alt Hacker NewsIt's also hard to predict how much money will be burned going down wrong avenues. The internet was the future, but it took a lot of failed companies to eventually land on a sustainable model that brought us the giants we have today.
Railways were also the future, but that didn't stop a rush to build out (often subsidized) lines that were ultimately uneconomical (either because they were corrupt or the planned settlements never arrived).
If AI is similar, then there's going to be a long slowdown on compute spend until the surplus is worked through. A good historical analogy could be the fiber optic buildouts of the late 1990s. The demand for data never really went down much, but the industry eventually commodified and took down some large companies (Nortel, especially)
I rhink there's a difference with AI because -- it brings true value because you pay for the tokens, you only pay for what you use. That is true value.
Compare to just paying for an internet connection, you have bandwidth but not sure what you can do with it that is valuable.
Let's say you use AI to produce software. There;s no limit as to how high the quality you want your software to have. And how fast you want your project to be complete. There's plenty of room for higher quality, and more performant AI. As AI becomes chepaer people will use more of it, they're not going to say "We have enough AI".
Compare to railroads. Yes you pay for the distance travelled but there's a limit to how much people wwill want to travel, how it will benefit them.