We are seeing the .com Bust and the Gold Rush playing out in real time.

Some mornings I take a peek at the news and I just read up on things while I wait for my coffee, and one article caught my attention.

Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot to AI, adds $127 million in value

Shoes to …AI ? Did I read that right. Yes I did . The first thing that came to mind was SouthPark. than The 1990s.

A Business pivots so hard that even a contortionist goes damn!

Give or take right now, AI is “hot” but, it’s as hot as running a building full of graphics cards with a failing cooling system. The thing is ALLBIRDS reads as a master class of failure. They make shoes, The shoes become popular. Allbirds leverages itself that they are the Steve Jobs of shoes and don’t read the room. Two years out they are sputtering and failing and have not become the next reebok or nike. They come up with a “brilliant” plan , They sell off all of their assets and jump on the AI train. ALLBIRD than renames themselves to NEWBIRD AI. Sure sure they likely wanted to create an image like they were a phoenix reborn from the ashes of their old company. But they missed out .. ALLbird to AIBIRD (which would of been perfect. like the mimicry of a parrot?). They could of adjusted there merch with a sharpie at that point.

But here’s the thing. A shoe maker has a soft fail, they could of sold off all of the assets that was shippable. Clearance out the shoes, Leverage out the lower markets and find out if the non tech-bro market liked the shoes and pivot there. Less risk than buying the AI lottery ticket. The fact they exited the shoe market at 39 million means they were not cratored.

They have Zero experience in the AI market. They have nothing other than cash to invest, Than they spoke the word they are going to invest an AI and than the venture vultures came. There market cap climbed to 148m . The funny thing is this is all speculative. like the .com bubble. Everyone is jumping in. NEWBIRD AI doesn’t even have land yet, they need to get in line for AI infrastructure, they need to find land that will not overwhelm local infrastructure. So right now they are selling their vision on a feverdream that by the time it comes to realization may be gone.

If ALLBIRD was a tech startup and they had some revolutionary code to help AI this would be a viable path but in the end, this is a shoe company that is buying a shovel from NVidia and trying to be the next big thing when the shovel is a kids play shovel and other companies are using construction machines in the AI market with very small to negative returns.

One last thing, “Stockholders are also asked to approve a charter amendment to remove the company’s environmental conservation public benefit and to authorize a plan of dissolution the Board could implement within 12 months.” Talk about the Theoretical take away from this. live in good nature and ecology than, setting your customer base on fire pissing on the fire and walking away from your mission statement.

For Allbird, They could of paired down the back stock . Sent shoes to influencers , built a brand on tiktok with a close enough reproduction , Kept there ecologically sounding mission statement, built an entire sector off of sephora girls and won big off of “vibes”.

The worst part of all of this, is this is an AI adjacent, that needed to talk about no technology and honestly the fucktons of money thrown at nothing. New Bird AI might be the Futures New Turd AI.

update: You know its bad when Voidzilla enters the conversation….

Rufus is failing upward.

Rufus is burning through money Like a kid with a sparkler in a gunpowder factory.

Amazon CEO Jassy defends $200 billion AI spend: “We’re not going to be conservative”

With a $15 billion AI run rate, they might recoup their costs in 13.3 years. But lets be real, they are not counting the upward costs, They don’t account for the land cost, they don’t account for hardware failure. They are land rushing and hoping they hit it big. James Wilson Marshall is likely spinning in his grave.

This is a bad idea, most people do not realize that the Slopocalypse is happening. AI companies are starting for the exits because smoke is happening. Between Claude releasing its source code, Sora melting overnight.

Rufus is going to follow Sora and Claude , out of the 200 billion with the “lion’s share going toward AI development.” Horse shit, anyone who has used Rufus knows that rufus is a very basic AI that favors trying to get people to buy the most expensive products without going through your sales history.

In all honesty Rufus will be the litmus test for pushing bad AI, They are not a centralized platform like grok nor is the AI functional outside of being a bad salesman. Rufus does not do anything other than say “i see you are looking at socks how about these socks” as it shows a 50$ pair of socks. In the economy right now we can’t afford 50$ socks. “Independent audits from January 2026 show Rufus only matches the “objectively best” product 32% of the time”. When your basic function is to (sell product)..How are you are burning 200 Million on AI? Fuck that call Wendy’s and get there bad AI , its all the same. Rufus is a digital Vampire, It doesn’t do much but where do you think it is getting its training data. At this point lets all buy condoms to screw with the LLM learning data.

This is the 1849 goldrush for the 2026 era, as more people jump in to play the AI game, the corpses of other AI miners are dying fast. for every large AI that dies, Likely 100 more smaller ones die. The Slopocalypse is here, and while you could dig with your hands in the goldrush the 2026 game is pay to play. You need to have storage that is skyrocketing in cost, Land, and obscene amounts of power to run an AI farm while destroying everything around you. The AI Farms(mines) that fail are quickly bought up and run again until they fail too. What is likely happening as well is the AI farms that are failing are being bought up by bigger AI, the problem is THE ROI IS EXTREMELY NEGATIVE.

The idea of AI is nice on paper, but when culture is making AI SLOP videos of farts our trajectory is heading towards idiocracy. The biggest question is when slop is done is there any room for advancement or has the system inwardly corrupted itself into uselessness. The part that is failing in this industry is the scaling issue, if we need an answer to something and the answer is a hallucination, the fix is not to throw more processing power at it. It should come down to a code audit.

Because models are training on themselves the slop has become the AI’s TikTok doomscoll and with the Data of a shower thought fever dream being inputted into the AI the model now makes it real and therefore a training point. Google has put in its own immune system via SynthID.

Well, Given we are watching the Slopocalypsy in real time and people Slopocalypse coffeepots might cease to function, in the end it is we the consumers that are stuck with the bill because at the end of the day the bankrupt company walks away and the land rot infects the system.

I’m off to have a coffee from my smarter dumb coffee pot with buttons and switches and no internet connection, hopefully you do the same, its cheaper!

Final note: when your run numbers are 15b with a 200b expenditure, this is cleanroom spending. it does not account for failure and other associated costs.