That's not how economics works.
If consumers have to pay less, that's a Good Thing.
The Chinese are trying to help, but Americans like tariffs more than they hate climate change. (At least that's the preference that their political system expresses.)
I've found that talking through projects is a weak indicator of competence. It's much easier to memorize talking points than to produce working code.
-> GPA can be gamed, as laid out.
-> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use.
-> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts
-> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot.
What should be best practice here? Ideally something that controls for first-time interviewer jitters.
If, hypothetically, there's two candidates, one who is more knowledgeable but has no personal projects versus someone who has less knowledge but has worked on different side projects in various languages/domains, I'm always going to pick the latter candidate since they clearly have a passion, and that passion will drive them to pick up the knowledge more than someone who's just doing it for a paycheck and could care less about expanding their own knowledge.
To go one step forward, you can ask them to go into detail about their side project, interesting problems they faced, how they overcame them, etc. Even introverts who are generally worse at small talk are on a much more balanced playing field when talking about something they're passionate about.
The first example basically stands in for all of them -- Microsoft invests $13B in OpenAI, and OpenAI spends $13B on Azure. This is literally just OpenAI purchasing Microsoft cloud usage with OpenAI's stock rather than its cash. There is nothing unusual, illicit, or deceptive about this. This is entirely normal. You can finance your spending through debt or equity. They're financing through equity, as most startups do, and they presumably get a better deal (better rates, more guaranteed access) via Microsoft than via other random investors and then buying the cloud compute retail from Microsoft.
This isn't deceiving any investors. This is all out in the open. And it's entirely normal business practice. Nothing of this is an indicator of a bubble or anything.
Or take the deal with Oracle -- Oracle is building data centers for OpenAI, with the guarantee that OpenAI will use them. That's just... a regular business deal. What is even newsworthy about this? NYT thinks these are "circular" deals, but by this logic every deal is a "circular" deal, because both sides benefit. This is just... normal capitalism.
The main difference of course being that these are actual companies as opposed to just entities intently designed to inflate the apparent financials. While it seems like that difference means this situation is perfectly fine as compared with the fraudulent case of Enron, the net effect is still the same; these companies are posting crazy quarter over quarter revenue growth, sending their stock prices to crazy highs and P/E multiples, while the insiders are cashing out to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I don't really see how exactly you're trying to make the argument that it may or may not be a bubble, it objectively meets the definition of a bubble in the traditional economic sense (when an asset's market price surges significantly above its intrinsic value, driven by speculative behavior rather than fundamental factors). These companies are massively overvalued on the speculative value of AI, despite AI having not yet shown much economic viability for actual profit (not just revenue).
Worse yet, it's not just one company with inflated numbers, it's pretty much the entire top end of the market. To compare it to the dot com bubble wouldn't be a stretch, it'd basically be apples to apples as far as I see it.