A history-lover’s guide to the market panic over AI

Andrew OdlyzkoAI, a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota, has a side hustle: he has become one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of speculative bubbles. Part of his time is spent at the , where he photographs pages from thousands of handwritten ledgers which he later scours for clues about earlier episodes of excess. He hopes that generative will one day take the drudgery out of the task. It is not lost on him that the latest speculative mania revolves around the technology itself.