Prior to the dot-com bubble itself, hype for the growing potential of the internet was modest and mostly in line with organic adoption and exploration. People at large weren't anticipating a revolution. They were just enjoying the growing areay of new products and opportunities that were appearing.
During the dot-com bubble, inasmuch as it represented a turning tide, this trickle had reached a tipping point and we witnessed a tsunami of innovative products that consumers were genuinely fascinated by. There were just too many of them for the market to sustain them all, and a correction followed, as you would expect.
This AI story is basically the opposite, much like the blockchain story. Many investors and some consumers who have living or borrowed memory of dot-com bubble or the smartphone explosion really really want another opportunity to cash in on a exponentially expanding market and/or live through a new technological revolution and are basically trying to will the next one into existence as soon as possible, independent of any organicity or practicality.
In contrast to blockchain hype, maybe it'll work here. Maybe it won't. But it's fundamentally a different scenario from the dot-com bubble either way.
There've been a _few_ of these over the last decade; _two_ attempts at blockchain stuff (an initial "use blockchains for everything" one, and a "use NFTs for everything" one a couple years after the first crashed and burned. And then of course there was 'metaverse'.
VCs just need to make sure there is enough hype by the time AI startups IPO, so that they can cash out. It's part of a bigger trend in finance, arguably caused by quantitative easing. It's why Uber could IPO, while they had never made a profit; but because of the hype, their stock price did great on day 1.
During the dot-com bubble, inasmuch as it represented a turning tide, this trickle had reached a tipping point and we witnessed a tsunami of innovative products that consumers were genuinely fascinated by. There were just too many of them for the market to sustain them all, and a correction followed, as you would expect.
This AI story is basically the opposite, much like the blockchain story. Many investors and some consumers who have living or borrowed memory of dot-com bubble or the smartphone explosion really really want another opportunity to cash in on a exponentially expanding market and/or live through a new technological revolution and are basically trying to will the next one into existence as soon as possible, independent of any organicity or practicality.
In contrast to blockchain hype, maybe it'll work here. Maybe it won't. But it's fundamentally a different scenario from the dot-com bubble either way.