As someone who lived through it, I am always surprised at how dismissive people are of the dotcom bubble and the changes that were underway.
It’s been applied to crypto as an analogy and now here to “AI” though I think you actually mean LLMs.
The thing about the initial web bubble was that the potential using already proven tech was just absolutely gigantic.
Like I used to have to go to an office in a building to buy a plane ticket. Then I didn’t. People used to have to mail me a 500 page catalog for me to order via mail, and there was no way to change price or availability.
To interact with most businesses it had to be synchronous, via phone call. Or very very slow or resource intensive via mail or in person and that was that.
Even immediately it was clear these things would change a lot. You’d be able to browse an online catalog of flights or books, you’d be able to email a business and ask a detailed question and copy and paste the request to whoever.
It was right there. It worked. It was clunky and adoption took a minute but nobody honestly was all that confused about what was happening.
The bubble was almost exclusively about how fast people thought change would happen, and which people would benefit.
The LLM thing feels different. It has clear use cases that work, no doubt. I use it to help draft business docs all the time. That could even be a huge market.
But there’s also an assumption that the cognitive ability of these tactics will grow without bound. We don’t actually know that.
Maybe maybe not. But that’s a difference that makes the dotcom bubble a partial analogy at best.
If that doesn’t happen then it’s not going to be an internet-sized change. Maybe something more on the scale of GPS or something.