Replace it with the internet and it's the difference between Amazon and Sears.

Yes, I mean, in the 00s bubble everybody and their dog needed an internet presence without any idea of what to do with it. The difference is not that between Amazon and Sears, but that between Amazon and the thousands of contemporaneous companies with clueless execs who had no idea what to do with an internet but were told that they now HAD to have one, preferably two.

The difference _is_ between amazon and sears. One was an internet company and thrived, one wasn't and died.

AI will do the same.

That a bunch of companies couldn't figure out how to use the internet is neither here nor there. There were plenty of factories that never figured out how to use electricity. Doesn't mean that steam power is still viable.

Nope, the context was poor return on investment on AI, and the fact that it’s because AI is currently in the overinflated hype cycle part of emerging technologies, just like all the other examples once were.

(Nb. someone using the term "AI" in 2024 can mean two things: either they just use it as a shorthand for referring to the currently hot incarnation of "AI", ie. "generative deep learning models with cross-attention layers", or they have no idea what they’ve talking about. And a priori the latter is much more likely.)

Sure, at this point generative deep learning models are somewhat likely be more like the internet and less like blockchains with regard to being an enabling technology. That doesn’t mean the hype cycle is not real.

Steam power is – and has always been – used to produce most of our electricity, BTW, and it’s only now changing, out of necessity.

Exactly. It's incredible how it's the exact same story every time, repeating every few years.

If your comparison for AI is XML, then you're missing the point of analogies.

you can say something like that only with a power of hindsight, knowing what was a useless fad and what was a ReVolUtioNary TecHnOLOgY

If you think of XML (and JSON, YAML) as a standardized CSV that can handle hierarchy I think that's beyond a useless fad. There are lots of edge cases in parsing data and having standardized tools for that makes it a lot easier for systems to communicate with each other.

I think the hype was there because companies needed to update their data to follow standards and update how that data interacts with other companies. The specifics of XML are less relevant - once things are standardized there can be standardized ways of converting to other formats.

Imagine needing to write custom parsers for every API; not needing that enabled SaaS APIs to be much more practical.

The point is that media hype predicted 500 of the last 2 technological revolutions... and only missed 1 or 2.

(And well, the OP's example of the internet is one that they missed.)