While I agree on the smell I think that the situations are really different. I am not an economist but I think that other than the situation of the huge amount of money in play we are in a really different case. The general user (and I have noticed it especially with today's WWDC) basically doesn't get any benefit from AI (neither LLMs, image generation or photo editing). They were promised living like in Wall-e in 5 years and they are basically still living the same life. White collar jobs slightly benefited from the LLMs and same with programmers (while many say that they can get huge leverage the public results of what software companies produce didn't get the same benefit). Everyone knows the market will crash, nobody knows how much.

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base698 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My father in law owns a small manufacturing business and is not technical at all. His computer skills stop with some CAD and basic excel. He pays for ChatGPT as does his wife and her kids. The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product. Almost every coffee shop I go to has people talking about AI and ChatGPT even in areas with no tech populations.

I still think it could crash, but it's got real users and a mind share like nothing I've ever seen.

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jrmg 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product

The dot com bubble was basically based on regular people buying computers and internet service, and then using them to buy products they used to buy in stores.

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mmcwilliams 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This seems to ignore the fact that millions of non-technical people did pay cash for a product: AOL. And in fact the AOL buyout of Time Warner coincided almost exactly with burst of the dot com boom.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> the AOL buyout of Time Warner To be clear, there is a world of difference between IPOs and LBOs. In the risk they create. And in the risk they signal.

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LargeWu 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These companies are never, ever going to make their money back off of retail customers. It's not even clear if those customers would be profitable at all, let alone enough to justify hundreds of billions in capital expenditures.

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100ms 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The question in my mind is persistence. Everyone goes through the honeymoon phase. I'm absolutely loathing the idea that phones are arriving soon with chatbot junk built deeply into it, enough that the thought is more what if I could maybe just stop using my phone so much. I threw myself at the Llama WhatsApp integration when I first got it, now the idea of having Llama in WhatsApp just feels so dumb.

I was a huge early fan of ChatGPT voice too, but I don't think I've used voice mode anywhere in at least 6 months. The question is what is the right level people are generally going to settle on for the use of these tools in the long term. 80% of my usage isn't much more than a better Google, I could live without it and I could live with cheaper options. I'm not sure the consumer money is going to be there en masse as hoped

Of course it still leaves a huge amount of business cases open, but I suppose the same principle applies. How soon will people tire of talking to robo-voice when they call their bank? etc.

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Waterluvian 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I definitely believe in the broad existence of people like your father in law. What I’m not sure about is how many of them would keep paying if their subscriptions were priced profitably.

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hypendev 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't argue the same.

My parents love using ChatGPT, asking it all kinds of questions. My mom discovered Claude and helps her immensely with her job - where she would have to take it home and work a few hours to be able to finish the tasks on her computer, as her company that still uses Office 98, now Claude does it in 5 minutes.

They fixed so many random issues using it, it is insane. My dad had a bike issue which would otherwise be solved by either trying to find obscure manuals from 20 years ago on random forums with me translating it from english to our language, or by taking it to a mechanic which could take months. This way, he just snapped a few photos, said what the problem is, and in a few minutes he had the fix.

I've built software that uses LLM's for a specific usecase - besides general adoption, professionals in the field contacted me and thanked me for making their lives easier, as the tasks would often take a lot of manual work. These people are earning way more from using my software, than I am from their subscriptions, which is still about 20x more than my API costs are.

While most non-dev people are behind the curve, the impact it has on their lives is becoming bigger and bigger by the day.

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gekoxyz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe I downplayed it too much but I really think this is still "in distribution" (we always have to remember that we are tech savy people and we influence the people that surround us). I see the value, but in my opinion it's not a generational opportunity, but a great acceleration. We are treating it like generational opportunity. That's why I say "everyone know there will be a crash, but noone knows how big that will be". The AI industry is not (in my opinion obviously) worth $ 391B [1] of added value.

[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/artifici...

	▲	hypendev 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It is still "in distribution", that is why when its "distributed" properly, it will surely add much, much more value to the economy. But it is a generational opportunity - we can remove a lot of barriers that come with knowledge, lack of it, access to it and more. Someone can easily get pretty on point medical advice without access to doctors. Get specific engineering advice without engaging with those engineers. We can apply common sense or specific knowledge on scale - in a world where about 50% of people have IQ under 100 and access to knowledge is gated behind lines and payments, this has a huge chance ot improve their lives. And there is the whole shadow inference economy - just for example, a few corporations I have worked with in insurance and telecommunications have been slowly introducing it inside their workflows and their data tooling, being able to clean data, tag it, analyse it in a way that before would probably cost them billons in human costs. One of them has a database going back to the 80's, with data being formatted and reformatted in all shapes and sizes, coming back all the way from paper records for some of their oldest clients. Cleaning this up was unimaginable before as a "something we can do in a day" project, but was more of a "possible with insane costs". This lead to all further activity being shaped by decisions someone made 40+ years ago, details being lost, data being thrown away or saved in random notes. And there's millions of companies like that all around the world, which can now do "impossible" and become much more efficient and productive for a much cheaper price and in way less time than ever.

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magarnicle 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Office 98

	▲	hypendev 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, my bad, might be 97 running on windows 98 - but yes, this is a giant corporation serving hundreds of corporate customers and a few hundred thousand private ones, using nearly 30 years old software because the management does not see reasons to upgrade and spend the extra cost associated with it. New machines and Windows XP are only used by upper management. Worst part? Their whole software stack is running on some version of Visual Basic, written by a dude that did not trust "others code" so he wrote everything from scratch, and retired about 5 years ago. Nobody knows how any of it works, or has any clue. The company will continue to run it and pay him for consultations as long as he is able to do it.

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jghn 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think that the situations are really different

Keep in mind that people said this before both of those crashes.That's the problem with bubbles. It's impossible to say if this time really IS different.

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charcircuit 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is ton of utility. I use it all the time to study, to look up what's happening in the world, to understand the context behind what others are saying, cooking recipes, and much more. Considering LLMs have access to tools for searching the internet they have a superset of the capabilities of Google and consumers got a lot of value from Google. In fact from putting ads on the search results Google has made billions of dollars from such consumers getting value from their service.

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Eufrat 5 hours ago | parent [-]

When you ask it to give you a digest of current events or as a study aid how are you ensuring that what your reading is a valid representation of the source material? Has it never given you false information?

	▲	thimabi 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not OP but, anyway, AI output should be treated like any other source material. I study from reputable sources every day and never cease to be amazed by how many errors or misconceptions they have. Peer-reviewed articles, books from renowned scholars, news from major publications… regardless of the source, false information and contradictions accumulate. I’d wager that AI, besides helping me uncover these issues in the literature, has had a lower error rate than most of the materials that I read on a daily basis.