[alexpotato]

One of my favorite stories from the dotcom bust is when people, after the bust, said something along the lines of: "Take Pets.com. Who the hell would buy 40lb dogfood bags over the internet? And what business would offer that?? It doesn't make sense at all economically! No wonder they went out of business."

Yet here we are, 20 years later, routinely ordering FURNITURE on the internent and often delivered "free".

My point being, sure, there is a lot of hype around AI but that doesn't mean that there aren't nuggets of very useful projects happening.

[coffeefirst]

True, but I think the point of that story is it’s really hard to predict what’s crap and what’s just too early.

It doesn’t guarantee the skeptics are wrong all the time.

[AstroBen]

"Look at what happened with the internet!" also doesn't mean the same will happen with AI

Neither argument works

[PKop]

There's 0 requirement that [new technology] must follow the path of the internet though. So it's kind of an irrelevant non sequitur.

[astura]

Pets.com was both selling everything at a loss and spending millions on advertising. It wasn't the concept that was the issue.