this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
1067 points (96.0% liked)
Technology
59340 readers
5218 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In the dot com boom we got sites like Amazon, Google, etc. And AOL was providing internet service. Not a good service. AOL was insanely overvalued, (like insanely overvalued, it was ridiculous) but they were providing a service.
But we also got a hell of a lot of businesses which were just "existing business X... but on the internet!"
It's not too dissimilar to how it is with AI now really. "We're doing what we did before... but now with AI technology!"
If it follows the dot com boom-bust pattern, there will be some companies that will survive it and they will become extremely valuable the future. But most will go under. This will result in an AI oligopoly among the companies that survive.
AOL was NOT a dotcom company, it was already far past it's prime when the bubble was in full swing still attaching cdrom's to blocks of kraft cheese.
The dotcom boom generated an unimaginable number of absolute trash companies. The company I worked for back then had it's entire schtick based on taking a lump sum of money from a given company, giving them a sexy flash website and connecting them with angel investors for a cut of their ownership.
Photoshop currently using AI to get the job done is more of an advantage that 99% of the garbage that was wrought forth and died on the vine in the early 00's. Topaz labs can currently take a poor copy of VHS video uploaded to Youtube and turn it into something nearly reasonable to watch in HD. You can feed rough drafts of performance reviews or apologetic letters to people through ChatGPT and end up with nearly professional quality copy that iterates your points more clearly than you'd manage yourself with a few hours of review. (at least it does for me)
Those companies born around the dotcom boon that persist didn't need the dotcom boom to persist, they were born from good ideas and had good foundation.
There's still a lot to come out of the AI craze. Even if we stopped where we are now, upcoming advances in the medical field alone with have a bigger impact on human quality of life than 90% of those 00's money grabs.