Technology

Just a reminder that the dot com bubble was a problem for investors, not the underlying technology that continued to change the entire world.

The best way to make money in the gold rush was selling shovels.

Same idea here. Nvidia is making bank.

This kind of feels like a common sense observation to anyone that's been mildly paying attention.

Tech investors do this to themselves every few years. In literally the last 6-7 years, this happened with crypto, then again but more specifically with NFTs, and now AI. Hell, we even had some crazes going on in parallel, with self driving cars also being a huge dead end in the short term (Tesla's will have flawless, fully self-driving any day now! /S).

AI will definitely transform the world, but not yet and not for awhile. Same with self driving cars. But that being said, most investors don't even care. They're part of the reason this gets so hyped up, because they'll get in first, pump value, then dump and leave a bunch of other suckers holding the bags. Rinse and repeat.

It's starting to look like the crypto/nft scam because it is the same fucking assholes forcing this bullshit on all of us.

The AI bubble can burst and take a bunch of tech bro idiots with it. Good. Fine. Don't give a fuck.

It's the housing bubble that needs to burst. That's what's hurting real people.

Ah, the sudden realisation of all the VCs that they've tipped money into what is essentially a fancy version of predictive text.

Alexa proudly informed me the other day that Ray Parker Jr is Caucasian. We ain't in any danger of the singularity yet, boys.

Pro tip: when you start to see articles talking a bout how something looks like a bubble, it means it's already popped and anybody who hasn't already cashed in their investment is a bag-holder.

AI is bringing us functional things though.

.Com was about making webtech to sell companies to venture capitalists who would then sell to a company to a bigger company. It was literally about window dressing garbage to make a business proposition.

Of course there's some of that going on in AI, but there's also a hell of a lot of deeper opportunity being made.

What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that's both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn't need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don't need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?

What if secondary education is simply one-on-one tutoring with an AI? How far could we get as a species if this was given to the world freely? What if everyone could advance as far as their interest let them? What if AI translation gets good enough that language is no longer a concern?

AI has a lot of the same hallmarks and a lot of the same investors as crypto and half a dozen other partially or completely failed ideas. But there's an awful lot of new things that can be done that could never be done before. To me that signifies there's real value here.

*dictation fixes

There's a lot of similarity in tone between crypto and AI. Both are talking about their sphere like it will revolutionize absolutely everything and anything, and both are scrambling to find the most obscure use case they can claim as their own.

The biggest difference is that AI has concrete, real-world applications, but I suspect its use, ultimately, will be less universal and transformative as the hype is making it out to be.

Did you mean the crypto/NFT bubble?

I think *LLMs to do everything is the bubble. AI isn't going anywhere, we've just had a little peak of interest thanks to ChatGPT. Midjourney and the like aren't going anywhere, but I'm sure we'll all figure out that LLMs can't really be trusted soon enough.

Same thing happened with crypto and block chain. The whole "move fast and break things" in reality means, "we made up words for something that isn't special to create value out of nothing and cash out before it returns to nothing

If it crashes hard I look forward to all the cheap server hardware that will be in the secondhand market in a few years. One I'm particularly excited about is the 4000 sff, single slot, 75w, 20GB, and ~3070 performance.

Good. It's not even AI. That word is just used because ignorant people eat it up.

Every startup now:

The dotcom bubble was different. Now, everything related to actual AI development is hyped but the dotcom bubble inflated entire indexes, "new market" indexes were setup comprising companies nobody had ever heard of. It was orders of magnitude worse.

An apt analogy. Just like the web underlying technology is incredible and the hype is real, but it leads to endless fluff and stupid naive investments, many of which will lead nowhere. There were certainly be a lot of amazing advances using this tech in the coming decades, but for every one that is useful there will be 20 or 50 or 100 pieces of vaporware that is just trying to grab VC money.

So, who are the up and comers? Not every company in the dotcom era died. Some grew very large and made a lot of people rich.

I read an article once about how when humans hear that someone has died, the first thing they try and do is come up with a reason that whatever befell the deceased would not happen to them. Some of the time there was a logical reason, some of the time there's not, but either way the person would latch onto the reason to believe they were safe. I think we're seeing the same thing here with AI. People are seeing a small percentage of people lose their job, with a technology that 95% of the world or more didn't believe was possible a couple years ago, and they're searching for reasons to believe that they're going to be fine, and then latching onto them.

I worked at a newspaper when the internet was growing. I saw the same thing with the entire organization. So much of the staff believed the internet was a fad. This belief did not work out for them. They were a giant, and they were gone within 10 years. I'm not saying we aren't in an AI bubble now, but, there are now several orders of magnitude more money in the internet now than there was during the Dot Com bubble, just because it's a bubble doesn't mean it wont eventually consume everything.

Where's all the "NoOoOoO this isn't like crypto it's gonna be different" people at now?