AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble
AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble
As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
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.
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.
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
Hm. Maybe I'm missing something but I'm not seeing a million 'successful' AI startups pop up overnight like during the Dot Com Bubble. Most of the AI investments I've seen have been from major corporations that can pivot and eat a little loss. I do see several resume and business-plan writing services but it just doesn't seem like much of a parallel, to me.
The article doesn't address this disparity, it just pretends like it's an equivalency - citing only megacaps like GOOG, MSFT, etc. Clickbait headline, I guess.
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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.
I read an article once about how when humans hear that someone has died, the first thing they try and do is come up with a reason that whatever befell the deceased would not happen to them. Some of the time there was a logical reason, some of the time there's not, but either way the person would latch onto the reason to believe they were safe. I think we're seeing the same thing here with AI. People are seeing a small percentage of people lose their job, with a technology that 95% of the world or more didn't believe was possible a couple years ago, and they're searching for reasons to believe that they're going to be fine, and then latching onto them.
I worked at a newspaper when the internet was growing. I saw the same thing with the entire organization. So much of the staff believed the internet was a fad. This belief did not work out for them. They were a giant, and they were gone within 10 years. I'm not saying we aren't in an AI bubble now, but, there are now several orders of magnitude more money in the internet now than there was during the Dot Com bubble, just because it's a bubble doesn't mean it wont eventually consume everything.
Ah yes who could have possibly seen this coming
No! Really, what a shock!!
It certainly is somewhere around the peak of the hype cycle.
It is all ridiculous how quickly these bubbles form - and then burst - these days.
Obviously AI has been around for a while, amd ChatGPT has been in development for years, but it really only hit the mass media literally less than a year ago. Late November, early December of 2022. And in well under a year there is already talk of the bubble bursting. The Dot Com bubble which many are referencing lasted for a much longer time. That bubble was inflating for years before it simply got so big it had to explode.
Fund these companies and take them public before the hype train derails. The VCs smell a greater fool, and it's the IPO investor.
Already!? XD
AI will follow the same path as VR IMO. Everybody will freak out about it for a while, tons of companies will try getting into the market.
And after a few years, nobody will really care about it anymore. The people that use it will like it. It will become integrated in subtle and mundane ways, like how VR is used in TikTok filters, Smart phone camera settings, etc.
I don't think it will become anything like general intelligence.
Whatever this iteration of "AI" will be, it has a limit that the VC bubble can't fulfill. That's kind of the point though because these VC firms, aided by low interest rates, can just fund whatever tech startup they think has a slight chance of becoming absorbed in to a tech giant. Most of the AI companies right now are going to fail, as long as they do it as cheaply as possible, the VC firms basically skim the shit that floats to the top.
This is probably a much better analogy than NFTs, but the dotcom bubble had much broader implications
Silicon valley of a disease that will blow up any growing technology where they will turn anything into a bubble. No matter how significant it is or not.
It cant even compare a phone camera sensor to an apsc one. It's still far behind
Well, then we are facing two bubbles at the same time: AI and cyber currencies. Once both those bubbles burst, the fallout is going to make the dot-com era bubble look like small suds by comparison.
Dot com is a bubble because some just host a website and got massive fund, same as crypto some just a random similar coin to eth they got massive fund. But Ai now can replace jobs, need massive fund to train so not much similar startup copying and startup barrier is high, also few free money going around at the same time due to interest rate. I think this might just be different.
Ai is a bubble, the question is if it will burst and when it will...
DRS GME
It isn't that it's like the Dot Com bubble, it's that not all AI matters, just ChatGPT mostly, and not only is it still very much in its inception phase, it's also still very much a huge risk because of the complete lack of transparency and the ridiculous amount of data retention. Another problem is, it's so effective, it only takes a few milking it to completely saturate the opportunity market, so good luck holding up the bubble when it's really one single company with relatively few subscriptions to it.
interestingly it's more like investing in Apple stocks in the 90's.
It's always the same. They hear about it and then race to rape it to death along with anyone in their way. And then call it success. God is dead.
