alt Hacker News> Railroads, semiconductors, plastics, networking... the utility was there for all of them, and so was the potential profit.
I wonder why so few people make the comparison to the recent VR hype. We heard the same things there about its unlimited potential, how it's inevitable that we will soon resolve all its shortcomings and that it will become ubiquitous.
I still believe VR will eventually live up to its potential, but no one can deny that bubble has popped after Meta took a huge loss on it. It took too long to resolve the hard problems so the timing didn't work for them.
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Dot com crash is a mush better comparison. Over promise and under delivery in a immature market.
Because VR failed to deliver at all. The experience is narrow, isolating, and frankly pretty horrible. People get motion sickness. The set of games is limited never mind the set of non-gaming activities. AR similarly has a lot of issues like narrow FOVs, low resolution, and brightness issues.
VR is a toy with a few very narrow areas of application in industry. That does not describe the current status of AI.
> I wonder why so few people make the comparison to the recent VR hype.
AI is already a gigantically transformative technology, with a staggering amount of paid consumption, and virtually everyone I know uses it every day, where I don't know anybody who regularly uses VR in any form.
The ship has absolutely sailed on "is AI a world-changing technology", where "are the leading AI companies worth what's been paid for them" is a completely open question.
The major problem with VR is that it simply doesn't have a good use case beyond the initial wow effect. AI certainly does.