McSweeney's Billion-Dollar AI Parody Exposes the $527B Reality Check Coming in 2026
McSweeney's Internet Tendency just accidentally wrote the most accurate investor pitch deck of 2024.
Their satirical piece "Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in" reads like pure fiction—desperate tech bro begging for validation with lines like "It's not a scam, it's disruptive!" and "Just invest with me, bro." But here's the uncomfortable truth: it gained 503 points and 228 comments on Hacker News because every developer recognized their actual boss.
The Numbers Don't Lie (Unlike the Pitches)
While McSweeney's crafted imaginary pleas, real hyperscalers are burning through $106 billion in Q3 2025 alone—a staggering 75% year-over-year growth. Goldman Sachs projects this madness scaling to $527 billion by 2026, up from $465 billion pre-earnings.
That's not investment. That's desperation with a Bloomberg terminal.
<> Stanford AI experts predict 2026 as a "reality check" year post-billion-dollar hype, shifting focus to actual utility and ROI over expansion./>
The Hacker News comments section turned into group therapy for developers. Top remarks joke about "AI grifters" and "billion-dollar vaporware," but the laughs feel hollow. These aren't just memes—they're war stories from the trenches of AI hype.
What Nobody Is Talking About
The real damage isn't the money. It's the pressure cooker every engineering team now operates in.
Developers face impossible mandates: justify massive capex with immature AI that hallucinates, implement "AI features" that solve problems nobody has, and build robust evaluation frameworks while executives demand hockey stick metrics yesterday.
S&P Global quietly flagged the hidden risks: overvaluation in unproven tech, supply chain vulnerabilities, and valuation bubbles that make 2000 look conservative. But nobody wants to hear warnings when the party's still raging.
The Inevitable Hangover
Goldman Sachs analysts are already shifting recommendations. They're getting "selective" on AI stocks, prioritizing companies with actual productivity gains over infrastructure plays. Translation: the smart money is preparing for disappointment.
Consensus forecasts show 25% capex growth slowdown by end-2026. That's not a soft landing—that's gravity reasserting itself after two years of defying physics.
Dave Eggers founded McSweeney's in 1998 to lampoon cultural absurdities. He probably didn't expect his humor site to become required reading for understanding venture capital in 2025.
The Developer's Dilemma
Here's what's actually happening in engineering orgs:
- Evaluation theater: Building dashboards that measure everything except actual utility
- Feature creep: Jamming LLMs into workflows that worked fine without them
- Technical debt: Rushing AI deployments to hit arbitrary deadlines
- Talent drain: Senior engineers fleeing companies that prioritize hype over substance
The satirical investor's plea—"please don't say mean things"—isn't fiction. It's a documentary. Replace "billion dollars" with your actual budget, and you've got next quarter's all-hands presentation.
The punchline? We're all complicit. Every time we ship half-baked "AI-powered" features to satisfy investors who've never debugged a hallucinating model, we validate the satire.
McSweeney's gave us permission to laugh. But the $527 billion question remains: when does the laughter stop feeling funny?
