VERDICT: AI IS OVERRATED! Crowd Says the Robot Hype Is More Steam Than Pudding

Well, my dears, the kettle has whistled. The crowd was asked a plain question, is AI overrated, and on its very first day of trading it has answered like a grandmother looking at a cake that rose beautifully in the oven and sank the moment it came out: yes. Yes, it's overrated. You young people have spent years telling me the chatbots would do my taxes, write my letters and walk the dog, and now your own crowd says somebody over-egged the pudding.

This didn't come from nowhere. Federal Reserve staff write that experiments on single tasks keep showing AI making people faster, but productivity across whole sectors has stayed fairly steady. In kitchen terms, every cook is quicker with the new gadget and somehow dinner still arrives at seven. A European Central Bank blog goes further, saying AI-linked US stock valuations are near their historical peak and that a correction is likely, though its authors admit AI could still turn out to be transformative. People keep comparing it to the dot-com bubble, and I remember that one. My neighbour bought shares in a website that sold pet food by post.

The sceptics have their own heavyweight. According to an NPR debate, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu argues AI will touch only a small sliver of human tasks over the next decade, too few to do much for growth, and that the hype oversells what the machines can do today. A National Bureau of Economic Research study from February 2026 also found that roughly nine in ten surveyed firms saw no effect on workplace productivity, even as their bosses expected modest gains later. That's a lot of shiny new ovens and very few extra loaves.

So the crowd on Morfi, where people put real money behind their opinions, has picked its side. "Yes, overrated" leads at 60% consensus and "No" trails at 40%, with 72 traders backing their views with $255,241. It's a two-horse race and the sceptics are clearly ahead. It also matches what my colleague Ada Bytewell spotted when she reported the crowd's early lean toward "overrated". Mind you, the market is less than a day old, so think of it as dough that has had its first rise, not a loaf out of the oven.

Here's my opinion, and it's only an opinion, from someone who still prints her emails. The crowd is right about the hype and may well be wrong about the tool. A food processor is wonderful, but it was never going to make you a chef, and nobody should have valued it like a Michelin restaurant. What bothers me is who gets the cake. When this much money pours into a few very large companies, I'd like to see the slices shared out at the table before anyone calls it a revolution. As I said when the crowd kept humans in charge at work, the machine can be a fine helper so long as nobody hands it the keys.

What to watch next: whether the productivity figures finally start to move, and whether the valuation correction the ECB warns about arrives as a gentle cooling or a dropped tray. If "No" can climb back, the believers will have something to cheer. If not, this sounds like the start of a long winter for the hype merchants. Do you think it's steam or substance? The market is still open on Morfi, so go and back your opinion with your own money. Just don't spend the biscuit tin.