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It was December 1999. Tech investors were riding high, convinced that a website and a Super Bowl ad were all it took to get rich quick. Spending was mistaken for growth; marketing was mistaken for a business model. In just a few months, the dot-com boom would go bust: $1.7tn in market value vanished, and the broader economy took a $5tn hit.
Yet something remarkable emerged from the wreckage. The post-crash internet wasn’t defined by speculation, but by creation: the rise of web 2.0 and open-source software – and the birth of platforms like Firefox and Wikipedia. The lesson is simple: when bubbles burst, what comes next can be better, if we build it differently.
Today, history is repeating itself – this time with AI.
The AI boom looks eerily familiar. Nearly 80% of stock gains in 2025 are concentrated in just seven companies – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, all of whom are vying for control of the full AI stack that will underpin our shared future – hardware, software, data, energy and infrastructure. This isn’t just about market share, it’s about who decides how billions of people learn, create and see the world.
That level of concentration should worry us all.
And like the dot-com days, valuations are rocketing without clear paths to profitability. Companies are selling the fantasy that AI will replace human workers, even though 95% of AI experiments inside firms fail to reach production. And instead of building public-interest tools that expand human potential, much of the industry is generating what Cory Doctorow calls “productive residue” – a flood of synthetic media, misinformation and deepfakes.
The problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the current economic logic behind it.
This is not inevitable. It’s the result of an economic model that treats technology as an extractive industry – hoarding data, consolidating power and externalizing harm. The AI arms race is driven not by innovation, but by domination, favoring profit over humanity.
A different economic model already exists
The good news is that an alternative model already exists. Around the world, open-source developers and mission-driven companies are building shared infrastructure for trustworthy AI – transparent, auditable and locally adaptable. They are proving that innovation need not depend on monopolistic control of data.
This is evident in the companies leading the way, the founders building tools that are both values-driven and competitive. Companies like Hugging Face, which runs the world’s most widely used open-source machine-learning model and dataset hub; Flower AI, which enables decentralized, federated learning to challenge the dominance of centralized big models; and Oumi, which offers a fully open-source platform for building and deploying custom AI models on local infrastructure rather than closed clouds. And many more.
These aren’t speculative bets; they’re seeds for a more sustainable, pluralistic tech ecosystem. It’s part of what we view as a double-bottom-line economic model for tech – an approach that values mission and money.
Slop is not destiny
If history is any guide, the current frenzy will end the same way the dot-com boom did: with a crash. But that’s not the end of the story – it’s the beginning of a new one.
In the last bubble, the Linux stack, the open-source building blocks that now underpin almost everything the internet, rose from the ashes to beat Windows. Open-source building blocks like these have created a stunning $8.8tn in value over the last two decades, with new research estimating tens of billions in value to startups and other businesses if they switch from closed AI platforms to open-source models.
How much value can we create today? It’s enormous.
When the AI bubble pops, we’ll face a choice. We can rebuild the same monopolistic model, or we can use the moment to design an economy that’s pro-human and values-driven. That means open models, transparent governance and equitable participation in the value AI creates.
It also means focusing on what people actually want from technology: privacy, security, agency and joy. The promise of AI isn’t its infinite scale – it’s the ability to make our lives easier, richer, and more creative without sacrificing choice or dignity.
This is already happening. As we experiment with privacy-protecting, open-source models for things like browser and email assistants, we see them getting better and better.
Imagine a future in which individuals and communities can host small, local AI models – energy-efficient, privacy-preserving and tailored to their needs. Where developers build tools collaboratively, not competitively. Where innovation is measured not by market share, but by public good.
That’s not a utopian fantasy. If we start now – building AI that’s open, transparent and rooted in shared values – we can ensure that the next era of technology expands human freedom instead of constraining it. The dot-com crash gave us the modern web. The next correction could give us a better one – if we have the courage to rethink the economics of innovation.
In the end, the choice is ours. We can let a handful of companies own the future. Or we can own what we build – together.
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Mark Surman is the president of Mozilla
