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 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.
But even the investments are focusing now on fewer, large companies.
In the dotcom era, investment funding was falling on everyone, like the rain.
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.