Today, though, I see companies like Tesla and OpenAI and cryptocurrencies gain gigantic enthusiastic followings without a whole lot of evidence of massive adoption and product/market fit. It’s pretty clear that underlying the enthusiasm is an economic interest in their success. That doesn’t alone negate the validity but without the adoption being self evident it’s very difficult to set aside my skepticism.
I remember walking down the magnificent mile in Chicago and going into an Apple Store for the first time and seeing and touching an early iPod nano. I knew right away that the device was an amazing leap forward. I of course didn’t predict the iPhone and Apple becoming today’s apple but I remember the “wow” factor that so many of these newer products lack. Again, I sincerely hope to be proven wrong here as I want better products!
like people used to be able to travel before cars as well, cars didn't solve a new problem and the world didn't have any demand for them too. but once they became available, regardless of whether someone knows it or not, the whole world needed cars. now the car builders control the demand because they can't instantly scale up the supply
AI is similar to that but people can scale it pretty quickly to the whole world, there are a number of efficiency problems being solved in the world using AI. a couple of years ago I had to research and read atleast 1 hour worth of content to find out the information that I needed, google was good but still it required 1 hour. now its hardly a couple of minutes with chatgpt in many cases.
efficiency problems usually don't manifest in demand, people adapt to the status quo