Shadowing Practice: The AI Take Over Has Completely Backfired (Here's the Proof) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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AI was supposed to change everything, replace millions of jobs, transform every industry, and become the biggest technological shift in history.
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But there's just one problem.
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The numbers don't seem to add up.
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Big tech is expected to spend around $725 billion on AI this year.
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Meanwhile, the entire global market for AI services generated only around $25 billion last year.
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That means for every $10 these companies are pouring into AI infrastructure, they're getting back only about 25 cents in revenue.
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And now the cracks are becoming harder to ignore.
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Products are being shut down.
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The cost of running AI keeps exploding.
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Lawsuits are piling up.
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And investors are starting to ask the question nobody wanted to ask two years ago.
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Where's the money?
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So is AI actually the next technological revolution?
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Or are we watching one of the biggest tech bubbles in history start to burst?
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Hi friends, I'm Maddie.
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I'm a senior software engineer who previously worked Google, Internet, other bictict companies like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft.
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For two years now, the story I've been told, that you've been told, is that AI was about to replace every engineer alive.
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We are not far from the world.
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I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code.
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And then in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.
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But as of now, the money flow doesn't exactly match up to this story.
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So in In this video, I'll break down why the AI hype is cracking in 2026, the spending method doesn't close, the AI products quietly getting switched off,
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and the legal problem no one thought about until too late.
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Let's get into it.
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We're going to start with the amount of money companies are spending on AI.
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The five companies building this infrastructure, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle,
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are on track for roughly $725 billion of capital expenditure in 2026.
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That's up 77% in a single year, and it was around $162 billion back in 2022.
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Goldman Sachs predicts that the total spend will be past $7.6 trillion through 2031. To put
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that into perspective, $725 billion a year is more than the entire
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annual GDP of Switzerland being spent by a handful of companies on hardware
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that loses most of its value in three or four years.
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And so here's the problem.
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That money isn't coming from spare cash anymore.
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Rather, it's eating companies alive.
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JP Morgan estimates AI capital expenditure went from around a third
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of hyperscaler operating cash flow in 2023 to roughly 93% in 2026.
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Their combined free cash flow, the actual money left over, fell to about $7 billion in the second quarter of 2026,
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down from $60 billion at the end of 2025.
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And analysts expect it to go negative this quarter.
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Amazon is looking at deeply negative free cash flow this year.
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Microsoft has told investors that its spare cash is shrinking, and it left a $60 billion buyback basically sitting there, unused.
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So the richest companies on earth are borrowing hard against a payoff that hasn't arrived yet.
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And the moment that made everyone realize how dangerous this could be is when DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that in early 2025 trained a competitive model for a few million dollars,
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erased something like $600 billion of NVIDIA's value in one trading day, the single largest day wipeout any US stock has ever taken.
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DeepSeek's success forced every investor to ask this very important question, what are we actually getting for all this spend?
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And even if that money were all there, the electricity and the infrared might not be.
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That part often doesn't get talked about as much because it's much less exciting than those stock charts.
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But there is a hard physical limit.
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Training and running these models eat staggering amounts of power.
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The International Energy Agency says electricity demand from data centers jumped 17% in 2025, and the AI-specific slice grew closer to 50%.
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In the US, data centers are now driving about half of all new electricity demand growth.
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The grid just simply can't keep pace
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because capital moves at the speed of markets and power plants move at the speed of permits and construction.
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Gartner is already projecting that power shortages could constrain 40% of AI data centers by 2027.
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So you have companies committing hundreds of billions of dollars to build-outs that physically cannot happen yet,
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and quietly signing deals for their own nuclear reactors to get around this limitation.
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That is not the behavior of an industry that has everything figured out.
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In addition to the massive cost of AI, it might seem as though projects keep on failing even with the help of AI.
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An MIT report found that roughly 95% of enterprise-generative AI pilots delivered no measurable return on investment.
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However, there's a bit more to that number.
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It does measure whether a pilot moved the bottom line within about six months, and a lot of them were in marketing, which is a hard place to show fast returns.
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Also, internally built AI tools succeeded about a third of the time, while vendor-based ones succeeded about two thirds.
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So most companies seem as though they're using it to solve problems that don't return much.
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This is the phenomenon even in large companies.
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For example, Amazon set a target of getting 80% of its developers using AI tools every week
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and built an internal leaderboard called KiroRank that scored engineers on how much AI they used.
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So then naturally, as you can imagine, engineers started pointing AI agents at pointless, made-up tasks purely to run up their token counts and climb the board,
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a move the industry has coined token taxing.
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It drove up Amazon's own compute bill for basically nothing.
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So in May of 2026, they officially killed the leaderboard, and a senior VP had to send around a note saying, please don't use AI just for the sake of AI.
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Also, a recent survey of more than 2,500 enterprises found
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that around 74% of companies that put a live AI customer service agent into production had to roll it back.
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So while the demo looks incredible, productionization is harder, especially in legacy systems full of edge cases the demo never saw or trained on.
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The reason why these AI agents are getting switched off isn't only because they're wrong.
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It's because that when they're wrong, the company can get into liability and big legal trouble.
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Late last year, the Australian government paid Deloitte around $440,000 for a report on a welfare system.
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A researcher started reading it and noticed something off.
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The report cited academic papers that just didn't exist and quoted a federal court judge saying something that the judge never said.
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It turns out that Deloitte had actually been using Gen.ai to help write it, and the AI had just hallucinated its sources.
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Deloitte ended up issuing a corrected version and refunded part of the fee.
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The lesson here is pretty stark.
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If your AI puts something in front of a client, you are liable for what it outputs.
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You don't get to blame it on the software.
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Now, stack that on top of hallucinations would turn out to be really stubborn.
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One 2026 benchmark that tested 37 different models clocked made-up answer rates anywhere from 15 to 52 percent.
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And oddly, several of the newer reasoning models actually did it more often than the older ones, not less.
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On legal questions in particular, Stanford put the range of hallucination at somewhere between 58 percent and 88 percent.
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So put yourself in a Fortune 500 boardroom.
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You've got a tool that that will confidently make things up some meaningful fraction of the time, a core precedent saying you own every word it says,
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and insurers who've started writing outright AI exclusions into their policies because they can't price the risk.
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What do you do?
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You quietly kill a lot of those customer-facing agents.
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So we have now a grim picture of the AI ecosystem.
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The spending is unsustainable, the pilots mostly fail, and the agents are getting retracted.
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So what should you do with this information if you're building a career?
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There are three things.
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Number one, don't confuse the bubble with the technology.
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For example, the dot-com crash didn't mean that the internet was fake, but it meant the money had run way ahead of the value
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and the correction wiped out everyone with no real business underneath.
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The same sort of principle can be applied here.
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You can think about it like this.
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Would a tool still be worth using if AI got 10 times more expensive to run?
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Real models with real products underneath will survive that.
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Number two, become the person who owns the output, not the person who produces it.
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Every failure we talked about in this video, for example, the dead pilots, the agents getting rolled back, Deloitte handing the government a faulty report, is caused
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because of the lack of type of this person someone who can catch what the AI got wrong
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and take responsibility for it.
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That role is growing while the just generate code role shrinks.
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So you should use AI every day, ship fast with it, and stay accountable for what it produces.
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And build robust eval and verification systems.
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And number three, last but not least, go where the deflation sends the money.
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So when a bubble sorts itself out, the money that was pumped into it doesn't just disappear, but instead it gets deflected toward products that can actually prove their worth.
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AI security is a good example.
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Every one of these systems getting shipped is an attack surface almost nobody can defend yet.
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Same with the people who can integrate AI into real systems, evaluate it, and make it reliable instead of just impressive on stage in a controlled environment.
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So you should specialize into the part that needs human judgment.
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So in conclusion, here's the real story of whether AI is all hype or not in 2006.
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Yes, AI stocks are getting hammered.
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Yes, 95% of those enterprise pilots went nowhere.
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And yes, the AI replaces everyone mantra is getting walked back in boardrooms across the industry.
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But none of that means AI itself is finished.
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The internet survived the crash and came back bigger.
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So AI will be fine.
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The only question here is whether you'll come out of this as someone who chased the bubble
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or if you'll become someone who understood what was actually valuable underneath it.
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And that's all I have for you in this video.
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If this perspective was helpful, hit that like button, hype the video, and subscribe for more videos on software engineering, AI, and tech.
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Why This Video Is Perfect for English Speaking Practice
This video is a goldmine for IELTS speaking practice and improving fluency. The host, Maddie, uses clear, conversational English with natural pacing—ideal for mimicking. Her explanations blend technical terms with everyday language, helping you learn to communicate complex ideas smoothly. Plus, the topic is engaging, making it easier to stay motivated while practicing pronunciation and intonation.
Breaking Down Natural Speech: 3 Key Phrases
- "The numbers don't seem to add up." This common idiom sounds natural in casual and formal contexts. Notice how "don't seem to" softens the statement, making it less direct—perfect for sounding conversational.
- "The cracks are becoming harder to ignore." "Cracks" here metaphorically means problems, and "harder to ignore" is a relatable way to say issues are growing obvious. Mimic the stress on "harder" and "ignore" to emphasize the point.
- "That money isn't coming from spare cash anymore. Rather, it's eating companies alive." "Rather" shifts the focus, and "eating companies alive" is a vivid metaphor. Practice the pause after "rather" to make the contrast clear, and stress "alive" for impact.
A Simple Shadowing Routine to Try Today
Shadowing (or "shadowspeak") is a proven way to improve English pronunciation. Here's how to use this video: 1. Watch a 30-second clip, then pause. 2. Repeat the clip, speaking aloud *at the same time* as Maddie—copy her tone, speed, and pauses. 3. Record yourself, then compare. Notice where your rhythm or stress differs. 4. Do this 5x with the same clip, then move to a new one. For extra help, use a shadow speak app to slow down the audio. This routine builds muscle memory for natural speech, making it easier to speak fluently in real conversations—even for IELTS prep!
Keep practicing, and you'll soon notice your pronunciation and confidence soar. You've got this!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is expected · being shut · I've been told |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've been told · has told · hasn't arrived |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | marketing, which is · person who owns · someone who can |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.