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Comment by arcfour | Hacker News Reader

The AI bubble is kind of like the dot-com bubble in that it's a revolutionary technology that will certainly be a huge part of the future, but it's still overhyped (i.e. people are investing without regard for logic).

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We were enjoying cheap second hand rack mount servers, RAM, hard drives, printers, office chairs and so on for a decade after the original dot com crash. Every company that went out of business liquidated their good shit for pennies.

I'm hoping after AI comes back down to earth there will be a new glut of cheap second hand GPUs and RAM to get snapped up.

Right. And same for railways, which had a huge bubble early on. Over-hyped on the short time horizon. Long term, they were transformative in the end, although most of the early companies and early investors didn’t reap the eventual profits.

But the dot-com bubble wasn't overhyed in retrospect. It was under-hyped.

At the time it was overhyped because just by adding .com to your company's name you could increase your valuation regardless of whether or not you had anything to do with the internet. Is that not stupid?

I think my comparison is apt; being a bubble and a truly society-altering technology are not mutually exclusive, and by virtue of it being a bubble, it is overhyped.

There was definitely a lot of stupid stuff happening. IMO the clearest accurate way to put it is that it was overhyped for the short term (hence the crazy high valuations for obvious bullshit), and underhyped for the long term (in the sense that we didn't really foresee how broadly and deeply it would change the world). Of course, there's more nuance to it, because some people had wild long-term predictions too. But I think the overall, mainstream vibe was to underappreciate how big a deal it was.

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