6 ms·

People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much

75 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

dhruv3006 9mo ago
I believe here the utility will perhaps come a lot later than the hype - The advances in multimodal settings have been great but reasoning not so much.
- wmf 9mo ago
  The same happened with the Internet/Web; the hype came true 10-15 years later than predicted.
  - nix-zarathustra 9mo ago
    I think the iPhone and the rise of the smartphones are what made the web popular.
  - etyhhgfff 9mo ago
    Hence AI is a good long term investment.
cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
Several factors are in confluence to make this different from previous tech booms. First, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their business like OpenAI and the companies bolting AI onto everything have been forceful and abrasive with their pushing. Normally technology has more time to seep in and organically normalize with people for a while before the pushing begins, but this time the gas pedal was floored shortly after OpenAI had shipped a usable MVP. Second, the value is far from clear for a lot of people, partly from lazy bolt-on integrations, but also just because people don't actually want/need it for many of the tasks it's being sold for and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks. Third, as noted in the article, the surrounding environment isn't right. Many of your average people feel like the dog in the "this is fine" meme[0] and aren't really in the mood to be sold something that could ultimately further concentrate wealth and make their lives harder. It's like parking an ice cream truck in front of a burning office building and wondering why nobody running out is buying a cone. I say this as someone who finds AI useful for some things. All of this is pretty plainly visible. Either the big names in the industry are horrifically out of touch or they're pretending to not see it in hopes of faking it until they make it, I'm not sure which. [0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-anniversary-gunshow-web-comic https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-...
- jorts 9mo ago
  Thanks for articulating exactly how I feel.
- latchkey 9mo ago
  The way I look at it, from a quality perspective, this is the worst it will be. I certainly won't ever go back to coding without AI. If you extrapolate from there and the general need for tokens compounding with the demand, it is only upwards, whether you agree with it or not. We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
  - davidw 9mo ago
    Who are the actors working to "improve it" though? You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. You have elected officials who might mean well but won't be able to react quickly and don't understand the nuance of a lot of tech things. You have ordinary people trying to figure out how to make use of this stuff without losing their own jobs. But they don't have a ton of influence.
    - latchkey 9mo ago
      I do agree with you, there is too much grift, but that's to be expected. I'm one of the actors and I sided with AMD early on.
    - jopsen 9mo ago
      > You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. For big tech to start relying on vibe coding without code reviews etc is a huge risk. Big tech has so much red tabe preventing people from getting stuff done. Security reviews needed, etc. This inertia will hold back even a super intelligence from getting stuff done. Some nerds in a garage trying to apply vibe coding to a problem won't have this red tape. Red tape is necessary in big orgs because you can't have 100k people running around shipping new half broken, semi supported software with security holes. So you established release processes, approvals, code reviews, etc. All I'm saying is: big tech is also at risk of being disrupted by AI.
zaptheimpaler 9mo ago
Look at the massive and growing wealth & power inequality today, an age of aristocrats, then look at these AI fucks bragging about how AI will eliminate all white collar jobs. Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. You can already see LLMs are making programmers much more productive but it's actually causing lower salaries and job losses - so who's capturing the value of that increased productivity? Not workers.. Meanwhile US government is overtly corrupt, criminal morons, they certainly don't care or have any sort of plan to distribute the gains from this technology evenly. Scott Bessent is saying with a smirk on his face that the tariff refunds will not go to consumers [1]. These people actively hate you and laugh at your powerlessness. Hating AI is the right response because the current political system ensures 10% of the benefits will accrue to most people and 90% to the elites, the power imbalance gets even more extreme and it will lead to techno-feudalism (as it has in the past). [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-tariff-refund-ultimate-223942102.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-tariff-refund-ul...
- jopsen 9mo ago
  > Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. Right now sota models requires a lot of iron. It's possible that this will always be the case. But its is not a certainty! We've seen software improvements shave orders of magnitude of compute requirements before. This could totally happen here. Iron could easily become stranded assets. But that said, models have already become commodities, well somewhat. Is the value in running inference or applying it? Today, we dare not use vibe coded libraries for mission critical things, HTML sanitization as an example. But one day, who is to say the industry won't be disrupted by a vibe coded database with ~100% Oracle compatibility? Made by a nerd in a garage. Established code bases is a moat today. It might not be in 5 years. Big tech won't be well positioned to take advantage, because trusting vibe coded crap is risky. My point is mostly: the future is uncertain. Big established software companies might see their moat challenged by nerd in a garage running LLMs in the cloud. What about the Adobe suite? AutoCAD? Office, etc. (To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat).
  - zdragnar 9mo ago
ars 9mo ago
Virtually everyone I know is using AI, from helping with creative writing, to making video series, to programming, to homework help, to writing speeches. And (almost) everyone said how terrible it is - and yet they all use it. Give it a bit of time for people to understand the limitations, and where it shines and it will become an indispensable part of life.
- trollbridge 9mo ago
  An excellent analogy would be the shift to gasoline-powered vehicles: yeah, the oil wells were dirty and everyone knew it, smog became a thing, sitting in traffic became a serious problem, and fatal vehicle crashes start happening, yet everyone kept using them.
nick49488171 9mo ago
Probably because at that time, normal people weren't rolling off the back of a massive inflationary period where they can no longer afford to look forward to having enough money to buy/use/participate in whatever cool new technology arises.
prydt 9mo ago
I think this is because the prevailing narrative around this bubble is: A) AI gets very good and you'll lose your job. OR B) This whole thing is a bubble and because of how many eggs have been put in this single basket, when the bubble pops, you'll lose your job as we head into a recession. It really does just seem like pure downside to the average person, not even to mention all the slop everywhere, deepfake revenge porn being democratized, and generally just having bad gpt wrappers shoved down your throat. Edit: There really isn't a sense that AI is going to help the common person. Inequality is rising and AI seems to only fuel this fire. I hope that we as a society can actually distributed the fruits of AI to everyone... but I'm not holding my breath.
- b112 9mo ago
  With the way things are going, we'll end up with identify verification rolled out everywhere. I don't mean to just read content, but instead to post online. Anything. An image, upload a video, write comments in text. This doesn't mean doxxing. I can have my identity verified with, for example, Youtube... but still have a handle/nick presented to end users. My real name need not be exposed. However without something like this, there's no real hope at curtailing what's coming down the pipe. And I say this without liking it, wanting it, I've fought for an anonymous internet my entire life. But I think that's just... over now. Either the internet will die, no forum, comment section, video site will live, or we end up with identity verification and gated posting online. I just don't see how else to deal with this. I'm not even saying you can't use AI to write comments, although I think that's a dumb way to interact with other people. It's simply that within a year, there won't be a single way to tell a single post from AI or human. A single video. Anything. And preventing fake accounts, sock puppeting, is the only way to even hope to stem that tide. And further, we'll need to be able to sue for defamation. Fraudulent activity. Foreign interference. The change required because of all of this, is literally repugnant. Yet... it's now here in front of us.
- davidw 9mo ago
  Yeah exactly: here's Sam Altman saying "ok yeah these things use energy, but so do the humans" https://bsky.app/profile/x2y.tech/post/3mfeulapemk2d https://bsky.app/profile/x2y.tech/post/3mfeulapemk2d
Animats 9mo ago
We've had a few dud booms in the last fifteen years. 3D TV. VR. Metaverse. Electric cars in the US. They all worked technically, but just didn't catch on.
- aquova 9mo ago
  One of these is not like the others
  - OneMorePerson 9mo ago
    I assume you mean electric cars since they were more of a "real product", but I have to say I think they were pushed too early and too fast. I am super curious how many early Nissan Leafs quickly ended up in the landfill due to the attempt to use premature battery tech. Toyota is kinda on the wrong side of this one now (lagging) but they had an idea that larger and larger hybrids should have been the way (like going from regular hybrid to PHEV to eventually fully electric). Subsidizing less (like $3k not $7k) on a whole bunch more hybrids would have done a lot more to influence real adoption and rack up fuel efficient miles than purely electric cars. A lot of people don't get hybrids cause they are like ~$8k ish more than basic gas and the math doesn't quite work out for people for a long time, tilting that math would have made a big difference. Especially for people who live in the city but sometimes drive long distance and only have one car, a PHEV is so ideal compared to having to have two cars or go rent or something.
- Animats 9mo ago
  NFTs/"Web 3.0"
umairnadeem123 9mo ago
[dead]
int32_64 9mo ago
Has there ever been another economic boom where the industry it's primarily occurring in is losing jobs? https://x.com/greg_ip/status/1991149493807353913 https://x.com/greg_ip/status/1991149493807353913
- Animats 9mo ago
  Wheat farming around the time of the McCormick reaper.[1] Farm employment dropped by half between 1900 and 1930. Production up. Wheat cheaper. Coal mining from 1950-1970. Production up. Coal cheaper. Employment way down. Classic book, "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" (1963) on how Appalachia became really poor. [1] https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/statistics-trends-american-farming https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
- abetusk 9mo ago
  I'm sorry I don't have better statistics but after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I think it took roughly 15 years for the stock market to bounce back. Though I could be wrong, I think unemployment was also high, including in the tech sector.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
abetusk 9mo ago
People did not. How quickly everyone forgets. There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale. Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2] Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3] A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20030226083257/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030226083257/http://www.redher... [3] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
- epc 9mo ago
  Just seconding this…people have a starry eyed view of the dotcom boom but there was a lot of waste and outright fraud. A lot of theoretical improvements to business processes were lost because…the businesses didn't want to change their processes.
- wmf 9mo ago
  People sneered at dotcoms but they weren't afraid of them. People are afraid of AI. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. The claims of "adopt Internet/AI or be left behind" were similar but for some reason the reactions are different.
  - alephnerd 9mo ago
    Right before the Millenium, mainstream media like the NYT was blaming the internet and "violent games like Tribe, Doom and Quake" for the Columbine Massacre [0] and other similar mass shootings in the 90s. A lot of those reporters are now leadership at major newspapers like the NYT (eg. Applebome who linked Doom with Columbine and is now the Deputy National Editor for the NYT). A large amount of reporters (both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists) discussing technology today are literally boomers who have been fighting this battle against each other since the 1990s and taking all the airtime away from alternative younger voices on both sides. [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-alma-maters-two-words-behind-the-massacre.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...
grebc 9mo ago
Crypto bro’s needed something to do with their GPU’s after the crypto craze died. Wonder what’s next when the AI craze dies.
- pousada 9mo ago
  Quantum computing?
alephnerd 9mo ago
Holy moley rose tinted glasses. There was plenty of internet and computer pessimism at the time as well, with the Internet expected to lead to more coal being used [0], being viewed as a conduit for scams [1], the risk of moral panics [2], and being blamed for causing the Columbine Massacre [3]. Ironically, this same author at the NYT (David Streitfeld) was a reporting negatively about the Dot-Com boom in the 1990s at the WashPo [4][5] as well as during the subsequent bust [6] and has been very public about his oride of being "low-tech" [7]. There is nothing wrong with that stance, but the entire premise of the article that techno-optimism was the norm which turned into techno-pessimism is clearly written in bad faith, when a large portion of the intelligentsia was already techno-pessimistic in the 1990s and 2000s, just like they were in the 80s, 70s, and earlier. [0] - https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=2863b8542580 https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=286... [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/01/technology/internet-s-chain-of-foolery.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/01/technology/internet-s-cha... [2] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322796.322800 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322796.322800 [3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-alma-maters-two-words-behind-the-massacre.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a... [4] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/06/glee-gloom-in-silicon-valley/f4548e8e-def8-49e4-8e7c-9de7b6f5d41b/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/06/g... [5] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/05/18/online-booksellers-jockey-with-price-cuts/2f95b9e6-3c8f-4428-9843-d30b2ace39b5/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/05/18/o... [6] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-21-mn-24886-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-21-mn-24886... [7] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/personaltech/tech-reporter-does-not-use-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/personaltech/t...
notatoad 9mo ago
>Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, recently said artificial intelligence was spreading more slowly than he had expected. his company has grown from ~10 million to ~900 million users in three years. if that's not quickly enough, the problem is unreasonable expectations. people like AI! they just don't want it to be shoved into absolutely every aspect of their lives at all times.
- EnPissant 9mo ago
  There is a big difference between 900 million people talking to ChatGPT and AI diffusing into other parts of society. I think the latter is lagging.
piyushpr134 9mo ago
I feel this is because dot com was increased human connect and made the world closer. This boom is only about reducing cost for companies by reducing people. There is hardly any talk about improving user experience. This is very negative outcome imo. Businesses can't be only to serve their shareholders. People are under estimating the effect this would have on the economy and finally on these businesses themselves as economy is all about rotation of money. Once businesses stop paying salary and concentrate everything to their owners, economy grinds to halt. AI boom is clearly anti human. People are fearing jobs, livelihoods, and their homes. I don't think anyone in right mind would have accepted this had this not been marketed the way it has been
apollo_mojave 9mo ago
I was too young to understand the dot com boom when it happened, being in grade school at the time. But I do remember when smartphones became not just a luxury, but a necessity, and how amazing the iPod seemed when it first came out. It was like something out of Star Trek. Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters. So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!). I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?" Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook! And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there. Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.
- jcgrillo 9mo ago
  You've hit spot on something important here, that AI arrived at a time when the shine has worn off the tech. Google got evil, Twitter was eviscerated by a clown who likes to make nazi salutes, Facebook plumbed depths of enshittification previously unknown to science. The metaverse turned out to be hot air. Bitcoins did not in fact change anything, let alone everything. And now we have the same spoiled brats who did all that stuff and told all those lies trying to say that chatbots are going to "real soon now" be somehow the most valuable technology ever made. All that, and the constant deluge of lies--coding agents will make you 10x as effective in six months, AGI is pretty much here, etc. When Jobs did his demos generally (maybe every time?) he had something to show. It wasn't some empty promise, it was real. I want that kind of tech, not the imaginary stuff.
baubino 9mo ago
Fewer people even knew about the dot com boom (or understood what it was) because the 24-hour news cycle didn’t exist yet and the means through which news and information would travel widely and rapidly (the subject of the boom itself) had not yet boomed. In contrast, news about AI seems almost inescapable. The discourse on the dot com boom was limited almost exclusively to people in tech and finance (who were poised to benefit the most) whereas the AI discussion is much broader and involves the general public, which is now rightly debating whether the upside is worth the cost.
cmxch 9mo ago
The dot-com boom brought more people into the fold, such that the prosperity included regular people. This one seems to bypass it by design, especially with the outsized negative impact on consumer products - whether with forced CoPilot buttons or irrationally expensive computer parts.
13pixels 9mo ago
One underappreciated angle: the dot-com boom created new distribution channels that were broadly accessible. Anyone could put up a website and reach people. The AI boom is quietly reshuffling distribution in ways most companies haven't noticed yet. We've been tracking how LLMs recommend products across categories. The correlation between Google ranking and LLM recommendation is near zero (0.08 across ~150 brands we tested). So a company that spent a decade building SEO authority can be completely invisible to ChatGPT, while a smaller competitor with better documentation and more mentions on Reddit or GitHub gets recommended instead. That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery -- and unlike the dot-com era, the companies being disrupted mostly don't even know it's happening yet.
- an_guy 9mo ago
  > That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery Until chatgpt integrate ads into their results

75 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

I believe here the utility will perhaps come a lot later than the hype - The advances in multimodal settings have been great but reasoning not so much.

wmf 9mo ago
The same happened with the Internet/Web; the hype came true 10-15 years later than predicted.
- nix-zarathustra 9mo ago
  I think the iPhone and the rise of the smartphones are what made the web popular.
- etyhhgfff 9mo ago
  Hence AI is a good long term investment.

cosmic_cheese 9mo ago

Several factors are in confluence to make this different from previous tech booms. First, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their business like OpenAI and the companies bolting AI onto everything have been forceful and abrasive with their pushing. Normally technology has more time to seep in and organically normalize with people for a while before the pushing begins, but this time the gas pedal was floored shortly after OpenAI had shipped a usable MVP. Second, the value is far from clear for a lot of people, partly from lazy bolt-on integrations, but also just because people don't actually want/need it for many of the tasks it's being sold for and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks. Third, as noted in the article, the surrounding environment isn't right. Many of your average people feel like the dog in the "this is fine" meme[0] and aren't really in the mood to be sold something that could ultimately further concentrate wealth and make their lives harder. It's like parking an ice cream truck in front of a burning office building and wondering why nobody running out is buying a cone. I say this as someone who finds AI useful for some things. All of this is pretty plainly visible. Either the big names in the industry are horrifically out of touch or they're pretending to not see it in hopes of faking it until they make it, I'm not sure which. [0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-anniversary-gunshow-web-comic https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-...

jorts 9mo ago
Thanks for articulating exactly how I feel.
latchkey 9mo ago
The way I look at it, from a quality perspective, this is the worst it will be. I certainly won't ever go back to coding without AI. If you extrapolate from there and the general need for tokens compounding with the demand, it is only upwards, whether you agree with it or not. We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
- davidw 9mo ago
  Who are the actors working to "improve it" though? You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. You have elected officials who might mean well but won't be able to react quickly and don't understand the nuance of a lot of tech things. You have ordinary people trying to figure out how to make use of this stuff without losing their own jobs. But they don't have a ton of influence.
  - latchkey 9mo ago
    I do agree with you, there is too much grift, but that's to be expected. I'm one of the actors and I sided with AMD early on.
  - jopsen 9mo ago
    > You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people. For big tech to start relying on vibe coding without code reviews etc is a huge risk. Big tech has so much red tabe preventing people from getting stuff done. Security reviews needed, etc. This inertia will hold back even a super intelligence from getting stuff done. Some nerds in a garage trying to apply vibe coding to a problem won't have this red tape. Red tape is necessary in big orgs because you can't have 100k people running around shipping new half broken, semi supported software with security holes. So you established release processes, approvals, code reviews, etc. All I'm saying is: big tech is also at risk of being disrupted by AI.

zaptheimpaler 9mo ago

Look at the massive and growing wealth & power inequality today, an age of aristocrats, then look at these AI fucks bragging about how AI will eliminate all white collar jobs. Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. You can already see LLMs are making programmers much more productive but it's actually causing lower salaries and job losses - so who's capturing the value of that increased productivity? Not workers.. Meanwhile US government is overtly corrupt, criminal morons, they certainly don't care or have any sort of plan to distribute the gains from this technology evenly. Scott Bessent is saying with a smirk on his face that the tariff refunds will not go to consumers [1]. These people actively hate you and laugh at your powerlessness. Hating AI is the right response because the current political system ensures 10% of the benefits will accrue to most people and 90% to the elites, the power imbalance gets even more extreme and it will lead to techno-feudalism (as it has in the past). [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-tariff-refund-ultimate-223942102.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-tariff-refund-ul...

jopsen 9mo ago
> Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. Right now sota models requires a lot of iron. It's possible that this will always be the case. But its is not a certainty! We've seen software improvements shave orders of magnitude of compute requirements before. This could totally happen here. Iron could easily become stranded assets. But that said, models have already become commodities, well somewhat. Is the value in running inference or applying it? Today, we dare not use vibe coded libraries for mission critical things, HTML sanitization as an example. But one day, who is to say the industry won't be disrupted by a vibe coded database with ~100% Oracle compatibility? Made by a nerd in a garage. Established code bases is a moat today. It might not be in 5 years. Big tech won't be well positioned to take advantage, because trusting vibe coded crap is risky. My point is mostly: the future is uncertain. Big established software companies might see their moat challenged by nerd in a garage running LLMs in the cloud. What about the Adobe suite? AutoCAD? Office, etc. (To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat).
- zdragnar 9mo ago

ars 9mo ago

Virtually everyone I know is using AI, from helping with creative writing, to making video series, to programming, to homework help, to writing speeches. And (almost) everyone said how terrible it is - and yet they all use it. Give it a bit of time for people to understand the limitations, and where it shines and it will become an indispensable part of life.

trollbridge 9mo ago
An excellent analogy would be the shift to gasoline-powered vehicles: yeah, the oil wells were dirty and everyone knew it, smog became a thing, sitting in traffic became a serious problem, and fatal vehicle crashes start happening, yet everyone kept using them.

nick49488171 9mo ago

Probably because at that time, normal people weren't rolling off the back of a massive inflationary period where they can no longer afford to look forward to having enough money to buy/use/participate in whatever cool new technology arises.

prydt 9mo ago

I think this is because the prevailing narrative around this bubble is: A) AI gets very good and you'll lose your job. OR B) This whole thing is a bubble and because of how many eggs have been put in this single basket, when the bubble pops, you'll lose your job as we head into a recession. It really does just seem like pure downside to the average person, not even to mention all the slop everywhere, deepfake revenge porn being democratized, and generally just having bad gpt wrappers shoved down your throat. Edit: There really isn't a sense that AI is going to help the common person. Inequality is rising and AI seems to only fuel this fire. I hope that we as a society can actually distributed the fruits of AI to everyone... but I'm not holding my breath.

b112 9mo ago
With the way things are going, we'll end up with identify verification rolled out everywhere. I don't mean to just read content, but instead to post online. Anything. An image, upload a video, write comments in text. This doesn't mean doxxing. I can have my identity verified with, for example, Youtube... but still have a handle/nick presented to end users. My real name need not be exposed. However without something like this, there's no real hope at curtailing what's coming down the pipe. And I say this without liking it, wanting it, I've fought for an anonymous internet my entire life. But I think that's just... over now. Either the internet will die, no forum, comment section, video site will live, or we end up with identity verification and gated posting online. I just don't see how else to deal with this. I'm not even saying you can't use AI to write comments, although I think that's a dumb way to interact with other people. It's simply that within a year, there won't be a single way to tell a single post from AI or human. A single video. Anything. And preventing fake accounts, sock puppeting, is the only way to even hope to stem that tide. And further, we'll need to be able to sue for defamation. Fraudulent activity. Foreign interference. The change required because of all of this, is literally repugnant. Yet... it's now here in front of us.
davidw 9mo ago
Yeah exactly: here's Sam Altman saying "ok yeah these things use energy, but so do the humans" https://bsky.app/profile/x2y.tech/post/3mfeulapemk2d https://bsky.app/profile/x2y.tech/post/3mfeulapemk2d

Animats 9mo ago

We've had a few dud booms in the last fifteen years. 3D TV. VR. Metaverse. Electric cars in the US. They all worked technically, but just didn't catch on.

aquova 9mo ago
One of these is not like the others
- OneMorePerson 9mo ago
  I assume you mean electric cars since they were more of a "real product", but I have to say I think they were pushed too early and too fast. I am super curious how many early Nissan Leafs quickly ended up in the landfill due to the attempt to use premature battery tech. Toyota is kinda on the wrong side of this one now (lagging) but they had an idea that larger and larger hybrids should have been the way (like going from regular hybrid to PHEV to eventually fully electric). Subsidizing less (like $3k not $7k) on a whole bunch more hybrids would have done a lot more to influence real adoption and rack up fuel efficient miles than purely electric cars. A lot of people don't get hybrids cause they are like ~$8k ish more than basic gas and the math doesn't quite work out for people for a long time, tilting that math would have made a big difference. Especially for people who live in the city but sometimes drive long distance and only have one car, a PHEV is so ideal compared to having to have two cars or go rent or something.
Animats 9mo ago
NFTs/"Web 3.0"

umairnadeem123 9mo ago

[dead]

int32_64 9mo ago

Has there ever been another economic boom where the industry it's primarily occurring in is losing jobs? https://x.com/greg_ip/status/1991149493807353913 https://x.com/greg_ip/status/1991149493807353913

Animats 9mo ago
Wheat farming around the time of the McCormick reaper.[1] Farm employment dropped by half between 1900 and 1930. Production up. Wheat cheaper. Coal mining from 1950-1970. Production up. Coal cheaper. Employment way down. Classic book, "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" (1963) on how Appalachia became really poor. [1] https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/statistics-trends-american-farming https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
abetusk 9mo ago
I'm sorry I don't have better statistics but after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I think it took roughly 15 years for the stock market to bounce back. Though I could be wrong, I think unemployment was also high, including in the tech sector.

deleted 9mo ago

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abetusk 9mo ago

People did not. How quickly everyone forgets. There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale. Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2] Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3] A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20030226083257/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030226083257/http://www.redher... [3] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

epc 9mo ago
Just seconding this…people have a starry eyed view of the dotcom boom but there was a lot of waste and outright fraud. A lot of theoretical improvements to business processes were lost because…the businesses didn't want to change their processes.
wmf 9mo ago
People sneered at dotcoms but they weren't afraid of them. People are afraid of AI. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are. The claims of "adopt Internet/AI or be left behind" were similar but for some reason the reactions are different.
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  Right before the Millenium, mainstream media like the NYT was blaming the internet and "violent games like Tribe, Doom and Quake" for the Columbine Massacre [0] and other similar mass shootings in the 90s. A lot of those reporters are now leadership at major newspapers like the NYT (eg. Applebome who linked Doom with Columbine and is now the Deputy National Editor for the NYT). A large amount of reporters (both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists) discussing technology today are literally boomers who have been fighting this battle against each other since the 1990s and taking all the airtime away from alternative younger voices on both sides. [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-alma-maters-two-words-behind-the-massacre.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...

grebc 9mo ago

Crypto bro’s needed something to do with their GPU’s after the crypto craze died. Wonder what’s next when the AI craze dies.

pousada 9mo ago
Quantum computing?

alephnerd 9mo ago

Holy moley rose tinted glasses. There was plenty of internet and computer pessimism at the time as well, with the Internet expected to lead to more coal being used [0], being viewed as a conduit for scams [1], the risk of moral panics [2], and being blamed for causing the Columbine Massacre [3]. Ironically, this same author at the NYT (David Streitfeld) was a reporting negatively about the Dot-Com boom in the 1990s at the WashPo [4][5] as well as during the subsequent bust [6] and has been very public about his oride of being "low-tech" [7]. There is nothing wrong with that stance, but the entire premise of the article that techno-optimism was the norm which turned into techno-pessimism is clearly written in bad faith, when a large portion of the intelligentsia was already techno-pessimistic in the 1990s and 2000s, just like they were in the 80s, 70s, and earlier. [0] - https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=2863b8542580 https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=286... [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/01/technology/internet-s-chain-of-foolery.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/01/technology/internet-s-cha... [2] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322796.322800 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322796.322800 [3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-alma-maters-two-words-behind-the-massacre.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a... [4] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/06/glee-gloom-in-silicon-valley/f4548e8e-def8-49e4-8e7c-9de7b6f5d41b/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/06/g... [5] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/05/18/online-booksellers-jockey-with-price-cuts/2f95b9e6-3c8f-4428-9843-d30b2ace39b5/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/05/18/o... [6] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-21-mn-24886-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-21-mn-24886... [7] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/personaltech/tech-reporter-does-not-use-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/personaltech/t...

notatoad 9mo ago

>Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, recently said artificial intelligence was spreading more slowly than he had expected. his company has grown from ~10 million to ~900 million users in three years. if that's not quickly enough, the problem is unreasonable expectations. people like AI! they just don't want it to be shoved into absolutely every aspect of their lives at all times.

EnPissant 9mo ago
There is a big difference between 900 million people talking to ChatGPT and AI diffusing into other parts of society. I think the latter is lagging.

piyushpr134 9mo ago

I feel this is because dot com was increased human connect and made the world closer. This boom is only about reducing cost for companies by reducing people. There is hardly any talk about improving user experience. This is very negative outcome imo. Businesses can't be only to serve their shareholders. People are under estimating the effect this would have on the economy and finally on these businesses themselves as economy is all about rotation of money. Once businesses stop paying salary and concentrate everything to their owners, economy grinds to halt. AI boom is clearly anti human. People are fearing jobs, livelihoods, and their homes. I don't think anyone in right mind would have accepted this had this not been marketed the way it has been

apollo_mojave 9mo ago

I was too young to understand the dot com boom when it happened, being in grade school at the time. But I do remember when smartphones became not just a luxury, but a necessity, and how amazing the iPod seemed when it first came out. It was like something out of Star Trek. Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters. So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!). I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?" Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook! And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there. Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.

jcgrillo 9mo ago
You've hit spot on something important here, that AI arrived at a time when the shine has worn off the tech. Google got evil, Twitter was eviscerated by a clown who likes to make nazi salutes, Facebook plumbed depths of enshittification previously unknown to science. The metaverse turned out to be hot air. Bitcoins did not in fact change anything, let alone everything. And now we have the same spoiled brats who did all that stuff and told all those lies trying to say that chatbots are going to "real soon now" be somehow the most valuable technology ever made. All that, and the constant deluge of lies--coding agents will make you 10x as effective in six months, AGI is pretty much here, etc. When Jobs did his demos generally (maybe every time?) he had something to show. It wasn't some empty promise, it was real. I want that kind of tech, not the imaginary stuff.

baubino 9mo ago

Fewer people even knew about the dot com boom (or understood what it was) because the 24-hour news cycle didn’t exist yet and the means through which news and information would travel widely and rapidly (the subject of the boom itself) had not yet boomed. In contrast, news about AI seems almost inescapable. The discourse on the dot com boom was limited almost exclusively to people in tech and finance (who were poised to benefit the most) whereas the AI discussion is much broader and involves the general public, which is now rightly debating whether the upside is worth the cost.

cmxch 9mo ago

The dot-com boom brought more people into the fold, such that the prosperity included regular people. This one seems to bypass it by design, especially with the outsized negative impact on consumer products - whether with forced CoPilot buttons or irrationally expensive computer parts.

13pixels 9mo ago

One underappreciated angle: the dot-com boom created new distribution channels that were broadly accessible. Anyone could put up a website and reach people. The AI boom is quietly reshuffling distribution in ways most companies haven't noticed yet. We've been tracking how LLMs recommend products across categories. The correlation between Google ranking and LLM recommendation is near zero (0.08 across ~150 brands we tested). So a company that spent a decade building SEO authority can be completely invisible to ChatGPT, while a smaller competitor with better documentation and more mentions on Reddit or GitHub gets recommended instead. That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery -- and unlike the dot-com era, the companies being disrupted mostly don't even know it's happening yet.

an_guy 9mo ago
> That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery Until chatgpt integrate ads into their results