Like the dot com bubble of the 90s burst and left us with the internet
I use AI daily for coding, responding to emails, scaffolding ideas, generating images. Without AI skills, I could not accomplish the same amount of work that I’ve now grown accustomed to getting done in a day. I am not alone here, and as many have said, the AI genie is well out of the bottle — the tech industry could not put it back, even if it wanted to.
However, for folks who have not yet begun using AI skills in their daily workflows, the thought of the current AI bubble bursting, and AI no longer being a thing, must seem to fall within the realm of plausibility.
The phrase, “AI is in a bubble” is heard a lot lately online in forums and videos. And while we’ve all been burned by various speculative bubbles in recent history, the tone with this particular phrase often leans to the side of AI as a passing fad or over-hyped trend.
The simplest way I’ve found of explaining to novices and students is by comparing the current bubble to the dot com bubble of the late 90s. People were registering any random word from the dictionary as a domain name, and startups were adding “.com” to their company names and logos just to increase their valuation. Anything remotely touching the web was considered high-tech and people were jumping on the investment bandwagon.
Of course having a homepage on the web racking up hits means very little, and once the market realized this, things cooled down and prices flattened sharply.
But we still have the underlying internet — companies having websites is now a standard, basic feature in business, expected in order to be taken seriously. You carry internet access around in your pocket. Your car and your television and your neighbor’s doorbell are all logging on to that same basic internet infrastructure.
When the AI bubble bursts, it will be the same. While anything with “.ai” is being gobbled up and over-sold at the moment, it’s only temporary.
But the infrastructure which is currently being fought over and built out, will remain.
Now of course not all the parallels are there. While there are of a lot of small companies everywhere popping up with AI tools or with AI in the name, there is a core of companies driving AI and infrastructure spending; some have called them the Magnificent Seven (Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Tesla). Additionally, I’m not making any comment on stocks or financials, or when a market correction may be appearing; I’m simply mentioning the technology parallels.
The speed of adoption for AI technology is much faster than the first waves of consumer internet and email — people are installing apps and purchasing subscriptions and ballooning user bases overnight. There is also a lot more regulation being drafted and clamping down faster on some of these AI initiatives, across many jurisdictions around the world.
AI is messy right now, with many shaking off the initial hype about replacing humans and still using it as a daily multiplier. Don’t let the hype stun you into inaction or prevent you from learning the skills you need to adapt to the new tech paradigm.
The bottom line is — whether you’re a developer, a medical billing coder, a fireman — get AI skills now. Ten years from now there will still be AI, and you might look back on this bubble with nostalgia, or regret.
(Who knows what our appliances will be doing…)