Can it be an investment bubble but also a hugely promising technology? The FOMO-frothing herd will over-invest in whatever is new and shiny, regardless of its merits?

I recently compared the buildout of data centers for AI to the railway bubbles of the 1800s.

Nobody will deny the importance of railways to the Industrial Revolution, but they also lost a lot of people a lot of money: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-envi...

While there was certainly a software bubble during the early internet, it still took obscene amounts of investments in brand new technologies in the late 90's. Entire datacenters full of hardware modems. In fact, 'datacenters' had to become a thing.

Then came DSL, then came cable, then came fiber. Countless billions of dollars invested into all these different systems.

This AI stuff is something else. Lots of hardware investment, sure, but also lots of software investment. It is becoming so good and so cheap its showing up on every single search engine result.

Anyway, my point is, while there may have been aspects of the early internet being a bubble, there were real dollars chasing real utility, and I think AI is quite similar in that regard.

Yes. But this article argues two things at once - that the technology is itself not useful and not used, and that this won't change in the future. And it also argues that this is a bad investment, at least in the form of OpenAI.

I have very little idea of the second - it's totally possible OpenAI is a bad investment. I think this article is massively wrong about the first part though - this is an incredible technology, and this should be evident to everyone (I'm a little shocked we're still having an argument of the form "I'm a world-class developer and this increases my productivity" vs. "no, you're wrong!" on the other).