Comment by saguntum

I think there's a bubble around AI, but I don't think I agree with this argument. Google search launched in 1998, and ChatGPT launched in 2022.

In 2001, if Google had gone under like a lot of .com bubble companies, I think the economic impact visible to people of the time would have been marginal. There was no Google News, Gmail, Android, and the alternatives (AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, MSN Search) would have been enough. Google was a forcing function for the others to compete with the new paradigm or die trying. It wasn't itself an economic behemoth the way it is today.

I think if OpenAI folded today, you'd still have several companies in the generative AI space. To me, OpenAI's reminiscent of Google in the late 90s in its impact, although culturally it's very different. It's a general purpose website anyone with an internet connection can visit, deep industry competitors are having to adapt to its model to stay alive, and we're seeing signs of a frothy tech bubble a few years after its founding. People across industry verticals, government, law, and NGOs are using it, and students are learning with it.

One counterpoint to this would be that companies like Google reacted to the rise of social media with stuff like Google+, but to me the level to which "AI" is baked into every product at Google exceeds that play by a great margin. At most I remember a "post to plus" link at the top of GMail and a few hooks within the contact/email management views. In contrast, they are injecting AI results into almost every search I make and across almost every product of theirs I use today.

If you fast forward 20 years, I would be surprised if companies specializing in LLMs were not major players the way today's tech giants are. Some of the companies might have the same names, but they'll have changed.