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?
I was alive during the dot com bubble and I don’t think normal people even noticed it. The web was a lot less centralised back in those days and stayed that way for a while. The websites that people were actually using didn’t go anywhere when the bubble burst but there was a lot more website turnover in those days anyway. People were always moving to a better newer service and there were multiple search engines that people used. Then AltaVista turned up and that was the engine to use, until Google turned up and everyone started using that. I still remember when Google was this cool new thing that most people hadn’t heard of.
A lot of people didn’t notice it, but it affected a little of people. That was the time of supply-on-demand, just in time manufacturing, rapid prototyping, and a lot of other behind the scenes stuff that was caught up in the bubble. Despite the name, it wasn’t all about websites. It was about unregulated venture capitalism.
Fast forward to AI, and there’s a lot more regulation, and barriers to entry. You’re not getting money thrown at you for having an idea… with AI today; a few well financed companies are spending lots of money on AI and then selling their services to established players to include the AI tagline.
In my view, AI has closer ties to the Cloud Services bubble.