Tech-bro loyalists won’t like it, of course, but there was a stark warning about the AI market from tech analyst Ed Zitron on CNBC recently. The gist, increasingly familiar, is that AI might be technologically transformative but is overbuilt and unproven – that trillions are being committed before any real returns have been demonstrated. The test will come when investors, lenders, and hyperscalers stop funding the gap. There are good quotes in there, too, which ring true across the whole tech industry – down the years. “People are wising up to the problem of generative AI – which is that there’s not really a business there,” said Zitron. The news anchor played a clip of Alex Karp, chief executive at Palantir. “Something has gone completely wrong,” he said. “The basic view among enterprises in this country is… I’m going to get no value and they’re going to get my IP.”

Zitron responded: “I hate to agree with him, but he’s right… The only reason big tech is investing in this is they have run out of hyper-growth ideas. They don’t have a next-iPhone, or a new Google search. So they’ve put over a trillion dollars, with trillions to come, into a kind of a dead-end industry. Because when [it] ends, they’ll have to admit that they don’t have anything else… This [becomes] a boring hardware business… It is a $10-$30 billion TAM, pretending to be a trillion dollar one – [which] everyone’s propping up because they have no hyper-growth ideas… Oracle is building 7.1 GW of capacity for one customer. [It] said [itself] the risk is it won’t get paid. OpenAI only loses money. I estimate it’s $75 billion of revenue [it] will have to pay for the Stargate data center project in annual compute revenue. OpenAI can’t afford that. And if they can’t, Larry Ellison can’t afford to pay back those bills.”

He added: “It is genuinely dangerous and dangerous across the board – for neo clouds, hyperscalers, every part of the industry.” Which is the bear case, right there – and a longer way into this than planned. The point, besides, is this idea of a tech industry enamoured by its own tech genius is perfectly familiar. How many brilliant technologies have missed their mark? RCR has written about industrial IoT and private 5G, say, in some form or another, for almost 10 years; this publication has been writing about clever cellular pyrotechnics for 40 years. Almost everything misses the mark, as defined at the top of the hype cycle; some find a new mark, much later. IoT is a line item on every industrial spreadsheet; private 5G will change some enterprises in some industries, and make some people some money along the way. Slicing? Well, there’s a clever tech, if ever there was one.

The RCR write-up today about VodafoneThree’s big 5G slice-up in the UK, for consumers and enterprises is a little glib about all the product branding and comms messaging. Which is fine, just because there’s a lot of it; but is also unfair because this is the great test of 5G’s most hyped tech – and how it goes down with punters. The importance of this campaign should not be under-stated – to test the appetite of enterprises, and the skill and artfulness of tier-one mobile operators. A lot has been said, including in these pages, about telcos in the enterprise market: how they stack ‘em high, and sell hand-over-fist, whereas the systems integration to kit-out different enterprises in different industries with bespoke connected-tech is too-much like hard work. But they are good at brand comms and product marketing, generally. So this VodafoneThree campaign is a bellwether for late-era 5G, and what comes after.

As it goes, the proposition is straightforward: using 5G SA to create differentiated connectivity, with guaranteed or prioritised performance for particular customers and applications. The branding is a lot: 5G+ is the network tech, FastTrack is the slicing capability, SuperMobile is the commercial service. There are National Business slices and National Critical slices, plus SuperMobile for Business, 5G+ Local Slicing, and a Network Boost carry-over service to keep some of the same SLAs on 4G and 5G NSA. But the tech jargon, familiar to us, won’t wash, and so VodafoneThree has to get the translation right. The question is whether the translation actually translates into real value for enterprises – whether there is a business there, and even whether there is some new niche telco-style hyper-growth in the offing. Slicing might be brilliant tech, but does it mean anything? The industry is watching.