I agree here. There might be a lot of funding going into AI, and there will be high-profile companies that go bust, but both business and non-technical users are paying because they get value.

- consumers using chat & image gen

- devtools buying, and users leveraging, tools like kapa.ai

- RAG definitely provides ROI

- medical imaging & drug discovery

- robotics like Stanford Aloha

- ecosystem for day-2 problems in LLM based systems

The applications are only going to grow

We will know it was a bubble when it bursts. It might be followed by another AI bubble 20 years down the road. There's no contradiction between "technology trend" and periodic bubbles. Those who lose $$$ along the way may console themselves with thinking about technology trends. :-)

If you lived in San Francisco in ~2014 there was a definite startup/social media bubble. So many calendar apps. So many email apps. So many ways to "share with friends" that made no money. Millions and millions invested (wasted) lol A lot of us laughed back then and we were ultimately right about it being a funding bubble. But this is just how it works. Something is successful, everyone copies it but is usually not successful - but sometimes there is some success. So they cast a wide net, scoop up what works, leave everything else behind. It's bubbly behavior but that's how the economy "breathes" by expanding and contracting. It ultimately adds growth.

There was also a real estate bubble in the early 00s with their 0-money-down loans, infinite refis, the "good faith estimate" - they were throwing money (houses) at people because middlemen could make a lot of money off selling loans. We all know about the burst, but few talk about the fact that the big banks took over those businesses, forcing them to shut down and acquired all their assets - they scooped up what worked and left everything else behind.

It seems like every presidential cycle there's some industry or space getting all the focus and funding. This current one - Trump/Biden - was the weirdest one, we had a brief crypto bubble, but it's been mostly Old Money paying themselves through government and politics (covid, wars, "keep the government running by printing $1T" type bills). I imagine the next president will "save us" from the political bubble and embrace technology, in particular AI/LLMs. The major corporations have to get a handle on AI, so I predict a lot of money will be thrown at AI/LLMs - we're just getting started. I think we have 8 years of AI bubble ahead of us.