Comment by Anamon

I disagree with that. I was around when the web grew into the mainstream, and almost everybody was sure that it would have a huge impact on every industry and activity it touched. There wasn't even remotely a level of skepticism comparable to those around VR, blockchain, and now GenAI.

And it seems pretty obvious why. The benefits were clear and palpable. Communication was going to become a heck of a lot easier, faster, cheaper, barriers were being lowered.

There's no such qualitative advantage offered by GenAI, compared to the way we did things before. Web vs. pre-Web, the benefits were clear.

GenAI? Some execs claim it's making stuff cheaper, but it doesn't consider quality and long-term effects, plus it's spouted by those with no technological knowledge and with a reputation to long have cashed out and moved on by the time their actions crash a company. Plus, still nobody seems to have figured out how to make money (real money, not VC) off of this. Faster -- again, at what price to quality?

Then there's the predictions. We've been told for about three years now about the explosive rise in quality we'll see from GenAI output. I'm still waiting. The predictions of wider spread, higher speed and lower cost of the web sounded plausible, and they materialised. Comparatively, I see a lot of very well-reasoned arguments for the hypothesis that GenAI has peaked (for now) and this is pretty much as good as it's going to get, with source data sets exhausted and increasingly polluted by poor GenAI slop. So far, the trajectory makes me believe this scenario to be a lot more likely.

None of this seems remotely comparable to the Internet or web cases to me. The web certainly didn't feel like a hype to me in the 90s and I don't remember anyone having had that view.