I still think it could crash, but it's got real users and a mind share like nothing I've ever seen.
The dot com bubble was basically based on regular people buying computers and internet service, and then using them to buy products they used to buy in stores.
To be clear, there is a world of difference between IPOs and LBOs. In the risk they create. And in the risk they signal.
I was a huge early fan of ChatGPT voice too, but I don't think I've used voice mode anywhere in at least 6 months. The question is what is the right level people are generally going to settle on for the use of these tools in the long term. 80% of my usage isn't much more than a better Google, I could live without it and I could live with cheaper options. I'm not sure the consumer money is going to be there en masse as hoped
Of course it still leaves a huge amount of business cases open, but I suppose the same principle applies. How soon will people tire of talking to robo-voice when they call their bank? etc.
My parents love using ChatGPT, asking it all kinds of questions. My mom discovered Claude and helps her immensely with her job - where she would have to take it home and work a few hours to be able to finish the tasks on her computer, as her company that still uses Office 98, now Claude does it in 5 minutes.
They fixed so many random issues using it, it is insane. My dad had a bike issue which would otherwise be solved by either trying to find obscure manuals from 20 years ago on random forums with me translating it from english to our language, or by taking it to a mechanic which could take months. This way, he just snapped a few photos, said what the problem is, and in a few minutes he had the fix.
I've built software that uses LLM's for a specific usecase - besides general adoption, professionals in the field contacted me and thanked me for making their lives easier, as the tasks would often take a lot of manual work. These people are earning way more from using my software, than I am from their subscriptions, which is still about 20x more than my API costs are.
While most non-dev people are behind the curve, the impact it has on their lives is becoming bigger and bigger by the day.
[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/artifici...
But it is a generational opportunity - we can remove a lot of barriers that come with knowledge, lack of it, access to it and more. Someone can easily get pretty on point medical advice without access to doctors. Get specific engineering advice without engaging with those engineers. We can apply common sense or specific knowledge on scale - in a world where about 50% of people have IQ under 100 and access to knowledge is gated behind lines and payments, this has a huge chance ot improve their lives.
And there is the whole shadow inference economy - just for example, a few corporations I have worked with in insurance and telecommunications have been slowly introducing it inside their workflows and their data tooling, being able to clean data, tag it, analyse it in a way that before would probably cost them billons in human costs.
One of them has a database going back to the 80's, with data being formatted and reformatted in all shapes and sizes, coming back all the way from paper records for some of their oldest clients. Cleaning this up was unimaginable before as a "something we can do in a day" project, but was more of a "possible with insane costs". This lead to all further activity being shaped by decisions someone made 40+ years ago, details being lost, data being thrown away or saved in random notes.
And there's millions of companies like that all around the world, which can now do "impossible" and become much more efficient and productive for a much cheaper price and in way less time than ever.
Worst part?
Their whole software stack is running on some version of Visual Basic, written by a dude that did not trust "others code" so he wrote everything from scratch, and retired about 5 years ago.
Nobody knows how any of it works, or has any clue. The company will continue to run it and pay him for consultations as long as he is able to do it.
I study from reputable sources every day and never cease to be amazed by how many errors or misconceptions they have. Peer-reviewed articles, books from renowned scholars, news from major publications… regardless of the source, false information and contradictions accumulate. I’d wager that AI, besides helping me uncover these issues in the literature, has had a lower error rate than most of the materials that I read on a daily basis.
Keep in mind that people said this before both of those crashes.That's the problem with bubbles. It's impossible to say if this time really IS different.