[alienthrowaway]

Back in the dotcom boom years, Internet adoption growth was real - with a lot of people and businesses paying real money to get online. And yet, the dotcom bust happened. The existence of paying customers adopting a technology does not assure the sustainability of the industry at any point in time.

[puppymaster]

i dont see dotcom technologies replacing droves of workers and creating panics in /r/screenwriters, /r/3dmodelers etc. The displacement is real and we are not going back. Dotcom tech created fake problems so their 'advance technology solution' can be presented as solution. With AI wave, it's the opposite - business heads are actually thinking 'what other real problems can i solve with AI'. OpenAi and Claude don't even have to do any preaching. That's real value.

[btown]

Two things could simultaneously be true: (a) trillions of dollars in value will be created/replaced/subsumed by AI solutions, and (b) even with near-universal adoption among knowledge workers, the value captured by the vendors of advanced AI solutions may never rise high enough to justify the valuations we're seeing now.

OpenAI's bet is that its frontier models will be so far ahead of the current status quo that, if they are the only ones providing those frontier models, they will be able to name their price (to end users and advertisers alike) while increasing their share of spend in the space.

But even today, last-generation and open-source models form a meaningful portion of adopted solutions. Not every application in 2028 will need the AGI-approaching GPT-10 - especially if those applications can leverage a relatively small amount of code, perhaps even written by that GPT-10, that can in turn orchestrate (say) DeepSeek V5 running on compute that can be obtained for pennies on the dollar.

OpenAI could become a victim of its own success, and cause a house of cards to take down the global economy in the process. I personally hope this doesn't happen, but there is real risk here.

[alienthrowaway]

You missed my point entirely. There was real value created during the dotcom boom too: Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Google, etc did not 'create fake problems'. Amidst the pearls of real value, were dozens/hundreds of overvalued, dogshit companies which never get a ROI for their investors, and the even marginally useful companies went under when the market correction hit.

There will be the WebVans of the AI boom era, we just don't know their names yet. There also will be Ciscos and Suns that will never reach their high-water mark ever again, or become obsolete in a few years, and sold for less that what people expect.