alt Hacker News> having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s
Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?
I don't and wouldn't claim that AI is completely useless, I personally use it for at least a couple hours out of each working day and feel that it boosts my productivity significantly. My point is that the kind of benefits we're seeing from AI are not the ones we expected, and the difference between expectation and reality doesn't seem to have sunk in for most. I regularly hear friends talk of the post-scarcity future which is just around the corner, something like the culture Minds from Ian M. Banks, and this pseudoreligious narrative seems to be what the big AI players are deliberately selling. What I'm actually seeing is something more akin to Mr Meeseeks from Rick and Morty.
> So, you’re committed to falling for the next one, too, eh?
Haha, no. The point was that I've seen better things in the long winters between hype cycles than in any hype cycle.
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> Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?
To a degree. There was breathless expectation that this was a turning point for commerce, government and society and that everyone had to stake their claim now. Everything was going to change.
What was it going to change into? Beyond "$OLDTHING but on the Internet!!!", nobody really knew. Those first steps were just webbifying existing processes, stumbling along, refining what was reasonably successful and dumping that which wasn't.
It was like a black hole; from afar we could vaguely see an event horizon, but the people falling into it had no idea what was happening or where they were in the process.
> Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?
A singularity? No.
One of the early driving obsessions was a coalition dethroning Microsoft (which both did and didn't happen). A battle over closed-vs-open. That story was everywhere.
The main thing I notice is that there's a bit of a difference in the way value is created. Even in the UK the arrival of the web created a lot of early adopter winners — ISPs, design agencies, small dev shops like the one I worked for. And it generated a fair chunk of early money, changed the direction of state monopoly telecom etc.
Early well-bounded successes in 96-98 earned proper money, generated a bunch of press, generated new work. Because they had to: you didn't get access to huge pots of cash to grow with, until you had a product that was on the market and selling. The VCs didn't know you existed.
At the beginning it was small tech industry hustle and actual product creation, and a lot of companies really had the small software company playbook and ran that. You had a lot of PC resellers and systems builders who suddenly found themselves as qualified as anyone to build websites or run ISPs.
The problem after that was everyone's eyes got bigger than their bellies, the projects got too ambitious too soon, the VC money arrived even in the UK, and there were a lot of failures. I perceive the moment the firm I worked for got VC money to be the beginning of the end. I thought my bosses were altogether crazy to take the deal.
We basically were not ready to scale fast — the dot com era really scaled brand new companies in terms of number of employees and scope at a level that was at that time sort of unprecedented except maybe in the semiconductor industry.
Towards the pets.com IPO crash end of things, that is when it started to get unreal in a way that you'd recognise now — people talking about entirely new business models, and you had a running joke that if you just put "… on the internet" at the end of your elevator pitch people showered you with cash. The most insane of these being CueCat: a barcode scanner, but on the internet.
But did we think it would fuck everything up everywhere all at once? No. It was going to make us money and make it easier for everyone to buy and sell things, but it was going to create jobs (and it did for a while). It took until well into the early 2000s for the impact on retail to be truly felt.
Nowadays, companies scale enormously before they make any money, VC cash gets handed over to PhD students who only have the concepts of a plan, freemium tiers do the marketing and everyone is trying to follow the loss-leading market-share growth strategy that Amazon arguably pioneered.
The AI boom is perhaps the peak of that Amazon growth culture, "winner-takes-all" thinking, which was always insane.
If you read the media from 1998 - 1999, there was than overarching message that EVERYTHING was changing. EVERY business needed to be on the Internet right now. Any business that wasn’t investing in the internet was going to be slaughtered. Brick and mortar stores were viewed as a negative on your balance sheet. All commerce would be e-commerce in just a couple of years. Startups with no revenue and no prospects for profitability for at least a decade were IPOing for hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes with 2x-3x the valuation of brick and mortar peers in the same segment who had established brands going back decades. Whenever anyone questioned the lunacy, everyone responded that, “This time it’s different because the Internet changes everything. None of the old rules apply.”
And then the crash happened and we learned that all the old rules still did apply, and while the Internet was hugely transformative, the simplistic idea that brick and mortar was bad and e-commerce was the only way forward was fundamentally wrong. Yea, surely some segments did change (Amazon killing Borders and Waldenbooks, Netflix crushing Blockbuster, etc.), but investors ultimately look at profit even if they’re willing to ignore it for a while to grab market share.
So, I suspect that AI is going to play out similarly. Right now everyone is frothy, screaming that anyone not token maxing will die. Yes, AI is going to be impactful, and, yes, it’s not going away. But the hype is surely overblown. When was the singularity supposed to arrive? Three years ago, Altman was saying it was going to be 2025, right?