[adampunk]

The problem I have with this analogy is it cuts the other way. His tempting to look at the dotcom bust and think of pets.com or some other venture where somebody lost their shirt. It gets a little harder when you expand it to companies that today own an enormous slice of the world, because they bet on the Internet. Most people lost in the dotcom boom; Amazon, for instance, didn’t. The whole premise was that if you moved soon enough, you could buy in on the ground floor—-that was emphatically the case if you bought Amazon. Now they own a huge almost inextractable chunk of the Internet. It’s quite hard to do business or pleasure on the Internet without somehow involving Amazon.

What I am saying and what I think a lot of folks who are trying to get this point across are saying is that this will be critical infrastructure sooner than 20 years. The right frame of mind is to look at this like we look at the Internet circa of the 1980s or the 1970s. This is big messy and experimental right now. We are in the middle of rebuilding computing with foundation models. That is happening at an enormous subsidy for the time being.