Ask HN: Is the rise of AI tools going to be the next 'dot com' bust?

For context, attended an Australian based tech expo / conference recently and whilst at the show (I’m sure there were marginally more) only two exhibitors didn’t have the term AI or Agent in there pitch or stand marketing..

And for reference, the two companies that stood out for non-AI capabilities made monitor stands.

This got me dwelling back into the post title, is this influx of AI tools going to be sustainable, or is there going to be an impending crash leaving only the ‘best and brightest’ on the other side?

Maybe someone should make AI-infused monitor stands.

/s maybe

I find LLMs incredibly useful for some very specific cases: summarizing text for example. Even dialogues to learn something.

Now there are n use cases (10 What we don't know is, if there will be significant advances, and how useful they will be. But we also don't know that for any other area.

What we do know however is that breakthroughs are rare.

Everybody is now in the hype train. AI here, AI there. I find most of it just annoying.

My guess is this that a reckoning is more probable than the new super feature.

It was largely the same. A ton of Internet companies struggled to find a way to make money after the initial land grab, and most failed. The hype was breathless and over the top.

A lot of late 90s to early 2000s hype has come true. Today we have substantial companies with no physical office and that have never used physical mail, delivery for everything, and ubiquitous connectivity for devices. It just took about 15-20 more years to get there.

I suspect we will have AI replacing programmers on non-trivial and non-slop projects in 15-20 years.

The social optimism of the late 90s and 2000s about the Internet was mostly wrong though. We didn’t really anticipate either surveillance capitalism or mass disinformation breaking whole segments of the population off from reality. Like most well intentioned people we had trouble even imagining the uses that “dark triad” personality types would have for the technology.

The pessimism around AI is, I think, an overcorrection from the excessive optimism around the net and the web.

It didn’t last past 2001 (lasted from 1996ish to 2001) and much of the money was stock and not real money so the paper millionaires never had the money since it never vested by the time they were hired until the time the dot com company went bust. VA Linux was a prime example of a company that didn’t have a profitable exit and evaporated with the market correction that I remember started in late 2000. The 9/11 attacks in NYC erased any chance of a dot com recovery.

Everyone knew there was this thing called the internet because cable broadband was being deployed everywhere and being sold for less than cost. That company whose name I couldn’t remember went bust I think around 2003(?) and I think AT&T took them over and doubled the price.

I remember someone showing me that you could do to domino’s pizza website and get a free pizza (unlimited orders) just for going to their website. I think that was 2002-3(?). There were lost of giveaways during that era. It all came to a stop as the internet grew and costs pilled up more so than the dot com bust.