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Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

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Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#161

Post by laterium »

thefz wrote: post #160
hnburnsy wrote: post #83

Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…

Inevitability of what, chatbots that mark poisonous mushrooms as edible in every product?

How does this add to the discussion? Is the goal to make HN as toxic as everywhere else online? If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise this performative negativity and cynicism is boring honestly.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#162

Post by thefz »

forgetfulness wrote: post #6
mmooss wrote: post #2

To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is a…

The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring tril…

Don't forget they are great at generating speech to text. That's all, TBH. You summarized everything.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#163

Post by thefz »

lagosfractal42 wrote: post #17
forgetfulness wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring tril…

GPUs have massive applications such as Alphafold, CRISPR, Medical Imaging, Meteorology. The massive planetary investment is not to make more AI chats that summarize text. That's just short sighted.

> The massive planetary investment is not to make more AI chats that summarize text. That's just short sighted.

Yup. It's to make already rich people richer.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#164

Post by thefz »

chermi wrote: post #73
AstroBen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which jobs is it doing, exactly? From what I can tell at this point it's a solution looking for a problem. Incredibly impressive, not so useful

Customer service.

Anything that requires reasoning over data and applying experience, such as technical troubleshooting, is outside of this scope.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#165

Post by thefz »

simianwords wrote: post #158
iammrpayments wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are rate limiting you, it means they already started enshitfying the product before it is even profitable

Why would they enshittifiy?

Because that's peak extraction for the enshittifier

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#166

Post by mmooss »

acdha wrote: post #139
mmooss wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, people spent a long time looking for the 'killer application'. Google didn't know how to make money off its search engine. Social media didn't exist in any mass form. Internet access on phones, beyond email, didn't exist in any usable way. Proprietary, walled garden services, with their own dial-up numbers, such as AOL and CompuServe, were seen as the future. Microsoft thought their similar servi…

The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded. That’s part of the difference with AI now: the internet immediately generated significant value almost instantly for relatively modest investment…

> The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded.

All I can say is, that was the opposite of what I've heard. Did you participate?

Also, Google was many years after Netscape's IPO, seen as the first SV boom. And what about Windows 95, if the Internet's ROI was so obvious?

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#167

Post by rdsubhas »

themafia wrote: post #149
hnburnsy wrote: post #83

Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…

> To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much quicker. Based on what? We're only seeing linear improvements for increasing spending. There's no new algorithm ideas on the horizon, just more and more hardware, in the hopes that if we throw enough RAM and CPU at the problem, it will suddenly become "AGI." No one has their eye on power budgets or sustainability or durability of the system. The human brain has…

> Based on what?

Internet did not have enough devices to reach people. At the height of 2002 only a fraction of people worldwide had an already expensive computer and an internet to go with it.

I ran a e-commerce startup from 2005-2010. Having access to demand is a thing.

Today everyone has access in their pockets. Go to small city in Africa, India and China, and observe how they use AI. See how perplexity has put AI answers in hundreds of millions of people's hands before Google in a matter of months.

Forgive me for saying — but "Based on what" for comparing accelerated adoption between 2005 and 2025 — is discarding many huge elephants in the room, starting with that small thing you're reading this in your hand with, and the invisible thing that's sending you this comment.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#168

Post by thfuran »

ghm2180 wrote: post #109

I have a noob question. How can developed economies where populations levels have plateaued continue to be expected to post positive GDPs (and therefore add net new goods and services) yoy? Homes as assets should pass on, higher cost services of today would be replaced by lower cost which only temporarily would increase units sold(but should eventually plateau because #units/person is not going to change). No compone…

>#units/person is not going to change

Why not? It has been changing forever. It was on a pretty consistent upward trend in the US since there was a US, roughly doubling since 1790, but it has started to decrease in the last few years.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#169

Post by thfuran »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #159
arexxbifs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what I think would happen if anyone, by tomorrow, could download GPT 5.1 for free and run it performantly on something like a $500 laptop: * It would stop datacenter- and other related infrastructure construction, making huge investments effectively worthless for companies like Oracle and Amazon, and of course hurt the construction sector. * It would hurt the companies you mention, plus a many more including N…

With hardware getting more performant and LLMs getting more efficient, what's preventing this outcome from being an inevitability? Sure, the average person has no interest in self hosting, but businesses will at least run the numbers.

There's no guarantee hardware will ever improve to such an extent that running your own ChatGPT 5 is cheap.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#170

Post by thfuran »

forgetfulness wrote: post #6
mmooss wrote: post #2

To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is a…

The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring tril…

And propaganda.
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