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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

this also happened with the internet. 6T is possible only if AI creates more wealth. same as with internet. Its not a zero sum game.

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Indeed, it is hard to say exactly how much wealth the internet creates, but it's a lot. E-commerce alone is $30 trillion industry; some estimates put the total economic value of the internet at $200 trillion or higher.

That said, this came too late for investors in the dot-com boom. AI investors may find themselves in a similar situation.

The dotcom bubble burst because the development of the internet could not keep up with expectations, even though investors were correct in principle with their assumption it would generate swaths of wealth. For AI the hope is that AI itself will start to push its own development and adoption sooner rather than later, so the timing issue that killed dotcom investors might instead make AI investors insanely rich. That's why we're still seeing heaps of money getting dumped into it.

That’s a very charitable take.

Without smartphone, cellular networks etc you’d be miles off. Nobody had this in their thesis so they were plain wrong.

Obviously there were plays from the dotcom era that just were not going to work on the timeframes expected because the rest of the infrastructure also hadn't caught up - not just internet, but shipping in general took a long time to catch up, and Amazon having to basically build their own logistics empire shows that ecommerce just wasn't going to be able to be The Thing at the speed those investments required.

But let's say you invested in the NASDAQ at it's peak during the bubble - late 2010s you're whole, inflation adjusted. Obviously, not ideal, but a decade and a half isn't the worst turnaround to make your money back if you just sit. Lots of trades that have gone far, far, far worse.

Smartphones overtook regular cell phones ~2013-2014 as the majority of owned cell phones in the US.

But the NASDAQ started on clear trajectory up and up since 08, several years before smartphones became big.

Smartphones accelerated it, but obviously the internet was going to keep growing and growing and everyone could see where it was heading well before smartphones. A huge amount of the value generated by the internet is on the business side. The amount of productivity from making it basically frictionless to collaborate from anywhere in the world is hard to understate.

And, perhaps more to this particular point, it came too late for vendors behind the dotcom boom. Lucent Technologies no longer exists. WorldCom no longer exists. Cisco is a shadow of its former self, with a stock price that only recovered last year.

Cisco is a profitable company making useful products and services. The fact that we consider that a failure is damning.

It isn't exactly not a zero sum game either though. If you want to sell something you have to have willing buyers with either funds on hand or sufficient credit to make the purchase. So yeah that 6T gotta come from somewhere.

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