alt Hacker NewsIt matters to the comparison being made between the dot com boom and an ai boom, they have completely different fundamentals outside of the hype train.
There were not as many consumers buying online during dot com boom.
To the extent currently more is being spent on AI than anything in the dot com boom.
Nor did companies run their businesses in the cloud, because there was no real broadband.
There’s no doubt there’s a hype train, there is also an adoption and disruption train, which is also happening.
I could go on, but I’m comfortable with seeing how well this comment ages.
I don't pay anyone for an image generator AI, because I can run an adequate image generator locally on my own personal computer.
My computer doesn't have enough RAM to run the state of the art in free LLMs, but such computers can be bought and are even affordable by any business and a lot of hobbyists.
Given this, the only way for model providers to stay ahead is to spend a lot on training ever better models to beat the free ones that are being given away. And buy "spend a lot" I mean they are making a loss.
This means that the similarity with the dot com bubble can be expressed with the phrase "losing money on every sale and making up for it in volume".
Hardware efficiency is also still improving; just as I can even run that image model locally on my phone, an LLM equivalent to SOTA today should run on a high-end smartphone in 2030.
Not much room to charge people for what runs on-device.
So, they are in a Red Queen's race, running as hard as they can just to stay where they are. And where they are today, is losing money.