Technology

My opinion on Artificial Intelligence companies in this era of madness

22 January 2026 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Apparently, the world has fully embraced Artificial Intelligence (or, more precisely, Large Language Models such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Deepseek).

Looking at the market capitalisation of the largest technology companies in the world, it is amazing that all of them now say that they are AI companies first and foremost. Consequently, everyone investing in AI have poured money in these companies.

Personally, I believe that this kind of (mad) market capitalisation is thanks to the excellent communication strategy of those companies. They have made everyone believe that they are on the verge of bringing a revolution to the planet and that any sensible enough investor need to purchase their shares.

Interestingly, some of them (e.g. Apple and Meta) have no AI product to show at all. Some have been saying that they are good in AI (e.g. Microsoft, Palantir, etc.) but is it really AI that they are doing?

For example, I was watching this very sad video on YouTube the other day about young people from Madagascar earning peanuts to curate data for AI platforms. One person even mentioned that a company which sells AI security monitoring equipment actually employs young Malagasy to watch hours and hours of video to detect suspicious activity. This is clearly not AI.

In other words, many companies seem to be lying about AI. They are telling investors that they have something big (or are on the verge of having something big) while they don’t have much. It’s basically a scam. And the whole world is mad for falling in such scams.

A few days ago, Cory Doctorow wrote a wonderful opinion piece in The Guardian titled “AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage.” In that article, he explains “how to pump a bubble”:

(1) When a company is growing, it is a “growth stock”, and investors really like growth stocks. When you buy a share in a growth stock, you are making a bet that it will continue to grow. So growth stocks trade at a huge multiple of their earnings.

(2) But here is the downside: eventually a company has to stop growing. Like, say you get a 90% market share in your sector, how are you going to grow? Once a company stops growing, it is a “mature” stock, and it trades at a much lower price-to-earnings ratio.

(3) Which is why growth-stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video or cryptocurrency or NFTs or the metaverse or AI.

Cory Doctorow continues:

“I am not saying that tech bosses are making bets they do not plan on winning. But winning the bet – creating a viable metaverse [for Facebook for example] – is the secondary goal. The primary goal is to keep the market convinced that your company will continue to grow, and to remain convinced until the next bubble comes along.

So this is why they’re hyping AI: the material basis for the hundreds of billions in AI investment.“

My opinion

I am a technologist and I really like how technology and innovation are formidable enablers. A country cannot progress without a good mastery and optimal usage of technology and innovation.

My mantra has always been: “It’s not about hardware or software though. It’s about peopleware.” But, as everyone knows, there is an enormous lack of competent people in the Mauritian society, at the level of our politicians, our civil servants, our CEOs of private companies, our teachers, our parents, our students, etc. The few who are competent are not enough for the country to have a critical mass of competencies.

Based on my past experience as a Senior Adviser for the Mauritian Government and a Head of an Innovation structure for the United Nations Development Programme in Mauritius, I predict that our dear Mauritian politicians and CEOs will definitely fall into the traps of all these AI and tech companies selling inexistent dreams and will waste years and enormous amount of resources chasing things that cannot be made.

If I were them, I would be very wary of salespeople and marketers from technology and AI companies.

This is an interesting video of Steve Jobs explaining the problem of companies forgetting how to make great product. For him, it’s when sales/marketing people get promoted (the talkers) instead of product people (the doers).

I suspect there are a lot of talkers at NVIDIA, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, Meta Platforms (Facebook), Tesla, Oracle, Palantir, IBM and Adobe (and others like OpenAI, etc.) these days…

Presentation on AI and Human Operation at the Mental Well-Being For All 2025 event

25 October 2025 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

On Saturday 25 October 2025, I had the privilege to speak at “Mental Well-Being For All 2025”, an event organised by the Abhyas School of Yoga, in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi Centre for Indian Culture and the Ministry of Health.

The gathering brought together people from NGOs, corporates, ministries, the civil service, healthcare and the social sciences to share their perspectives on mental well-being. One of the most touching moments was watching children from local shelters perform on stage.

I was invited to speak on “Artificial Intelligence & Human Operation: How Technology Can Support and Challenge Mental Health.” I explored the idea that AI is not just a machine, but also a mirror of ourselves as it reflects our cognitive patterns, our assumptions and our biases, especially through the data we choose to feed it. I said that AI is best understood as an extension of our mind, not a replacement for it.

I spent some time unpacking both the positive and negative aspects of AI. On the positive side, AI enables therapy chatbots, mood-tracking wearables and predictive models that can help detect early signs of depression or burnout. On the negative side, the same technologies can amplify loneliness, fuel anxiety and isolate the very people who are already most vulnerable.

This is why it is essential for all of us to become AI Literate. We need to understand how these tools shape our emotions, our attention and our relationships. What does it mean to be “mentally healthy” in a digital society? In many ways, learning about AI is also an exercise in self-awareness.

My sincere thanks to the Abhyas School of Yoga for the kind invitation, especially Priyanka Prakash (Executive Business Developer and Wellness Specialist) and Alla Kozyreva (Leadership Well-being Trainer). I am also grateful to the management and staff of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Indian Culture and the Ministry of Health for their contribution in making this event possible.

Victor Gruen wanted shopping malls to be beautiful European squares

11 October 2025 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

The Marktplatz (Hallstatt, Austria), courtesy of My Path In The World

Victor Gruen was born Viktor Grünbaum in Austria on 18 July 1903. In 1941, he moved to Los Angeles in the US and he became a pioneer in the design of shopping malls. He passed away on 14 February 1980.

His vision for a shopping center was inspired by the beautiful European squares, typically those in Vienna. A Redditor, Engelberto, explains:

“I believe his starting observation was that the new suburbs all lacked a center – a commercial, cultural, social center. His idea of a mall would give those places a center. A modern, indoor interpretation of an old world town core. Where people would meet and where cultural events and the like could be held. It would look very different from a European city but it would serve the same functions that he felt were missing in surburbia. The main problem was that mall investors would remove from the plans anything that was not commercial and would serve to maximise revenue. Any added value that could not be expressed in numbers was seen as superfluous.”

Victor Gruen really wanted Americans to experience what he, when he was in Vienna, had experienced: a central place where people would meet and share experiences. Unfortunately, the investors thought otherwise and only concentrated on the shopping in mall.

La City Trianon, a shopping mall, tropical island style.

This is why, today, most malls, including the ones in Mauritius, are first and foremost shopping and eating malls. There are not really places for people to meet and spend time together.

Lately, I have also noticed that many malls are very noisy. Christina and I even had to flee from one a few weeks ago because an (uneducated) animator was making way too much (stupid) noises.

Still, we are fortunate in Mauritius, because it’s a tropical island, to still have some malls which are nice for people to spend time in. Personally, I have no issue with, say, Bagatelle or Trianon. Some malls do stress me a lot though and I don’t like going there but I will not name them out of decency.

The Redditor, Engelberto, adds:

“And this kind of worked for many decades. But I wonder if the slow death of shopping malls in the last 20 years or so could have been avoided if these places offered modern shoppers more diverse reasons for going there. Something that cannot be replicated through online shopping.”

Malls are not dead in Mauritius. In fact, we had a new mall pretty much every month. But, this is not sustainable and, at one point, people, including investors, will get bored.

Interestingly, Engelberto also says that online shopping (naturally) only focusses on the shopping and completely forgoes the social aspects of going to a mall. In the future, we might all do our shopping online and people might stop seeing each other. I am not sure I want this.

No wonder Victor Gruen decided to return to Vienna when he became old and, in a speech in London in 1978, he disavowed shopping mall developments as having “bastardised” his ideas.