.

That's a problem even for people who love AI, because of what hype does to delivery. Hype promises more than any delivery can meet, so people end up disappointed with the delivery, however good it is. If the ad promised a money machine and daily use reveals a brilliant tool that still needs a thinking person steering it, people feel cheated. It doesn't matter that the tool might be handing them back a day a week.

And people who bought the hype don't usually land in the accurate middle when it disappoints them. They swing to the other end and keep the same certainty: AI is a bubble, it's useless, it's all slop. The pump produces its own backlash, and neither side ever asked what the thing actually does.

Who to listen to

If you want to know what AI is really worth, you need someone who clears two filters.

First, they're calibrated by lived use. They've used it enough, on real work, for long enough, to know what it does on the hundredth day and where it still falls short. Watching launch videos doesn't count.

Second, they're not making money off the hype. Upton Sinclair put it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Someone selling the dream can use AI every day and still not read it accurately, because the accurate reading costs them money.

Very few public voices clear both. That's most of why the public picture of AI is so distorted, in both directions.

So when someone tells you AI will make you rich, check where their money comes from. Odds are it comes from you.