Comment by dragonwriter
4 months ago
There is an AI bubble just like there was a dotcom bubble; the fact that it is a real technology with real uses we with world changing long-term impacts does not mean that the recent investment hype will not soon be recognized as excessively exuberant given the actual payoffs to investors and the timelines on which they will be realized.
(And putting masses of people out of work and and thereby radically destabilizing capitalist societies, to the extent it is a payoff, is a payoff with a bomb attached.)
The dotcom bubble was a bunch of Silicon Valley types buying fancy domain names and getting showered in money before they even released anything remotely useful.
AI companies are releasing useful things right this second, even if they still require human oversight, they are also able to significantly accelerate many tasks.
> The dotcom bubble was a bunch of Silicon Valley types buying fancy domain names and getting showered in money before they even released anything remotely useful.
The AI bubble involves a lot of that, too.
> AI companies are releasing useful things right this second, even if they still require human oversight, they are also able to significantly accelerate many tasks.
So were the Googles and other leading firms in the dotcom bubble era, and if you said the dotcom bubble wasn’t a bubble because of that, you’d obviously have been wrong.
I feel like this bubble actually has two bubbles happening:
1. The infra build out bubble: this is mostly the hypescalers and Nvidia.
2. The AI company valuation bubble: this includes the hyperscalers, pure-play AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the swarm of startups that are either vaporware or just wrappers on top of the same set of APIs.
There will probably be a pop in (2), especially the random startups that got millions in VC funding just because they have a ".ai" in their domain name. This is also why the OpenAI and Anthropic are getting into the infra game by trying to own their own datacenters, that may be the only moat they have.
However, when people talk about trillions, it's mostly (1) that they are thinking of. Given the acceleration of demand that is being reported, I think (1) will not really pop, maybe just deflate a bit when (2) pops.
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