Just a reminder that the dot com bubble was a problem for investors, not the underlying technology that continued to change the entire world.
That's true, but investors have a habit of making their problems everyone else's problems.
Not that you're wrong per-se but the dotcom bubble didn't impact my life at all back in the day. It was on the news and that was it. I think this will be the same. A bunch of investors will lose their investments, maybe some adventurous pension plans will suffer a bit, but on the whole life will go on.
The impact of AI itself will be much further reaching. We better force the companies that do survive to share the wealth otherwise we're in for a tough time. But that won't have anything to do with a bursting investment bubble.
Lots of everyday normal people lost their jobs due to the bubble. Saying it only impacted the already rich investors is wrong.
The dotcom bubble was one of the middle dominos on the way to the 2008 collapse, the fed dropped interest rates to near zero and kept them there for years, investor confidence was low, so here come mortgage backed securities.
In addition, the bubble bursting and its aftermath is what allowed the big players in tech (Amazon, Google, Cisco etc) to merge to monopoly, which hasn’t been particularly good
Good for you. But perhaps fuck off, because some of us lost jobs, homes, and financial stability.
The best way to make money in the gold rush was selling shovels.
Same idea here. Nvidia is making bank.
And that's before you even point out that they were also making bank from the last gold rush
Good time to be in the GPU business
This kind of feels like a common sense observation to anyone that's been mildly paying attention.
Tech investors do this to themselves every few years. In literally the last 6-7 years, this happened with crypto, then again but more specifically with NFTs, and now AI. Hell, we even had some crazes going on in parallel, with self driving cars also being a huge dead end in the short term (Tesla's will have flawless, fully self-driving any day now! /S).
AI will definitely transform the world, but not yet and not for awhile. Same with self driving cars. But that being said, most investors don't even care. They're part of the reason this gets so hyped up, because they'll get in first, pump value, then dump and leave a bunch of other suckers holding the bags. Rinse and repeat.
I also don’t know why this is a surprise. Investors are always looking for the next small thing that will make them big money. That’s basically what investing is …
It's starting to look like the crypto/nft scam because it is the same fucking assholes forcing this bullshit on all of us.
As someone that currently works in AI/ML, with a lot of very talented scientists with PhD's and dozens of papers against their name, it boils my piss when I see crypto cunts I used to know that are suddenly all on the AI train, trying to peddle their "influence" on LinkedIn.
The AI bubble can burst and take a bunch of tech bro idiots with it. Good. Fine. Don't give a fuck.
It's the housing bubble that needs to burst. That's what's hurting real people.
Ah, the sudden realisation of all the VCs that they've tipped money into what is essentially a fancy version of predictive text.
Alexa proudly informed me the other day that Ray Parker Jr is Caucasian. We ain't in any danger of the singularity yet, boys.
I couldn't agree more. What they're calling AI today exposes its issues pretty easily still, asking it to spell lollipop backwards for example. The usefulness of ChatGPT back in December was also considerably better than it is today. Companies are putting up more guardrails which the bots have to re-train to adapt to "being too honest" or mechanisms to prevent them being used for illicit purposes, that affect how useful they ultimately are, meaning we're seeing hyperbole instead of substance.
One AI startup was just hustling the AI washing saying stuff like "if a computer is a bicycle for the mind, AI is a jumbo jet for us all" and I had to laugh. It reminded me of all the talk around VR back in 2016.
Pak'n'Save has an AI recipe generator, and for a while there was no sanity checking of the ingredients. I entered what I had on hand and it gave me this.
Pro tip: when you start to see articles talking a bout how something looks like a bubble, it means it's already popped and anybody who hasn't already cashed in their investment is a bag-holder.
There's a lot of similarity in tone between crypto and AI. Both are talking about their sphere like it will revolutionize absolutely everything and anything, and both are scrambling to find the most obscure use case they can claim as their own.
The biggest difference is that AI has concrete, real-world applications, but I suspect its use, ultimately, will be less universal and transformative as the hype is making it out to be.
Same thing happened with crypto and block chain. The whole "move fast and break things" in reality means, "we made up words for something that isn't special to create value out of nothing and cash out before it returns to nothing
AI is bringing us functional things though.
.Com was about making webtech to sell companies to venture capitalists who would then sell to a company to a bigger company. It was literally about window dressing garbage to make a business proposition.
Of course there's some of that going on in AI, but there's also a hell of a lot of deeper opportunity being made.
What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that's both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn't need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don't need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?
What if secondary education is simply one-on-one tutoring with an AI? How far could we get as a species if this was given to the world freely? What if everyone could advance as far as their interest let them? What if AI translation gets good enough that language is no longer a concern?
AI has a lot of the same hallmarks and a lot of the same investors as crypto and half a dozen other partially or completely failed ideas. But there's an awful lot of new things that can be done that could never be done before. To me that signifies there's real value here.
*dictation fixes
In the dot com boom we got sites like Amazon, Google, etc. And AOL was providing internet service. Not a good service. AOL was insanely overvalued, (like insanely overvalued, it was ridiculous) but they were providing a service.
But we also got a hell of a lot of businesses which were just "existing business X... but on the internet!"
It's not too dissimilar to how it is with AI now really. "We're doing what we did before... but now with AI technology!"
If it follows the dot com boom-bust pattern, there will be some companies that will survive it and they will become extremely valuable the future. But most will go under. This will result in an AI oligopoly among the companies that survive.
.com brought us functional things. This bubble is filled with companies dressing up the algorithms they were already using as "AI" and making fanciful claims about their potential use cases, just like you're doing with your AI example. In practice, that's not going to work out as well as you think it will, for a number of reasons.
The Internet also brought us a shit ton of functional things too. The dot com bubble didn't happen because the Internet wasn't transformative or incredibly valuable, it happened because for every company that knew what they were doing there were a dozen companies trying something new that may or may not work, and for every one of those companies there were a dozen companies that were trying but had no idea what they were doing. The same thing is absolutely happening with AI. There's a lot of speculation about what will and won't work and make companies will bet on the wrong approach and fail, and there are also a lot of companies vastly underestimating how much technical knowledge is required to make ai reliable for production and are going to fail because they don't have the right skills.
The only way it won't happen is if the VCs are smarter than last time and make fewer bad bets. And that's a big fucking if.
Also, a lot of the ideas that failed in the dot com bubble weren't actually bad ideas, they were just too early and the tech wasn't there to support them. There were delivery apps for example in the early internet days, but the distribution tech didn't exist yet. It took smart phones to make it viable. The same mistakes are ripe to happen with ai too.
Then there's the companies that have good ideas and just under estimate the work needed to make it work. That's going to happen a bunch with ai because prompts make it very easy to come up with a prototype, but making it reliable takes seriously good engineering chops to deal with all the times ai acts unpredictably.
I think *LLMs to do everything is the bubble. AI isn't going anywhere, we've just had a little peak of interest thanks to ChatGPT. Midjourney and the like aren't going anywhere, but I'm sure we'll all figure out that LLMs can't really be trusted soon enough.
If it crashes hard I look forward to all the cheap server hardware that will be in the secondhand market in a few years. One I'm particularly excited about is the 4000 sff, single slot, 75w, 20GB, and ~3070 performance.
Good. It's not even AI. That word is just used because ignorant people eat it up.
It is indeed AI. Artificial intelligence is a field of study that encompasses machine learning, along with a wide variety of other things.
Ignorant people get upset about that word being used because all they know about "AI" is from sci-fi shows and movies.
The dotcom bubble was different. Now, everything related to actual AI development is hyped but the dotcom bubble inflated entire indexes, "new market" indexes were setup comprising companies nobody had ever heard of. It was orders of magnitude worse.
An apt analogy. Just like the web underlying technology is incredible and the hype is real, but it leads to endless fluff and stupid naive investments, many of which will lead nowhere. There were certainly be a lot of amazing advances using this tech in the coming decades, but for every one that is useful there will be 20 or 50 or 100 pieces of vaporware that is just trying to grab VC money.
So, who are the up and comers? Not every company in the dotcom era died. Some grew very large and made a lot of people rich.
Where's all the "NoOoOoO this isn't like crypto it's gonna be different" people at now?
I mean, it is different than crypto, but that's an incredibly low bar to clear.
That's an incredibly bad comparison. LLMs are already used daily by many people saving them time in different aspects of their life and work. Crypto on the other hand is still looking for it's everyday use case.
How much VC is really being invested at the moment? I know a variety of people at start ups and the money is very tight at the moment given the current interest rate environment.
Like 85% of the most recent YC class are "revolutionize x with AI" crap.
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