“Trust us bro’ doesn’t work anymore. Time for someone checking what the AI is actually doing to humanity,” one X handle said, referring to the Sept. 7 cover.
Several handles voiced a similar opinion. Adam Ghaida, founding engineer of AI-powered personal assistant Orchid, said that “Trust Us is probably the most ominous title they could’ve picked.”
These concerns are not without reason. Non-business magazines and newspaper covers have a history of serving as contrarian indicators, marking tops in industry trends or their market valuations, as noted by late Paul Macrae Montgomery, a renowned stock and bond market forecaster who created the Magazine Cover Indicator.
The Magazine Cover Indicator
Montgomery noted decades ago that by the time a general-interest magazine puts an investment theme on its cover, most of the excitement is already baked in. In other words, the idea has become overbought in both financial and societal terms.
He set three conditions for the signal to count. The cover must appear in a mainstream magazine rather than a trade or business title, it must feature a widely understood idea, and the theme must already have seen a significant price run-up. Time’s cover on the OpenAI founders checks all three. AI isn’t just widely discussed worldwide, it has also pulled in billions of dollars in investor money, VC funding, and capex spending.
