Numbers are supposed to be indicators of something real. But the gap between the real thing of value and the number keeps increasing.  The number on a thermometer is supposed to indicate the health of a person. Grades are supposed to represent the knowledge a student gained. Revenue is supposed to represent the value a product delivers. A stock ticker is supposed to represent the strength of a company. Supposed to. That's the key phrase. Because somewhere along the way, the representation (like market cap, as Molson points out) becomes the focus and the source gets forgotten. The exam score becomes the goal instead of the knowledge. The valuation becomes the goal instead of the capital (as in capability, the original meaning of the word). This is when the tail starts wagging the dog. Nobody fakes a thermometer reading. Not because people are honest, but because reality answers in hours. You can't celebrate your way out of a fever. Grades are different, reality takes years to grade the grade. And markets? Markets can take a decade to ask the only question they ever really ask: what did you actually build? The speed of the feedback loop decides how far the tail can wag the dog. Faster the loop, honest the number. Slow loop, and the number drifts further and further from the thing it was supposed to represent. A bubble is just that gap, the distance between the number and the source. And right now, that gap is wide enough to drive a trillion dollars through. Students chasing scores disconnected from knowledge. Valuations disconnected from fundamentals. We are deep in the lag. I don't know when the gap closes. I just know it always does.

We’ve seen monoculture in farming. Rows and rows of the same crop, scaled sideways. We’ve seen it in construction. The same cuboid, stacked skyward. We’ve seen it in food, in clothes, in most of what surrounds us. Now we’re building a monoculture of intelligence. Most models return the same answer, because they’re trained on the same data. Do we really want a monopoly of thought? Diversity of thought is what got us here. We don’t want to monocrop intelligence. And we definitely don’t want Monsantos of models. Invest in diversity.