I was born in 1997 and have no clue how the .com bubble looked like. With the way they are advertising AI right now (it will solve every problem on earth) it just annoys me, and what’s worse people who aren’t in the ML/DL field are buying it too. I am just curious how the .com was like and how it compares to the current AI bubble?
Interesting question.
It’s different in the broad mechanics of the hype and the technology, obviously. AI isn’t really a basic information delivery mechanism like the 00s web was. It’s a lot more than that, thanks to the progress we’ve made since then. Plus, it has a lot more potential to impact artists and creative types. The web promised to propel them. Generative AI is threatening to make them completely obsolete.
But a lot of the psyche/sales hype stuff is very similar. The dot com boom started out all about democratizing the world and giving everyone a voice. Then it quickly became a capitalist free for all of coming up with any and every idea to shoehorn the Internet (and especially the web) into every walk of life. And the venture capital money-grabbing frenzy that inevitably led to. So that second aspect is very similar to where we are at right now with AI. And the first aspect isn’t a million miles away from the frequent assurances that AI will better society.
The technology stack for AI is more stable and well thought out than the nebulous web was. But it clearly still has some pretty big implementation challenges. Not to mention the resource/energy ceiling we are currently fighting against.
The potential of AI to destroy huge swathes of professions is massively different from the early commercial web. Back then the web was widely seen as a new source of careers, not a career killer.