A bubble isn't related to whether something is useful or not, it's about speculation and detachment from reality. AI being extremely useful and being a bubble aren't mutually exclusive. It can be the case that everyone finds it useful but at the same time the valuations and investments aren't realized.

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kergonath 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

> A bubble isn't related to whether something is useful or not, it's about speculation and detachment from reality.

See the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s for a perfect example. The Web is still useful, but the bubble bursting was painful.

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dehrmann 6 days ago | parent [-]

The web in 2000 wasn't actually very useful.

	▲	kergonath 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		It was. There were blogs, news, forums, shops. I was buying CDs off Amazon and computers on the Apple Store in 2000. I met my wife on a PHPBB forum. I read hours upon hours of research on the Noldor language on someone’s blog. Jon Stokes and John Siracusa (and many others) were posting on Ars, including what was becoming the future of MacOS. Anandtech was already there, even if it had a lot of room to grow and improve. I really don’t know where you got that impression.

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shoo 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep, there's a big difference between a company and its stock. Even if the company is great, an investment such as a stock can never be good or bad without reference to the price you need to pay for it. A famous example from the dot-com era is Cisco. Great company, but buying Cisco stock at its March 2000 peak was a bad investment -- it was "priced to perfection" and the stock price today, over 25 years later, is lower than the dot com era price.