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Comment by throwaway777x | Hacker News Reader

I had a job at a small investment firm at the time in college and to me it is nothing like the dotcom bubble.

The dotcom bubble was the "new economy", the old economy had changed forever and was dead. No one thought it was a bubble. Even when the bubble popped it took until 9/11 to wake us up from the mass hysteria.

I can't think of another "bubble" that practically everyone thinks we are in a bubble. To the point that I think many would find it irrational to believe we are not in a bubble. That is not what bubble is. A bubble is the madness of crowds, not the wisdom of crowds and the crowd certainly believes we are in a bubble.

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There were front page news stories about a possible bubble back then.

The chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously made a speech warning of "irrational exuberance". It can't get much more direct than formal government warnings at the highest level.

"the old economy had changed forever and was dead."

Ehem - what is the difference compered to now? Wasn't programmers obsolete by 6mths ago and nobody would work so we do need UBI?

However your point that if everybody are thinking there is buble there is none is valid. Ironically your whole post undermine this point. And you are not alone in your analysis. General bubble wisdom is not settled as one might think.

Plus famous Alan Greenspan "irrational exuberance" was in 1996. And AFAIK in 1999 everybody know there is buble but it busted only in 2000. On top of that I have seen overlying plots of stock prices now and before dot com suggesting there is 1-2 years of increases still to go.

> Ehem - what is the difference compered to now? Wasn't programmers obsolete by 6mths ago and nobody would work so we do need UBI?

You're applying an arbitrary time constraint to the realization of AI's promise in order to rubbish it. This is a logical mistake common among critics: not yet, so never. It doesn't seem as if there is a near limit to the tech's development. Until that changes, the potential for job wipeouts and societal upheaval is real, whether in 5 or 50 years.

Sorry but that was not my point. My point was refuting of the thesis (in the comment that I am replying to) that nobody was making grand claims about AI contrary to grand claims about internet pre dot com. Obviously in both cases there were/are grand claims made.

Have you considered that your investment firm and other peers at the time were in an information bubble?

In fact outside of tech if the dotcom bubble wasn’t being discussed it’s because most folks—being not, or barely, online yet—weren’t paying any attention to it per se. The bubble they cared about was the broader stock market bubble, which was definitely widely perceived as a bubble.

> practically everyone thinks we are in a bubble

Very untrue, economy doesn't happen on online forums in echo chambers but out there. Every major company invests into AI however they can for the classical FOMO emotion.

This is how movers and decision makers think. No CEO thinks - this will crash, so lets invest into it massively and spread our company finances more thinly when the SHTF comes.

25 years time. "I remember the LLM bubble, everyone knew we were in a bubble but they carried on as if the music would never stop. Don't worry, our situation is nothing like that, there is no talk of a bubble."

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