And for reference, the two companies that stood out for non-AI capabilities made monitor stands.
This got me dwelling back into the post title, is this influx of AI tools going to be sustainable, or is there going to be an impending crash leaving only the ‘best and brightest’ on the other side?
/s maybe
Now there are n use cases (10 <= n <= 50?). There is no real moat.
What we don't know is, if there will be significant advances, and how useful they will be. But we also don't know that for any other area.
What we do know however is that breakthroughs are rare.
Everybody is now in the hype train. AI here, AI there. I find most of it just annoying.
My guess is this that a reckoning is more probable than the new super feature.
These days it seems even a significant porting of the general public is aware of the overhype. But back then internet wasn't much of a thing so information didn't spread as fast so I imagine a lot of people didn't even know there was a huge hype around the internet.
- Everyone knew the Internet (and now AI) was going to be transformational.
- It was clear it would reshape economies and open up entirely new possibilities.
- But no one really knew what the killer use case would be, or how big any given Internet (now AI) business might get.
So, like a gold rush, huge amounts of money poured in, and everyone hoped their idea would turn into the next massive market.
The way it usually goes is that the prize goes to best real life application. It's not entirely clear what that is just yet. I was involved in web commerce in the 90s and there was a good bit of casting around looking for applications. And not really any mobile use, though I did a bit of that too. It's hard to visualise the future.
We are currently in the early phase where people are creating code messes with little oversight and future people will be expected to build on them, which will either take expanded effort or complete re-writes from scratch.
The quality of all products will suffer for the foreseeable future.
It's now a several times a day occurrence for me of trying to help someone figure out a problem, and when I ask them why they did that, the answer is always that the AI told them to.
If the people that are using these tools don't know right from wrong, it's a recipe for disaster.
This problem is amplified in non-technical fields where people are creating tools for businesses without even the knowledge of what a code review is.
AI will be around forever, and the problems it will create are immeasurable, but unfortunately, it will likely always be seen as the solution to the problem as well.
If the two graphs so far look the same you have your answer. Ultimately this will not be a finance problem but a market and behavior problem. People are predictable with confidence.
From an employees standpoint, most of the employers weren’t profitable and when they went out of business, employees weren’t having a hard time finding a job.
But honestly, it was only people working for “tech” companies. I was working in Atlanta as a Windows developer with four years of experience working for a boring old bill printing company. Other profitable enterprise companies were still hiring like banks, insurance companies, airlines, etc.
Today, all of the major tech employer’s are trillion dollar profitable companies with real businesses that are not dependent on Gen AI. They have been using machine learning forever and still will.
Every company doesn’t need to be a software development shop. But every company doesn’t need to be into data analytics.
On the other hand, from the investor’s standpoint, the only publicly traded company that will live or die by AI is Nvidia - and Tesla which has always been a meme stock. If investor money is lost in the private market, who cares?
Yes I know that there is a push to allow private equity investing in 401K plans and pensions. I really only have sympathy for pension fund holders who don’t have a choice.
In reality most things go in an S curve and the excitement fades in a rather boring way. People were worried about bubbles in 2016, but they never really happened.
There was never a mobile bust, or a social bust, or a big data bust. These things just got boring after a while and the valuations stabilised. Sometimes companies went bust and sometimes they kept growing, but the super exponential growth in validation stopped. And we moved on to talking about the next thing.
I think its better to describe AI as a big shake up. Like a Cambrian explosion of sorts.
We will see tons of bankruptcies, in both AI and not AI companies. A ton of low profile ones and likely many high profile ones. It's just the nature of it.