Meet Eleftherios "Jerry" Floros — author, keynote speaker, and one of the more independent voices in the current AI debate. Jerry is a contributing author of the bestselling FINTECH Book Series published by Wiley — The WealthTech Book, The PayTech Book, The LegalTech Book, and The AI Book — and is currently writing his third solo book, AI Sucker Punch: It's Going To Hit You Harder and Faster and Sooner Than You Think. He is a lecturer at the FinTech Circle Institute, and a member of the British Blockchain Association, Crypto Valley Association, Global Tech Advocates, Tech London Advocates, and the Institute of Directors. Across more than three decades in finance, engineering, and maritime industries — and now sitting at the intersection of AI, blockchain, and financial technology — Jerry has become one of the most-followed independent commentators on where AI is actually heading, and one of the few willing to push back on both the abundance narrative and the doom narrative in equal measure. In this episode, Jerry walks through the economics of AI (why for every $1 OpenAI and Anthropic take in, they spend roughly $1.50 producing it), the bubble that is now forming and the bust that follows, the concentration of power around a handful of billionaires deciding the future for 8 billion people, the physical constraints (energy, water, cooling) that half of new data centre projects have already run into, Europe's move toward sovereign AI, the MAD-style regulatory framework that Jerry argues we now urgently need, and the human cost that is already visible in tech layoffs and student job prospects. Subscribe to the Fintech Garden Newsletter 👉 https://fintech.garden Timestamps: 01:20 – What is AI, actually? Jerry's working definition 02:30 – The data problem: cameras on foreheads, synthetic data, and 80% of code written by AI 04:30 – IQ scaling: models at 114–150 now, and where this goes 05:30 – The bandwidth bottleneck: humans can't keep up with the tokens per second 06:00 – What AI should be used for: nuclear fusion, AlphaFold, Alzheimer's, cancer 08:25 – Defining "humane tech" and what it means in practice 09:00 – 8 billionaires deciding the fate of 8 billion people 10:00 – DeepMind and AlphaFold: the open-sourced Nobel Prize 12:00 – The AI realist position: neither abundance nor doom 13:30 – Will capitalism cap the data centres? 18:00 – The bubble, the bust, and who survives 20:00 – Why we need MAD-style AI regulation 22:00 – Europe's move toward sovereign AI 24:00 – The Anthropic responsible-scaling moment 25:00 – The generational close: what future are we giving our children? 27:00 – The 142,000 tech layoffs and the mental wellbeing crisis The Fintech Garden is hosted by Igor Tomych, founder and CEO of DashDevs, and Dumitru Condrea, founder of Novafin. All conversations revolve around the world of fintech, movers and shakers, and how decisions are made. Make sure to tune in to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to how the world of finance is evolving before our eyes. Follow us: https://fintech.gardenCheck out DashDevs: https://dashdevs.comCheck out Novafin: https://novafin.co/ Connect with our hostsIgor Tomych https://www.linkedin.com/in/igortomych/Dumitru Condrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcondrea/
