There's a useful narrative gaining traction in Silicon Valley right now: we're living through such extraordinary technological change that the old rules of business don't apply anymore. Stay private longer. Avoid regulatory scrutiny. Skip the quarterly earnings calls. The reasoning is simple. By the time anyone figures out what you're actually worth, the singularity will have arrived and made valuation itself quaint.
It's comfortable thinking. For founders, it's a permission slip. For investors, it's an excuse. For the public, it should be a red flag.
The obvious consensus is too comfortable. The better question is what this trend breaks next.
Let's be direct about what's happening. Companies are using existential technological upheaval as cover for not doing the unglamorous work of building sustainable businesses. They're treating "the singularity" the way previous generations treated "the cloud" or "blockchain" or "the metaverse" as a rhetorical escape hatch whenever someone asks a boring question about fundamentals.
When a company says "we can't go public because AI is changing everything," what they're really saying is "we prefer not to be transparent about how we make money." When they acquire startups based on vague conviction about AI futures, they're spending shareholder capital on bets masquerading as strategy. The singularity becomes an all-purpose justification for decisions that would otherwise require justification.
This matters because it erodes the distinction between vision and avoidance.
There's nothing new about companies making bold claims about the future. Steve Jobs did it. Elon Musk does it constantly. The difference is that those companies eventually had to prove something. They went public. They shipped products. They faced consequences when their bets didn't work out. The accountability was built in.
What's changed is that the tech ecosystem now permits indefinite runway based on theoretical upside. A company can raise billions, make massive strategic moves, and face almost no market discipline because the next funding round will just assume that "AI changes everything anyway, so who knows what the rules are." It's infinite runway masquerading as innovation.
The real break here is in how we evaluate corporate decision-making. If every major tech company's strategy is essentially "bet on AI and stay private," we've moved past business analysis into theology. We're taking it on faith. Faith is fine for religions. It's a terrible foundation for companies that affect millions of people and hold billions in capital.
Consider what happens next. Some of these companies will eventually need to generate actual revenue at actual scale. The singularity, as it turns out, doesn't pay the bills. When that moment arrives, the singularity narrative becomes a liability. Every quarter of slower-than-expected growth gets framed as "the singularity is delayed," which is another way of saying "we miscalculated our entire business model."
Or consider the inverse problem. What if AI does drive genuinely transformative change in the next few years? Companies that used the singularity as cover to avoid building real operational discipline will be especially fragile when the rules actually do change. You can't wing it during genuine disruption.
The healthier path is unglamorous. It involves building real businesses. It means answering hard questions about unit economics and customer acquisition cost and retention. It means accepting that not every company needs to be private forever, and that going public doesn't mean giving up on ambition. It means treating AI as a tool that shapes competitive advantage, not as a cosmic force that suspends the need for strategy.
The singularity might be coming. Probably something close to it will. But the companies that survive it won't be the ones that used it as an excuse to avoid accountability. They'll be the ones that built real foundations while everyone else was still waiting for the future.