Something is shifting in AI-land.
In the last few weeks, a handful of AI lab leaders have started talking openly about slowing down, pausing frontier releases, or at least dialing back the hype they spent the last three years building. Some closely watched IPOs have been quietly pushed to “next year.” And the same people who told us AI would remake the global economy are now the ones telling us to be careful.
Two stories are floating around to explain it.
Story one: take it at face value. Some of the smartest, best-funded people on the planet are genuinely worried about what they’ve built, and they’re trying to get ahead of it.
Story two: it’s cover. Pausing, delaying, and warning is exactly what precedes a bubble deflating — a way to manage the narrative before “we sold you a story” becomes the headline.
Here’s the trend-following answer to that debate: it doesn’t matter which one is true.
Not because it isn’t interesting — it is. But because you will never get a phone call telling you which story wins before the market moves. You’ll get a chart. That’s the whole discipline in one sentence: see the price, follow the price, trade the price. Not the earnings call, not the op-ed, not the postponed IPO. The price.
Lab leaders hedging in public. IPOs slipping. A noticeably more cautious tone from people who were maximally bullish a year ago — any one of those is a headline. None of them is a trade. A trade shows up when price confirms something: a market that’s been trending starts printing lower highs, or a name that looked unstoppable finally breaks its own trendline. Until then, it’s just noise dressed up as insight.
That is exactly why trend followers have survived every bubble and panic for decades without ever needing to diagnose the story correctly in real time. 1999–2000 didn’t require knowing whether the internet was a real revolution or a mania. 2008 didn’t require understanding a CDO. It required a system that got you out when the trend broke and back in when a new one started — regardless of which narrative turned out to be true.
So hold the “AI pause” story loosely. It might be real caution. It might be a soft landing ahead of a correction. It might be nothing at all. Whatever it is, it will show up in price before it shows up in a headline you can trust. Watch the trend, not the narrative.
P.S. Building the discipline to evaluate your execution and not just your results is one of the hardest things in trading. The Trend Following Mastery course is built on that foundation, and the Bull, Bear & Black Swan Report reinforces that thinking every month. If you’d like a purchase link for the Report, just email us at [email protected].
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