AI has a hype cycle and young people are seeing their first one before the next AI winter
Yes. I remember attending a professional conference around 1996 or 1997. One of the presenters spoke about the Internet and how we could supposedly use it in our work. Some people in the audience were doubtful (partly because the live demonstration didn’t go well due to problems getting a dial-up connection) and said it just seemed like a bunch of hype.
Someone in the audience responded, as I recall, “Yes, there is a lot of hype about the Internet now. But it’s clearly becoming useful, and it won’t be hype forever.”
I feel the same way now about LLMs.
So arguable there was no dotcom 'bubble' in the sense that the dotcom stocks weren't overvalued as a whole. (Not all individual stocks did well. But the future is always hard to predict. And stock prices are about expected values of future prices, actually realised futures can differ.)
The dotcom bust was real though: dotcom stocks were way too cheap after the so called 'bubble' burst, in the sense that buying an index of NASDAQ stocks then and holding them until today would have given you crazy outsized returns.