Why the A.I. Boom Is Unlike the Dot-Com Boom

Posted by janandonly 16 hours ago

Comments

Comment by davidklemke 12 hours ago

Comment by chaudharyt 16 hours ago

>A.I. is being financed and controlled by multitrillion-dollar companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta that are in no danger of going kaput, unlike the dot-com start-ups that were little more than an idea and a bunch of engineers.

What about Anthropic and OpenAI both being in loss? What about various other VC funded AI companies? Those are essentially the description of the last line.

>Many business leaders, by contrast, are eager to take up A.I. as soon as they can.

> Relatively few regulatory barriers are standing in the way of A.I. The Trump administration is doing all it can to enable an A.I. future.

Are they? Aren't there a load of compliance issues popping up wrt to data privacy? How many businesses today are laying off people actually because of AI (vs just claiming AI for headcount reductions)?

Mostly throughout the article, every point that argues in favor of "this time its different" has an equally problematic "time is a flat circle" when you re-read it. Some examples:

>many dot-com businesses did not work because the products were too expensive and the customers too few.

>Dot-coms were under great pressure to rack up revenue and justify their extreme valuations.

Comment by thijson 15 hours ago

I was watching a video where the speaker said the current A.I. capex requires $2 trillion of revenue to break even. However the whole advertising TAM is $1 trillion. Maybe there's another way to monetize it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4XoK7PbeCY

Comment by thfuran 15 hours ago

Of course there's another way to monetize it: convince large companies that they can replace significant fractions of their workforce with it and charge them tons of money for the chance.

Comment by winternett 12 hours ago

A lot of tools & companies created in the .Com era were copied, consumed, & bought by companies under the table... The eras were indeed different in many ways, but the way the "hype machine" was wound up late in the game (after cracks began to show) should not be forgotten... Lots of whales lost lots of money even when the ships were sinking because they stopped evaluating companies & the actual tech, and just bet on news reports... In terms of investment & the markets, all of the speculation has taken on a speculative & careless "lottery style" of investment now too...

Investors that have no idea of what the tech is really doing, nor even the huge copyright implications are flocking to invest based on agenda-laced news reports of Ai taking jobs, and for that very reason it's creating a huge set up. Ai is over-promised already, just like self checkouts at the supermarkets, everyone in EV self-driving cars , and speed cameras in preventing crimes were years ago..>

These things are made to drive company profit, and they do, even well after law suits are settled, so I guess that's why it keeps happening with funded mega-marketing campaigns.

Twitter came out of the Dot.Com era, so did many other tools we still use... Let's hope that they change Ai and social media to generate actual money and useability for non-corporate-backed (everyday non-millionaire+) humans without ever-increasing monthly subscriptions...

That's the only way it won't end up shelved as a meme generator, or just used as an expensive calculator. Ai's pretty good at math though.

Twitter ended up later going from one of the world's most valuable platforms to being a meme of itself for only $45 billion. Great job they did there.

Comment by arisAlexis 15 hours ago

someone should run an experiment about things being true vs upvotes on HN. I bet there would be a negative correlation as upvotes mostly show emotions.

Comment by ahartmetz 14 hours ago

I'd be interested in "This time it's different" articles vs it being different that time. I find "This time it's different" articles to be a very bad sign.

Comment by richardatlarge 4 hours ago

Just a feeling, but this reads like smoke and mirrors. Dot com not a good comparison, how about the housing bubble?

Too big to fail, vol. 2