Technology

A point the article makes rather well is that something is not a bobble because it doesn’t work, but because the investment going into it is fundamentally irrational in scale. The web still existing has nothing to do if investment or companies tripping over themselves to advertise as a dotcom in the dotcom bobble was rational, percicly because it clearly wasn’t dispite the web being a fundamentally revolutionary tech.

The question when it comes to LLM’s, the near exclusive subject of the marketing around AI, is if bunch of random companies paying for a mildly improved chat bot are actually going to generate enough profit once the marketing hype has worn off and the legal challenges settled to justify the current massive scale of investment, or if instead once the project managers and CEO’s have moved on to the next buzzword to attract investors LLM’s will become a tight market where providers struggle to turn a large enough profit to satisfy investors.

There is a free link in the comments, and your concerns are addressed in the first 3 paragraphs.

This bubble is quite bubbly. There is an AI company for anything and everything now. The market is almost fully saturated with "AI" everything.

Just like the web bubble, all of the intsta-AI shops need to fail so the real tech can grow. AI is never going to go away, but most of the scam companies will fail in due time.

We might have one big consolidation, or several. The hype will die and the quick money will disappear. It's the same story, every time. One the magic AI box stops shitting out dollar bills, we should be good.

It surely is a bubble - so probably a bit different than many other bubbles.

I think OpenAI made the right call (for them) to commercialize when they did - as that pretty much was their only chance to do so. Things has moved fast over the last 1.5 years - and what used to take a decade in tech has happened within months: OpenAI is the dinosaur company grandfathered in, while for already about a year it's been more sensible for anybody wanting to do something with LLM to selfhost (or buy hosting capacity, but put up own data) one of the more open language models, and possibly adjust or re-train it.

As a company owner I get a ridiculous amount of spam for a year already from all kinds of companies building products on top of OpenAI stack, or are trying to sell training or conferences. All those companies will be left with nothing once all the slower users realize technology has moved on. It's like somebody trying to build all their product offerings based on VMWare stack nowadays.

If you as a company want to offer something around AI right now the safest option is probably offering hosting, or if you want to do more hands on, adjustment of open models. Both of those are very risky, and many will go bust in years to come - but not as suicidal as building on top of a closed dinosaur.