I was born in 1997 and have no clue how the .com bubble looked like. With the way they are advertising AI right now (it will solve every problem on earth) it just annoys me, and what’s worse people who aren’t in the ML/DL field are buying it too. I am just curious how the .com was like and how it compares to the current AI bubble?
I was alive during the dot com bubble and I don’t think normal people even noticed it. The web was a lot less centralised back in those days and stayed that way for a while. The websites that people were actually using didn’t go anywhere when the bubble burst but there was a lot more website turnover in those days anyway. People were always moving to a better newer service and there were multiple search engines that people used. Then AltaVista turned up and that was the engine to use, until Google turned up and everyone started using that. I still remember when Google was this cool new thing that most people hadn’t heard of.
A lot of people didn’t notice it, but it affected a lot of people. That was the time of supply-on-demand, just in time manufacturing, rapid prototyping, and a lot of other behind the scenes stuff that was caught up in the bubble. Despite the name, it wasn’t all about websites. It was about unregulated venture capitalism.
Fast forward to AI, and there’s a lot more regulation, and barriers to entry. You’re not getting money thrown at you for having an idea… with AI today; a few well financed companies are spending lots of money on AI and then selling their services to established players to include the AI tagline.
In my view, AI has closer ties to the Cloud Services bubble.
until Google turned up and everyone started using that.
My older brother, who was a graduated CS major, turned me on to it way before anyone else had heard of it. He was also the first person to introduce me to the existence of Java (not script) when he brought a book home for the holidays some years before that.
I mostly agree with the above take. Except people were talking about this stuff on the news a lot. It was one of the interesting stories of the time. As well as Y2K and the increased traffic in Silicon Valley.
The big difference (to me) is that the public is, I think, more aware in that you can see it on your daily carry devices and tell that there’s something neat there, sorta, but not enough to want it. Back then it was stuff other people were doing while only a fraction (I couldn’t tell you how many) people were already online. Not that I think most of the public is using AI, but they know it’s an option on a device (or more) that they already have as opposed to being excluded.
Both are colossal wastes of capital.
The AI bubble feels a lot more focused on increasing worker efficiency/replacing workers while the .com bubble felt more like throwing things at the wall to see what stuck.
People had ideas for what you could do online, but no one really knew what it looked like or how it could work. Since no one knew what form the Internet would take, a lot of companies were formed to throw shit at the wall and see what stuck.
The AI bubble is a lot dumber.
One difference is that we know one was definitely a bubble thanks to hindsight, whereas the other is only hoped to be a bubble because lots of people want it to turn out to be one. It remains to be seen whether it actually is.
I think they’re quite comparable. Lots of companies earned a ton of investment funding for having the word “AI” in their name, and they will collapse over the next couple years. But much like the Dot Com bubble, the big ones will survive, possibly with only a few years to recover back whatever they lose during a pop.
Yeah exactly, it’s not like websites turned out to be totally useless or anything: the bubble was that tons people were making websites for everything in the hopes that they would get investment and maybe figure out a purpose down the line if they felt like it. Values got inflated and then popped. Clearly though we still use websites for lots of things because they are a good way to exchange information and interact with users.
The AI bubble is the same. It’s garnering huge investment at the moment, its value is inflated, and eventually the market will pop. That doesn’t mean we won’t be using generative AI in the future or that it doesn’t have value at all. Some companies will survive, the sector will start to grow again more gradually and our fridges will have AI in them that does something actually useful.
