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?