Look at NASDAQ between 1995 and 2005. I’ve never seen anyone claiming that it was not a bubble. Sure, some companies survived (as some always do, a bubble is not the end of the world), but a lot of people took a bath.
> 3D TV seems to be a true bubble so far, I don't know if AI is
That is not what a bubble is. A bubble is over-valuation of a bunch of stocks, when all investors want to hop on the same train. The fad is the companies’ stocks, not (necessarily) their products.
Nobody was claiming that the Internet was a fad in ~2000, just that investors were so eager that ridiculous startups with dubious business models got tons of money dumped on them for no reason, and that the expectations were out of line with reality, even for successful big companies.
Likewise, I don’t think this report refers to “AI” being a fad as much as just AI companies being overvalued.
It seems possible to believe that AI will swallow the world and also many AI companies being overvalued.
Instacart was founded about a decade later, and its margins are pretty slim by tech company standards (net income ~$100m on $2.5bn revenue) so I think it's pretty clear that in the year 2000, there's no possible way that Webvan could have succeeded even if it had done everything right.
Extrapolate this logic to AI, and the parallel is clear: The current generation of AI over-promises and under-delivers at enormous cost, and yet billions are invested under the premise that quality will go up and costs will go down enough in the next few years to build viable businesses.
If those investors are correct and we're just a few years away from useful, cost-effective AI, they'll make their money back. If they're wrong and we're actually a decade away, not a single AI product that hits the market within the next few years will survive.
Webvan was a good idea with bad VCs. They were forced by their funders to expand to too many locations, for the "first mover advantage". So they had 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. Which means a lot of trucks. Which Webvan bought and owned. Webvan drivers were direct employees. The sub-minimum wage gig economy hadn't been worked out yet.
The people behind Webvan later did Kiva Systems and helped Amazon get warehouse automation going.