The AI bubble will pop. It’s up to us to replace it responsibly | Mark Surman

Fri, 30 Jan 2026

When bubbles burst, what comes next can be better, if we build it differently

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.

Mark Surman is the president of Mozilla