Apple and Nvidia are neck-and-neck for the crown of the world’s most valuable company. This is happening not because Apple is gaining value, but because Nvidia’s stock is losing value. Investors have been selling off the chipmaker’s shares amid a broader market rethink over how much artificial intelligence related companies should be worth. When Apple briefly overtook Nvidia on Friday, Daniel Newman, CEO of the tech advisory firm The Futurm Group, had a pithy response. “I actually tweeted something out that just had one word and it said: ‘dumb,’" he said. Because, Newman said, while Apple will likely keep selling lots of iPhones and make lots of money.“It's not anywhere close to what we expect Nvidia to do in the future years,” he said.Newman said what’s happening in the markets now is that investors are growing a bit more cautious after two years of exuberance over AI. Daron Acemoglu, an institute professor at MIT who researches the economic underpinnings of the AI boom, said caution is warranted. “The whole industry could have a shakeup,” Acemoglu said.A shakeup that would happen if profits — when and if they materialize — don’t justify the enormous spending on AI, which is forecasted at $2.59 trillion globally this year alone. “I don't think anybody has come up with a reasonable scenario in which, in two or three years' time, we're going to see trillion dollars of revenue,” Acemoglu said.Meanwhile, there are questions about whether big tech firms will keep spending massively to build data centers. Newman said earnings reports this week from Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and others will be key. “Everybody's been kind of waiting for who blinks,” he said. “[Are] any of these hyperscalers going to say we're not going to spend what we said we're going to spend?”If they say that, Newman said, that would likely spark a further selloff in stocks related to the AI buildout.