Comment by jaffee

4 hours ago

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