The dot com bubble was this crazy time where for a brief period a generation didn’t know about this thing that the generation after them was increasingly and rapidly interested in.

So like people use the whole “Wild West” metaphor and it’s really apt. Conglomeration was happening in the 90s with the rise of walmart, home depot, etc and it was becoming clear that opening a retail store was a dying business because the “big guys” were destroying towns. Like it was only a matter of time before a walmart came to your town and shuttered main street

But the internet was different. All these established entrenched companies didn’t care about it, yet. So you could make bank with basic ideas. Like oh, clearchannel owns 70% (now like 95%) of the radio stations in the us. Trying to start anything in that space is foolish, plus there’s all these regulations. But internet radio? Boom, millionaire. Petco and petsmart are rising and putting pet stores out of business. But pets.com? Had prominent national advertising including a float in the macys thanksgiving day parade, a Super Bowl ad, and was listed in nasdaq. Boom, millionaires. Busted after 2 years and now redirects to petsmart tho

Some of them stuck around. Like banking was obviously entrenched with old money but then a couple of rich kids were like what if we use daddies money to do internet banking? Then x.com and PayPal started and now we have elon musk and peter thiels reign of terror

AI seems to have some similarities in that there’s the whole “what if we apply AI to x” thing and VC dummies throw cash at it but it’s not as broad so the bubbles not as big and frankly it’s not as definitively revolutionary. The internet was clearly a game changer. Like anyone with half a brain who used it saw the potential early on; it was a new modality for communication with an unprecedented speed and dearth of information. And after it had matured a few years people started to see how fast it was progressing, especially via stuff like games. We went from doom to quake to final fantasy 8 and everquest in the span of the 90s and anyone paying even a lick of attention saw the potential for things like facetime, netflix, youtube, etc eventually.

But with AI it’s harder to picture. There’s the narrative that it will eventually do stuff and it can do impressive things but for the most part most people’s experience with it is that it’s like having a mediocre employee. Their work is okay but you have to constantly check it because they always make stupid mistakes. They tell you they’ll learn to stop doing that but it’s been several years now and they keep doing it. Just like teslas will self drive in 2018, chatgpt will reach agi any day now, maybe, or maybe it’s an illusion and it’s really just a bunch of if>then statements that are constantly trying to fix themselves but messing up others in the process.