alt Hacker NewsIndeed, 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.
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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.
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.