People also said the same thing about NFTs, and they were correct.

I think “AI” will eventually have more consumer facing uses, but the current crop is incapable of telling truth from fiction which severely limits the appeal to Google’s main user base. OpenAI is riding on hope and it feels like Google is chasing after that application to avoid looking like they are behind, but it’s not clear that actual customer demand is looking for Google to offer such half baked technology.

> A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

- https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...

People said the same thing about the Segway, and 3D TVs, and NFTs

And that's still somewhat true. I'm up at our cottage right now, where we have 300mbps cable internet. The upstream is paltry (10mbps), but I haven't really felt it impacting my work (and my kids are still able to stream everything they'd like, too). Sure, I miss the 5gbps symmetrical we have at home, but in reality there's not a huge real impact.

... and they were right, and there was a massive destruction of capital invested in companies that installed dark fiber and went bankrupt. The difference was that the dark fiber then got lit later on, because it was useful physical infrastructure.

The same cannot be said of the present AI boondoggles.