Comment by pseudosavant
Comment by pseudosavant 12 hours ago
The dotcom bust killed companies, not the Internet. AI will be no different. Most players won’t make it, but the tech will endure and expand.
Comment by pseudosavant 12 hours ago
The dotcom bust killed companies, not the Internet. AI will be no different. Most players won’t make it, but the tech will endure and expand.
The difference is that the Internet was actually useful technology, whereas AI is not (so far at least).
I think you're exaggerating a little, but aren't entirely wrong. The Internet has completely changed daily life for most of humanity. AI can mean a lot of things, but a lot of it is blown way out of proportion. I find LLMs useful to help me rephrase a sentence or explain some kind of topic, but it pales in comparison to email and web browsers, YouTube, and things like blogs.
Or endure and contract.
The key difference between AI and the initial growth of the web is that the more use cases to which people applied the web, the more people wanted of it. AI is the opposite - people love LLM-based chatbots. But it is being pushed into many other use cases where it just doesn't work as well. Or works well, but people don't want AI-generated deliverables. Or leaders are trying to push non-deterministic products into deterministic processes. Or tech folks are jumping through massive hoops to get the results they want because without doing so, it just doesn't work.
Basically, if a product manager kept pushing features the way AI is being pushed -- without PMF, without profit -- that PM would be fired.
This probably all sounds anti-AI, but it is not. I believe AI has a place in our industry. But it needs to be applied correctly, where it does well. Those use cases will not be universal, so I repeat my initial prediction. It will endure and contract.