Surely one of the silliest things that happened in tech stocks in 2024 was the sudden tumble in Nvidia Corp. shares moments after its fiscal second-quarter earnings release in August. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who otherwise walked on water this year, mentioned a minor -- and resolved -- blip in production of its new chip, yet investors panicked anyway.

They soon sobered up. The world, it turned out, continued to spin. But what it highlighted were the deep anxieties lurking just beneath the thin surface of optimism on artificial intelligence. The market is on high alert for signs of the peak and will react disproportionately whenever it thinks it has found one. This doesn't bode well for 2025, when cooler heads must prevail as the progress of AI development seems almost certain to slow, possibly to a crawl.