I was around for the dot com boom and bust, and this does not feel similar. The issue with the internet was that much of the value came from network effects that were not there in the late 90s and early aughts when personal computing was desktop boxes with 56k dial up connections. Very much, “if you build it, they will come.” It was the mass rollout of cable modems and then smart phones that changed the math.
There is no cart before the horse here. AI is coming for you, not the other way around. The pessimistic takes are underestimating the impact by at least a couple orders of magnitude. Think smart phones as a lower bound.
I have no idea what capacity people here work with AI, but given my view and experience the pessimistic takes I commonly see on here do not seem realistic.
With the internet, there was a clear value proposition for the vast majority of use cases. Even if some of the specific businesses were poorly-conceived or overly optimistic, the underlying technology was very obviously a) growing organically, b) going to be something everyone used & wanted, and c) a commodity.
All three of those parts are vital for a massive boom like that.
Generative AI is growing some, yes, but a lot of the growth is being pushed by the companies creating or otherwise massively invested in gen-AI. And yes, many people try out ChatGPT's webapp, but that's mostly a gimmick—and frankly, many of the cases where people are attempting to use it for more are fairly awful cautionary tales (eg, the people trying to use it as a therapist, and instead getting a cheerleader that confirms their worst impulses).
Gen-AI may be useful to some people, but it's not going to be a central feature of most people's lives—at least not in the forms it exists in today, or what can be clearly extrapolated from them. Yes, it can help some with coding—with mixed results—but not everyone's a programmer. Not everyone's even an office worker. The internet has obvious useful applications for a plumber or a lawyer; if I hired one of those and they said they were using generative AI to help them in their work, I'd fire them instantly. There are already a bunch of (both amusing and harrowing) stories of lawyers getting reamed out in court for using gen-AI to help them write legal filings.
OpenAI may or may not have a robust moat—I've seen people arguing both ways; personally I suspect lean slightly toward the "not" side—but generative AI as a whole is not something that's an interchangeable commodity the way internet access, or even hosting, is. First of all, in order to use the models that are touted as being advanced enough to actually look like more than spicy autocorrect, you need a serious GPU farm. Second of all, AFAIK, those models are being kept private by the big players like Google and OpenAI. That means that if you build your business on generative AI, unless you're able to both fork out for a massive hardware investment and do your own training to match what the big boys are already doing, you're going to be 100% dependent on another specific for-profit company for your entire business model. That's not a sound business decision, especially during this time where both the technology and the legal aspect of generative AI are still so much in flux.
Generative AI may be here to stay, but it's not going to take over the world the way the internet did.
- internet & ecommerce & online changed the way we shopped.
- smartphones in every pocket changed behaviors around entertainment, communication, and commerce
what behaviors of people will gen-ai change ? perhaps the way we learn (instead of google, we head over to a chatbot), perhaps coding .. all up in the air, and unclear at the moment.
Hindsight is 20/20. The company I worked at went under because people questioned whether enough people would ever buy stuff over the internet to make the business viable. It was very much not obvious then.
> Gen-AI may be useful to some people, but it's not going to be a central feature of most people's lives—at least not in the forms it exists in today, or what can be clearly extrapolated from them…
The problem is that you are going to have to compete with people who are using AI. There is a learning curve, and some people are better at using it than others. Some people know how to use it really well.
> The problem is that you are going to have to compete with people who are using AI.
This doesn't sound as much of a game changer as you seem to think.
Generative AI is a productivity tool, that can help (to an extent) in certain professional settings. It's usage will never be as ubiquitous as the internet (unless you want to build an economy out of users generating memes using AI).
While I find it somewhat useful (although pretty far of how hyped it is) the economics of it are still super unclear. Right now companies are willing to dump money into this because it is fashionable with the investor class, but I don't know how long it will take for it to lose steam.
I know lawyers using it, plumbers using it. My sweet little ol grandma uses it. I depend on it as an office worker.
My belief is that it is similarly transformative as the Internet. The bubble will burst, some use cars will never materialize, others will emerge as costs come down, and as value chains adapt.
Your belief is opposite to mine. Time will tell who is right.
There is no cart before the horse here. AI is coming for you, not the other way around. The pessimistic takes are underestimating the impact by at least a couple orders of magnitude. Think smart phones as a lower bound.
I have no idea what capacity people here work with AI, but given my view and experience the pessimistic takes I commonly see on here do not seem realistic.