Comment by 1dom
6 hours ago
I agree! AI, crypto and dotcom were all hugely valuable and world changing. It's a shame they were all afflicted with hypes and bubbles along the way.
6 hours ago
I agree! AI, crypto and dotcom were all hugely valuable and world changing. It's a shame they were all afflicted with hypes and bubbles along the way.
Internet -> Obvious value, more efficient communication, knowledge sharing, transactions etc.
AI -> Value is very obvious to me as a developer.
Blockchain -> ? What is the actual value? Something about decentralized finance and not having to trust anyone? And the tradeoff is every transaction costs $10 or more. It was always a dubious proposition with its "value" driven by speculative investment which fueled the hype machine.
Yeah there are parallels in that in all cases people got really excited about something tech and poured a bunch of money in, but the outcomes and actual amount of value derived can be wildly different.
You see that you're assessing AI from the depth of the AI bubble and coming to the same conclusion about AI as people who assess crypto from the depths of a crypto bubble came to, right?
The dotcom bubble was due to all the useless, speculative stuff people were doing with the internet, not the useful bits you referred to that are still around which we use today.
The AI bubble is coming from all the useless, speculative stuff people were doing with AI, not the useful bits you referred to that are still around which we use today.
... You see where I'm going with this, right?
Crypto use cases that are still around that get used today are are not hard to find for anyone sincerely wanting to accept that they exist. I've already listed a few in other posts. That's not my point though.
My point is there's a speculative bubble around AI, and that's got a lot of parallels to the speculative bubbles around crypto and dotcom. Everything you've said supports the idea that you're unaware that you're talking from inside a bubble.
> It was always a dubious proposition with its "value" driven by speculative investment which fueled the hype machine.
Explain to me - without speculation or hype - why we still need trillions more datacentres, power, water, money and everything else for AI, if we're already using it and it's already here and we're already getting the most out of it?
The argument for more datacenters is 2 fold:
- Likely to be a zero sum winner. The Players that have invested now, do not want to be left behind.
- The improvement and capabilities in agents continues to grow. There is no reason to believe this will slow down any time soon
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Since you're very active with the commenting, what would you say is your definition of "bubble"?
Cyclical speculative investment.
All investment is kind of speculative: you're betting on the future, but typically for a reason.
A bubble, IMO, is what emerges when lots of people bet on the future purely because they see others betting on the future. People often don't realise they're doing it, like the people building AI SaaS apps. They think they're going to get rich because they think everyone is using the bubble tech.
Most of the apps are rubbish and could be implemented with something other than AI, same as a lot of crypto apps or dotcom websites in the bubble periods.
They look like they're useful in the bubble, because they're getting regular customers (as everyone comes in to try this newfangled AI/Crypto/dotcom tech) but once everyone's tried it, the only people who come back are the ones with the actual use for it, and there's never enough use to support the hype created in bubbles.