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For those around for the .com bust it does feel very similar. In both cases the tech is amazing and isn’t going away, but the business models of many/most compa

by JCM9 1y ago

For those around for the .com bust it does feel very similar. In both cases the tech is amazing and isn’t going away, but the business models of many/most companies “innovating” with the tech is simply unsustainable. A lot of “AI” currently looks like a dry forest waiting for lighting to strike and burn it to the ground. The latest round of PR puff from CEOs saying they’re doing layoffs because of AI (vs their poor performance or prior bad business decisions) is fueling the perception that the hype is a mile wide and a millimeter thick, just waiting for the moment when it all comes crashing down. This is a longstanding predictable pattern in tech. Most of these “AI companies” will go bust or become a shell of their former self and sold off for parts. The tech will be commoditized and become pretty ubiquitous across the board but not a profit center in its own right.

windexh8er 1y ago
In most implementations of generative AI, as of today, the use case is as a feature. People don't buy features, they buy products. If your company is built solely on this hot button you better be sure you either have some IP backing it up, are building and own it (models), or are the best mouse trap for your target market. Because, I'm watching an entire industry segment all show up with slight iterations of the exact same thing and those things are not great. They're unreliable and mostly mediocre.
- nancyminusone 1y ago
  "Thank god <insert every service> added an AI chatbot to their site! It makes it much faster and easier to use!" - things no living soul has ever said
  - dinfinity 1y ago
    Actually, compared to the non-AI chatbots they are incredibly good.
    - Yizahi 1y ago
      Considering that the only purpose of chat-bots is to bullshit customers and filter out as much as they can before redirecting to the human support, then yeah - LLM chat-bots are good. Just not good for the the customers. I recently had to call my telco and they had a temerity to demand that I have(!) to speak to the fucking bot. And then bot declared it doesn't understand me and hang up the call. I have no idea if that bot was neural network powered, but the only improvements LLM bot may have achieved is to keep me in the hamster loop longer and delay transfering to the support even more.
    - Sharlin 1y ago
      Compared to being tortured to death, merely being waterboarded is incredibly good.
- sheepscreek 1y ago
  Yes. But those feature companies are not IPO’d and listed on the exchanges. That is the key distinction with the markets this time. Most public companies in this space are actually growing their bottom lines. I’m not talking about just Nvidia here. You can see this effect in the entire food-chain. Everyone is benefitting.
  - rented_mule 1y ago
    I have inside knowledge (that I'm not trading on) of multiple publicly listed companies with "every feature is AI powered or it doesn't ship" policies that are being applied to their entire product or major parts of their product. Those policies come from execs who are primarily informed by science fiction and FOMO, not by an understanding of the available tools. AI is great when it's the right tool. But the rate at which features are shipping at these companies is plummeting because so many features would be cheaper, easier, and better without AI. It feels like self-gaslighting on a scale that I haven't seen since the dot com days. And I see engineers and their managers struggling to maintain their sanity as they try to improve their products within the constraints of these policies.
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    So… where is the money coming from? Where is the value added?
Workaccount2 1y ago
CEOs are doing layoffs because Elon dumped 80% of Twitter staff and it didn't collapse. Those layoffs were a make or break moment for tech.
- dreamcompiler 1y ago
  It didn't collapse in the sense of ceasing to exist. It did collapse as a place where decent human beings cared to gather, and it lost over 75% of its market value.
  - ern_ave 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - brookst 1y ago
      Private companies have valuations. Your can pedant on whether it’s appropriate to use the word “market”, but the fact is pretty well known. Musk paid $44B and it is generally considered to be worth less than $10B today[1], though his open participation in political corruption has resulted in valuations all over the map, including $44B[2]. It’s kind of Schroedinger’s valuation; if he and Trump are having a spat it’s worth less because there’s a risk Trump orders it shut down or seized or whatever, if he and Trump make up the company is a a part of the ruling party’s government apparatus. But as far as actual product value, outside of a clubhouse for red hats, it’s pretty close to zero. They have to literally sue companies to force them to advertise[3], which would be laughable if creeping fascism wasn’t so bad that it’s actually a successful strategy. Any attempt to claim free speech high ground while suing companies for declining to advertise is incredibly disingenuous. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258129/musks-44-billion-twitter-now-valued-at-just-9-4b-as-x https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258129/musks-44-billion... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elon-musk-x-rebounds-purchase-price https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo... 3. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsuit-advertisers-boycott-new https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...
weinzierl 1y ago
"For those around for the .com bust it does feel very similar." I was around for the .com boom and it feels very different. I experienced the boom as exuberant without limits, the current situation is much more nuanced.
- apercu 1y ago
  I was around as well and while tech financing is more sophisticated and mainstream, it feels like a similar cliff in regards to valuations - what are some of the nuances you see that separate these too time periods?
  - noosphr 1y ago
    My grandmother wasn't using altavista in 2000. She is using chatgpt in 2025.
- Applejinx 1y ago
  Maybe you were in the handbasket for the .com boom, and more of an outsider this time around?
  - weinzierl 1y ago
    I am certainly much older now;-) So my question to the youngsters in the handbasket: Do you feel pure and completely untroubled for being part of something big that is certainly not going away anymore? Do you look into your future and see bright skies without the slightest hint of a cloud?
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I did as well, and then we had a few layoff rounds after having "positive" results when the VC money dried out, and those that stayed like myself, had several months of delayed salaries.
- arevno 1y ago
  I was also around, and I concur. NVDA has a P/E of 55, which is definitely elevated, but nowhere near the 230+ that CSCO had at that time. TO say nothing of SUNW. The big AI labs are definitely losing money, but they're doing it on the back of tens of (rapidly growing) billions of dollars in ARR, versus the dot com e-commerce and portal flameouts who would go public on (maybe) a million in revenue, at best. We also have large AI teams at FAANG who are being funded directly by the fat margins of these companies, whose funding is not dependent on the whims of VC, PE or public markets. These times are not really comparable.
digitcatphd 1y ago
If I’m not mistaken they are using high valuations of top companies to conclude AI is overhyped? Sorry, but weren’t these valuations escalated because of low interest rates and quantitative easing? Perhaps combined with increased concentration in Top 10 by investors navigating uncertainty? Typical BS coming from a mega fund only supported by management fees. not saying AI isn’t hyped but this is laughable.
- thunky 1y ago
  Exactly. Their chart even shows that these companies were more overvalued in 2020, before the AI "bubble" even started.
jstummbillig 1y ago
Disagree, because the very few very big AI players are (in contrast to the 90s) very solid. Yes, there is a breadth of absolute bullshit built on top of current AI, but if it were only ChatGPT-alikes and LLMs for coding from here on out, that in itself is enough real value, that requires very little imagination, a lot of implementation and there's more demand than can easily be satisfied right now for both.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  I’m an AI enthusiast, and it’s not clear to me that selling inference to a prop model is a winning business model, which is what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing. The open models are good enough today for many things, and are likely to only get better. Feels like inference is a commodity, and not clear how much money there is in it. I would love to know how much of the inference I pay for is being paid for by VC cash: I suspect a lot of it.
  - xnx 1y ago
    > I would love to know how much of the inference I pay for is being paid for by VC cash: I suspect a lot of it. Definitely a lot of VC subsidies for OpenAI and Anthropic, none for Google.
    - petesergeant 1y ago
      Sure, that doesn’t mean we’re not getting subsidised tokens from Google though
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    To be fair though though, the "open" models are fairly sketchy as well, from a business standpoint, because somebody is paying for a lot of GPUs and expensive talent. It's probably the least obviously sustainable open source product of all time, and it's not at all clear to me why that would change going forward. Right now there seem to be roughly two paths, when it comes to frontier-level LLMs: Meta just not giving a fuck, spending instagram money and pretending it's a business, and whatever Deepseek is doing that might make it both good and also super cost-effective (and there it's even less clear, how much of it is real and what the actual costs are).
xnx 1y ago
It's interesting how both of those period have their tech stock flagship. dotcom: Cisco ai: Nvidia
- chii 1y ago
  on the other hand, it's easier to "copy" telecommunications equipment than state of the art chips. Not saying there won't be competitions to nvidia's dominance, but so far, not a pip from anyone (realistically that is).
  - xnx 1y ago
    > Not saying there won't be competitions to nvidia's dominance, but so far, not a pip from anyone (realistically that is). It's so surprising. So much money at stake and there is zero competition for hardware purchase. Google's Tensor chips are excellent, but can only be rented.
- esafak 1y ago
  I think Cisco imploded because people moved to the cloud. But even cloud providers are stuck with nvidia; they have a software moat. Curiously, nvidia's P/E ratio is lower than it was two years ago!
  - high_na_euv 1y ago
    Cloud is 2010+ thing
ParanoidShroom 1y ago
Do you think FANG companies inflate AI on purpose in order to create a scenario for a bust to happen, they can survive it given their vast warchest of cash
Spooky23 1y ago
It’s one of those scenarios where the high level value prop is obvious and compelling, just like the dotcom bubble. 80% of the hype is about 20% of the bullshit. And the bullshit attracts 80% of the dollars. The current cohort of leaders are Jedi at separating sovereign wealth and markets from their treasure.
chrisweekly 1y ago
The .com bubble casualties were companies acting like "the internet means we don't need a viable business model". I see echoes of that in today's "AI means we don't need (m)any human experts anymore, now everyone is a 10x engineer". Unless it's leveraged by skilled experts, AI-generated code is the payday loan / high-interest credit card of tech debt.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  "The AI means we don't need a viable business model" seems to describe the current reality quite closely.
pfisherman 1y ago
I was around for the dot com boom and bust, and this does not feel similar. The issue with the internet was that much of the value came from network effects that were not there in the late 90s and early aughts when personal computing was desktop boxes with 56k dial up connections. Very much, “if you build it, they will come.” It was the mass rollout of cable modems and then smart phones that changed the math. There is no cart before the horse here. AI is coming for you, not the other way around. The pessimistic takes are underestimating the impact by at least a couple orders of magnitude. Think smart phones as a lower bound. I have no idea what capacity people here work with AI, but given my view and experience the pessimistic takes I commonly see on here do not seem realistic.
- ZephyrBlu 1y ago
  Smartphones as a lower bound is crazy
  - pfisherman 1y ago
    Karpathy’s talk about computing 3.0 was spot on. Look at what is going on with pydantic and langchain. “LLM programming” is about to be a thing.
    - Yizahi 1y ago
      Wait, there was computing 2.0? Damn, I missed whole revolution again...
- danaris 1y ago
  I would say exactly the opposite, frankly. With the internet, there was a clear value proposition for the vast majority of use cases. Even if some of the specific businesses were poorly-conceived or overly optimistic, the underlying technology was very obviously a) growing organically, b) going to be something everyone used & wanted, and c) a commodity. All three of those parts are vital for a massive boom like that. Generative AI is growing some, yes, but a lot of the growth is being pushed by the companies creating or otherwise massively invested in gen-AI. And yes, many people try out ChatGPT's webapp, but that's mostly a gimmick—and frankly, many of the cases where people are attempting to use it for more are fairly awful cautionary tales (eg, the people trying to use it as a therapist, and instead getting a cheerleader that confirms their worst impulses). Gen-AI may be useful to some people, but it's not going to be a central feature of most people's lives—at least not in the forms it exists in today, or what can be clearly extrapolated from them. Yes, it can help some with coding—with mixed results—but not everyone's a programmer. Not everyone's even an office worker. The internet has obvious useful applications for a plumber or a lawyer; if I hired one of those and they said they were using generative AI to help them in their work, I'd fire them instantly. There are already a bunch of (both amusing and harrowing) stories of lawyers getting reamed out in court for using gen-AI to help them write legal filings. OpenAI may or may not have a robust moat—I've seen people arguing both ways; personally I suspect lean slightly toward the "not" side—but generative AI as a whole is not something that's an interchangeable commodity the way internet access, or even hosting, is. First of all, in order to use the models that are touted as being advanced enough to actually look like more than spicy autocorrect, you need a serious GPU farm. Second of all, AFAIK, those models are being kept private by the big players like Google and OpenAI. That means that if you build your business on generative AI, unless you're able to both fork out for a massive hardware investment and do your own training to match what the big boys are already doing, you're going to be 100% dependent on another specific for-profit company for your entire business model. That's not a sound business decision, especially during this time where both the technology and the legal aspect of generative AI are still so much in flux. Generative AI may be here to stay, but it's not going to take over the world the way the internet did.
npalli 1y ago
>For those around for the .com bust it does feel very similar. Not it doesn't. I was around and we didn't have an entire group of GenX gang warning about the .com crash everywhere, everytime. Compared to nonsense metrics like eyeballs, this time we have real revenue and the biggest companies are tech. It might end in some crash but nothing like the .com one.
4b11b4 1y ago
I keep coming back to this thought that the ability for computation itself sets the stage for speculation.. or rather, widely available and cheap computation.
zcw100 1y ago
Some of the most valuable companies in the world right now are remnants of the dot com crash, Facebook (Meta), Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. By this logic the "AI companies" will go bust and coalesce into a few winners who will go on to become the worlds first multi trillion dollar companies and dominate the economic landscape for the next couple of decades.

by JCM9 1y ago

windexh8er 1y ago

In most implementations of generative AI, as of today, the use case is as a feature. People don't buy features, they buy products. If your company is built solely on this hot button you better be sure you either have some IP backing it up, are building and own it (models), or are the best mouse trap for your target market. Because, I'm watching an entire industry segment all show up with slight iterations of the exact same thing and those things are not great. They're unreliable and mostly mediocre.

nancyminusone 1y ago
"Thank god <insert every service> added an AI chatbot to their site! It makes it much faster and easier to use!" - things no living soul has ever said
- dinfinity 1y ago
  Actually, compared to the non-AI chatbots they are incredibly good.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    Considering that the only purpose of chat-bots is to bullshit customers and filter out as much as they can before redirecting to the human support, then yeah - LLM chat-bots are good. Just not good for the the customers. I recently had to call my telco and they had a temerity to demand that I have(!) to speak to the fucking bot. And then bot declared it doesn't understand me and hang up the call. I have no idea if that bot was neural network powered, but the only improvements LLM bot may have achieved is to keep me in the hamster loop longer and delay transfering to the support even more.
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    Compared to being tortured to death, merely being waterboarded is incredibly good.
sheepscreek 1y ago
Yes. But those feature companies are not IPO’d and listed on the exchanges. That is the key distinction with the markets this time. Most public companies in this space are actually growing their bottom lines. I’m not talking about just Nvidia here. You can see this effect in the entire food-chain. Everyone is benefitting.
- rented_mule 1y ago
  I have inside knowledge (that I'm not trading on) of multiple publicly listed companies with "every feature is AI powered or it doesn't ship" policies that are being applied to their entire product or major parts of their product. Those policies come from execs who are primarily informed by science fiction and FOMO, not by an understanding of the available tools. AI is great when it's the right tool. But the rate at which features are shipping at these companies is plummeting because so many features would be cheaper, easier, and better without AI. It feels like self-gaslighting on a scale that I haven't seen since the dot com days. And I see engineers and their managers struggling to maintain their sanity as they try to improve their products within the constraints of these policies.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  So… where is the money coming from? Where is the value added?

Workaccount2 1y ago

CEOs are doing layoffs because Elon dumped 80% of Twitter staff and it didn't collapse. Those layoffs were a make or break moment for tech.

dreamcompiler 1y ago
It didn't collapse in the sense of ceasing to exist. It did collapse as a place where decent human beings cared to gather, and it lost over 75% of its market value.
- ern_ave 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - brookst 1y ago
    Private companies have valuations. Your can pedant on whether it’s appropriate to use the word “market”, but the fact is pretty well known. Musk paid $44B and it is generally considered to be worth less than $10B today[1], though his open participation in political corruption has resulted in valuations all over the map, including $44B[2]. It’s kind of Schroedinger’s valuation; if he and Trump are having a spat it’s worth less because there’s a risk Trump orders it shut down or seized or whatever, if he and Trump make up the company is a a part of the ruling party’s government apparatus. But as far as actual product value, outside of a clubhouse for red hats, it’s pretty close to zero. They have to literally sue companies to force them to advertise[3], which would be laughable if creeping fascism wasn’t so bad that it’s actually a successful strategy. Any attempt to claim free speech high ground while suing companies for declining to advertise is incredibly disingenuous. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258129/musks-44-billion-twitter-now-valued-at-just-9-4b-as-x https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258129/musks-44-billion... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elon-musk-x-rebounds-purchase-price https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo... 3. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsuit-advertisers-boycott-new https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...

weinzierl 1y ago

"For those around for the .com bust it does feel very similar." I was around for the .com boom and it feels very different. I experienced the boom as exuberant without limits, the current situation is much more nuanced.

apercu 1y ago
I was around as well and while tech financing is more sophisticated and mainstream, it feels like a similar cliff in regards to valuations - what are some of the nuances you see that separate these too time periods?
- noosphr 1y ago
  My grandmother wasn't using altavista in 2000. She is using chatgpt in 2025.
Applejinx 1y ago
Maybe you were in the handbasket for the .com boom, and more of an outsider this time around?
- weinzierl 1y ago
  I am certainly much older now;-) So my question to the youngsters in the handbasket: Do you feel pure and completely untroubled for being part of something big that is certainly not going away anymore? Do you look into your future and see bright skies without the slightest hint of a cloud?
pjmlp 1y ago
I did as well, and then we had a few layoff rounds after having "positive" results when the VC money dried out, and those that stayed like myself, had several months of delayed salaries.
arevno 1y ago
I was also around, and I concur. NVDA has a P/E of 55, which is definitely elevated, but nowhere near the 230+ that CSCO had at that time. TO say nothing of SUNW. The big AI labs are definitely losing money, but they're doing it on the back of tens of (rapidly growing) billions of dollars in ARR, versus the dot com e-commerce and portal flameouts who would go public on (maybe) a million in revenue, at best. We also have large AI teams at FAANG who are being funded directly by the fat margins of these companies, whose funding is not dependent on the whims of VC, PE or public markets. These times are not really comparable.

digitcatphd 1y ago

If I’m not mistaken they are using high valuations of top companies to conclude AI is overhyped? Sorry, but weren’t these valuations escalated because of low interest rates and quantitative easing? Perhaps combined with increased concentration in Top 10 by investors navigating uncertainty? Typical BS coming from a mega fund only supported by management fees. not saying AI isn’t hyped but this is laughable.

thunky 1y ago
Exactly. Their chart even shows that these companies were more overvalued in 2020, before the AI "bubble" even started.

jstummbillig 1y ago

Disagree, because the very few very big AI players are (in contrast to the 90s) very solid. Yes, there is a breadth of absolute bullshit built on top of current AI, but if it were only ChatGPT-alikes and LLMs for coding from here on out, that in itself is enough real value, that requires very little imagination, a lot of implementation and there's more demand than can easily be satisfied right now for both.

petesergeant 1y ago
I’m an AI enthusiast, and it’s not clear to me that selling inference to a prop model is a winning business model, which is what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing. The open models are good enough today for many things, and are likely to only get better. Feels like inference is a commodity, and not clear how much money there is in it. I would love to know how much of the inference I pay for is being paid for by VC cash: I suspect a lot of it.
- xnx 1y ago
  > I would love to know how much of the inference I pay for is being paid for by VC cash: I suspect a lot of it. Definitely a lot of VC subsidies for OpenAI and Anthropic, none for Google.
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    Sure, that doesn’t mean we’re not getting subsidised tokens from Google though
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  To be fair though though, the "open" models are fairly sketchy as well, from a business standpoint, because somebody is paying for a lot of GPUs and expensive talent. It's probably the least obviously sustainable open source product of all time, and it's not at all clear to me why that would change going forward. Right now there seem to be roughly two paths, when it comes to frontier-level LLMs: Meta just not giving a fuck, spending instagram money and pretending it's a business, and whatever Deepseek is doing that might make it both good and also super cost-effective (and there it's even less clear, how much of it is real and what the actual costs are).

xnx 1y ago

It's interesting how both of those period have their tech stock flagship. dotcom: Cisco ai: Nvidia

chii 1y ago
on the other hand, it's easier to "copy" telecommunications equipment than state of the art chips. Not saying there won't be competitions to nvidia's dominance, but so far, not a pip from anyone (realistically that is).
- xnx 1y ago
  > Not saying there won't be competitions to nvidia's dominance, but so far, not a pip from anyone (realistically that is). It's so surprising. So much money at stake and there is zero competition for hardware purchase. Google's Tensor chips are excellent, but can only be rented.
esafak 1y ago
I think Cisco imploded because people moved to the cloud. But even cloud providers are stuck with nvidia; they have a software moat. Curiously, nvidia's P/E ratio is lower than it was two years ago!
- high_na_euv 1y ago
  Cloud is 2010+ thing

ParanoidShroom 1y ago

Do you think FANG companies inflate AI on purpose in order to create a scenario for a bust to happen, they can survive it given their vast warchest of cash

Spooky23 1y ago

It’s one of those scenarios where the high level value prop is obvious and compelling, just like the dotcom bubble. 80% of the hype is about 20% of the bullshit. And the bullshit attracts 80% of the dollars. The current cohort of leaders are Jedi at separating sovereign wealth and markets from their treasure.

chrisweekly 1y ago

The .com bubble casualties were companies acting like "the internet means we don't need a viable business model". I see echoes of that in today's "AI means we don't need (m)any human experts anymore, now everyone is a 10x engineer". Unless it's leveraged by skilled experts, AI-generated code is the payday loan / high-interest credit card of tech debt.

Sharlin 1y ago
"The AI means we don't need a viable business model" seems to describe the current reality quite closely.

pfisherman 1y ago

I was around for the dot com boom and bust, and this does not feel similar. The issue with the internet was that much of the value came from network effects that were not there in the late 90s and early aughts when personal computing was desktop boxes with 56k dial up connections. Very much, “if you build it, they will come.” It was the mass rollout of cable modems and then smart phones that changed the math. There is no cart before the horse here. AI is coming for you, not the other way around. The pessimistic takes are underestimating the impact by at least a couple orders of magnitude. Think smart phones as a lower bound. I have no idea what capacity people here work with AI, but given my view and experience the pessimistic takes I commonly see on here do not seem realistic.

ZephyrBlu 1y ago
Smartphones as a lower bound is crazy
- pfisherman 1y ago
  Karpathy’s talk about computing 3.0 was spot on. Look at what is going on with pydantic and langchain. “LLM programming” is about to be a thing.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    Wait, there was computing 2.0? Damn, I missed whole revolution again...
danaris 1y ago
I would say exactly the opposite, frankly. With the internet, there was a clear value proposition for the vast majority of use cases. Even if some of the specific businesses were poorly-conceived or overly optimistic, the underlying technology was very obviously a) growing organically, b) going to be something everyone used & wanted, and c) a commodity. All three of those parts are vital for a massive boom like that. Generative AI is growing some, yes, but a lot of the growth is being pushed by the companies creating or otherwise massively invested in gen-AI. And yes, many people try out ChatGPT's webapp, but that's mostly a gimmick—and frankly, many of the cases where people are attempting to use it for more are fairly awful cautionary tales (eg, the people trying to use it as a therapist, and instead getting a cheerleader that confirms their worst impulses). Gen-AI may be useful to some people, but it's not going to be a central feature of most people's lives—at least not in the forms it exists in today, or what can be clearly extrapolated from them. Yes, it can help some with coding—with mixed results—but not everyone's a programmer. Not everyone's even an office worker. The internet has obvious useful applications for a plumber or a lawyer; if I hired one of those and they said they were using generative AI to help them in their work, I'd fire them instantly. There are already a bunch of (both amusing and harrowing) stories of lawyers getting reamed out in court for using gen-AI to help them write legal filings. OpenAI may or may not have a robust moat—I've seen people arguing both ways; personally I suspect lean slightly toward the "not" side—but generative AI as a whole is not something that's an interchangeable commodity the way internet access, or even hosting, is. First of all, in order to use the models that are touted as being advanced enough to actually look like more than spicy autocorrect, you need a serious GPU farm. Second of all, AFAIK, those models are being kept private by the big players like Google and OpenAI. That means that if you build your business on generative AI, unless you're able to both fork out for a massive hardware investment and do your own training to match what the big boys are already doing, you're going to be 100% dependent on another specific for-profit company for your entire business model. That's not a sound business decision, especially during this time where both the technology and the legal aspect of generative AI are still so much in flux. Generative AI may be here to stay, but it's not going to take over the world the way the internet did.

npalli 1y ago

>For those around for the .com bust it does feel very similar. Not it doesn't. I was around and we didn't have an entire group of GenX gang warning about the .com crash everywhere, everytime. Compared to nonsense metrics like eyeballs, this time we have real revenue and the biggest companies are tech. It might end in some crash but nothing like the .com one.

4b11b4 1y ago

I keep coming back to this thought that the ability for computation itself sets the stage for speculation.. or rather, widely available and cheap computation.

zcw100 1y ago

Some of the most valuable companies in the world right now are remnants of the dot com crash, Facebook (Meta), Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. By this logic the "AI companies" will go bust and coalesce into a few winners who will go on to become the worlds first multi trillion dollar companies and dominate the economic landscape for the next couple of decades.