[mumbisChungo]

No matter how right the AI crowd is, elements of it are/will be a bubble.

No matter how right the bubble crowd is, the market becoming irrationally exuberant for a brief period of time does not invalidate the technology or the rapid change we'll see as a result of it.

[DragonStrength]

For sure, the Dotcom crash didn’t mean the web was bad technology.

[jameshart]

Not technically bad, anyway. Just… socially destructive to the fragile web that held society together.

[NitpickLawyer]

Yeah, this is what all the bubbleists miss. We got FAANG++ out of the last bubble, and they literally rule the world with the tech that was promised during said bubble. Catsdotcom and dogsdotcom failing had 0 impact on the tech itself.

It's the same today. A lot of the hyperVCfunded startups will fail, without a doubt. But the tech giants will get their money from this tech, and it will be ubiquitous in ways we can't even imagine now.

[strange_quark]

I'm not sure that the dotcom bubble leaving behind the web means that AI (and by AI I mean LLMs) are going to be transformative in the same way the internet was. Just because it happened once doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen again.

To be clear, I don't think LLMs are going to vanish, there's clearly some things they're good for, but there's also some really big differences between the AI bubble and the dotcom bubble. People are very skeptical and worried about AI, they (the general public) aren't really using it for anything more than search, there hasn't been any clear economic data indicating that it improves productivity in a meaningful way, and a killer app hasn't really emerged that isn't a free chatbot. Plus, the majority of the money is concentrated in the same 5 or 10 companies just passing it back and forth between each other before eventually handing it over to NVIDIA. Maybe I was just too young to pay attention to the dotcom bubble, but the vibe seems completely different.

[techpineapple]

I think the comparison between AI and the web is interesting. I still feel like AI has this assumption that it's going to surmount a gap that it may not surmount.

The internet basically just got gradually better at all the things around it. Better graphics, faster internet, better programming languages, bigger hard drives.

But we still don't know what LLM's are. They're maybe just a feature, not a whole suite of technologies creating an ecosystem, the idea that they'll make the leap from Fancy Lisa AI Companion to colleague is fanciful. I don't think there's a direct line that shows that up and to the right automatically means superintelligence.