Comment by hakfoo

AI is appealing to the investors not because it solves human problems, but because it solves some of the problems of previous bubbles.

When we wired the world for the Internet in the 1990s, or built railways across the continent in the 1800s, we eventually reached a point where even the starriest-eyed investors could see they've covered effectively the entire addressable market. Eventually AOL ran out of new customers no matter how many CDs they mailed out, or we had connected every city of more than 50 people with steel rail, and you could hear the music was slowing down.

By dangling the AGI brass ring out there, they can keep justifying the expenditure past many points of diminishing returns, because the first thing we'll ask the Omnipotent AGI is how to earn the quadrillions spent back, with interest.

It also has the benefit of being a high-churn business. The rails laid in 1880, or the fiber pulled in 2000, were usable for decades, but in the AI bubble, the models are obsolete in months and the GPUs in years. It generates huge looking commercial numbers just to tread water.