[eru]

The dot-com boom of the late 1990s also had plenty of VC money.

Back then and today, you find plenty of true believers, and plenty of people who are in it for the money.

Similar, when people financed eg canals and railways or factories in the past, many participants cared about the money.

(Or are you saying it's not about the money, but specifically VCs?)

[mna_]

>Similar, when people financed eg canals and railways or factories in the past, many participants cared about the money.

Those things were tangible and their advantages/disadvantages more immediate than something intangible like ``AI''.

[eru]

Hindsight is 20/20. Past breakthroughs look obvious and immediately beneficial in retrospect.

Btw, there were plenty of people who thought electricity or the internet were just toys or fads.

[AstralStorm]

True, but original electricity stayed the same, even the turbine generators still in use are very similar. (Same with steam power, still in use today.) Batteries are improved but general operation is the same. There's many more devices using it, mostly for the better.

We don't even know if we want LLMs in more devices. Likewise we likely do not want Internet/email in every toaster.

LLMs staying the same would be the death of this technology. Even minor improvements don't matter enough.

Voice activated devices are not necessarily paradigm shifting either. We had these for over 25 years now.

[eru]

Turbine generators are a pretty late development (invented in 1884 for propulsion, not electricity generation).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity#Cultural_perceptio...

> It is said that in the 1850s, British politician William Ewart Gladstone asked the scientist Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday answered, "One day sir, you may tax it."

That admittedly apocryphal anecdote is set 30 years before the turbine you mentioned was invented.