People paid a lot for beanie babies and various speculative securities on the assumption that they could be sold for more in the future. They were assets people aimed to resell at a profit. They had no value by themselves.
The source of revenue for AI companies has inherent value but is not a resell-able asset. You can't resell API calls you buy from an AI company at some indefinite later date. There is no "market" for reselling anything you purchase from a company that offers use of a web app and API calls.
I think the article's premise is basically correct - if we had a 10x explosion of productivity where is the evidence? I would think some is potentially hidden in corporate / internal apps but despite everyone at my current employer using these tools we don't seem to be going any faster.
I will admit that my initial thoughts on Copilot were that "yes this is faster" but that was back when I was only using it for rote / boilerplate work. I've not had a lot of success trying to get it to do higher level work and that's also the experience of my co-workers.
I can certainly see why a particular subset of programmers find the tools particularly compelling, if their job was producing boilerplate then AI is perfect.
The fundamental difference of opinion people have here though is some people see current AI capabilities as a floor, while others see it as a ceiling. I’d agree with arguments that AI companies are overvalued if current models are as capable as AI will ever be for the rest of time, but clearly that is not the case, and very likely, as they have been every few months over the past few years, they will keep getting better.
Oh, of course not. Just like people weren't paying vast sums of money for beanie babies and dotcoms in the late 1990s and mortgage CDOs in the late 2000s [EDIT] unless there was value in the product.