[jillesvangurp]

Very different things. I lived through the dot com bubble (didn't get rich because I was busy doing a PhD instead). Basically, a massive amount of clueless idiots funding companies that were literally nothing more than a crappy website. It was over in a few years. At the peak of the hype, disgusting amounts of money got spent on companies that went absolutely nowhere because there was absolutely nothing there. And then it all fizzled out. But there was also a healthy amount of experimentation and new stuff happening.

This feels different; there's actually some substance to the madness. Quite a few of the companies being funded are actually creating some pretty cool tech. And there's some real revenue potential as well; it's not just investment money keeping everything going. A good dot com era company reference would be companies like Google or Amazon that took the cash and got a lot of that tech making money for them even after the investment bubble burst. They also grabbed some of the smarter people at the same time. There are a few more examples. If you squint a little, you can see a few companies that are likely to be able to start raking in lots of cash soon that are at this point well funded.

Also a lot of the current investment money is being converted into GPU hardware. Which is of course nice for companies like NVidia, whom are probably a bit over valued currently. But the point is that hardware is tangible. Even if the companies that buy it go bust, the hardware just ends up in the hands of others. We're talking many millions of GPUs that are being deployed and that, like it or not, will be doing a lot of AI workloads for years to come for whomever ends up owning it. And there are a lot of smart people trying to make that hardware do all sorts of cool stuff. Hardware is a much better asset to have than useless websites. And I don't think a lot of the software is that bad either.

[choppaface]

Add that in the dotcom bubble, internet-flavored growth had never happened before, so it was relatively harder to predict the growth of (say) Google.

But today, deep-learning-flavored growth is a 10-year-old concept, and LLMs largely have leverage over existing (versus quite new) business models. There will probably be fewer new monopolies versus the dotcom era; in particular OpenAI has lots of competition.