Comment by kemotep
6 hours ago
Is the internet bigger or smaller than it was in 1998 compared to today?
Demand for internet and web services is significantly higher today than in 2000 but a bubble still popped. Heck a regular old recession or depression, completely unrelated to AI could happen next year and could collapse the industry. I mean housing is more expensive than ever nearly 20 years after collapsing in the Great Recession.
The problem that I have with dotcom comparisons is that people miss what popped and what remained after that bubble. Catsdotcom and Dogsdotcom popped. But the tech remained, and now we have FAANG++.
If we apply the same logic, any of oAI, xAI, Anthropic might pop, but realistically they won't, and even if they do, some other players will take their spots, and the tech will survive, and more importantly the demand will still be there. This cat isn't going back into the bag. People want this now. More than all the providers can give them. Today. The demand won't suddenly disappear now that "we got a hit" like someone put it recently.
I feel like this fails to address my point.
In 2008 there was a subprime mortgage crisis that caused the housing market to crash. Nearly all banks who participated in this survived. There was and still is significant demand for houses, financed through mortgages.
The bubble can burst, most if not all the big players still survive 20 years later and yet significant value and capital can still be destroyed in the process.
Same for the dot com. There was demand for the internet, it couldn’t meet the expectations of the day, and yet here we are with like 100x more internet services than before all these years later. Saying the AI bubble will pop is not a prediction that all AI companies will cease to exist immediately. Amazon lost 80% of their stock price in 2000. Is Amazon bigger or smaller than they were in 2000 today?