The Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI missed its end-of-year billion-active-user target. Is the AI bubble actually popping or is the panic overblown?

This week on AI For Humans, the AI bubble panic hit a fever pitch after a Wall Street Journal report revealed OpenAI missed its weekly user, monthly revenue, and end-of-year billion-active-user targets. CFO Sarah Friar reportedly told peers she's worried OpenAI won't be able to pay for future compute contracts if revenue doesn't accelerate, and the board is now scrutinizing Sam Altman's deals more closely.

AI stocks crashed, with Oracle, AMD, and CoreWeave all sinking on the news. Anthropic is eating into OpenAI's market share on coding and enterprise. We dig into whether the bubble is actually popping or whether this is a panic that conflates AI capability with the business of AI. Spoiler: we don't think it's over.

Plus, DeepSeek v4 launched and made surprisingly small waves. OpenAI's deal with Microsoft expanded to other clouds. Meanwhile, AI itself is absolutely not slowing down: Tom Cruise is running faster than ever in a viral video, OpenAI dropped a new Chappie-style voice interaction, Claude got a Blender connector for 3D modeling, NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Nano Omni with 30B parameters and 256K context, and Talkie is an LLM trained entirely on 1880s text.