> One thing I’ve noticed with the AI topic is how there is no discussion on how the name of a thing ends up shaping how we think about it. There is very obviously a marketing phenomenon happening now where “AI” is being added to the name of every product. Not because it’s actually AI in any rigorous or historical sense of the word, but because it’s trendy and helps you get investment dollars.
I was reading one famous book about investing some times ago (I don't remember which one exactly, I think it was a random walk into wall st, but don't quote me on that) and one chapter at the beginning of the book talk about the .com bubble and how companies, even ones who had nothing to do with the web, started to put .com or www in their name and were seeing an immediate bump in their stock price (until it all burst, as we know now).
And every hype cycle / bubble is like that. We saw something similar with cryptocurrencies. For a while, every tech demos at dev convention had to have some relation to the "blockchain". We saw every variation of names ending in -coin. And a lot of company, that where not even in tech, had dumb project related to the blockchain, which for anyone slightly knowledgeable with the tech it was clear that it was complete BS, and they almost all the time were quietly killed off after a few month.
To a much lesser extent, we saw the same with "BigData" (who even use this word anymore?) and AR/VR/XR.
And now its AI, until the next recession and/or the next shiny thing that makes for amazing demos pops-out.
It is not to say that it is all fake. There is always some genuine business that have actual use case with the tech and will probably survive the burst (or get brought up and live on has MS/Google/AWS Thingamajig). But you have to be pretty naïve if you think 99% of the current AI company will live in the next 5 years, and believe their marketing material. But it doesn't matter if you manage to sell before the bubble pop, and so the cycle continue.
Hah, I forgot about that, and their subsequent delisting. That was about as blatantly criminal as you could get and in that particular hype train I remember some noise about that but not nearly enough.
I was reading one famous book about investing some times ago (I don't remember which one exactly, I think it was a random walk into wall st, but don't quote me on that) and one chapter at the beginning of the book talk about the .com bubble and how companies, even ones who had nothing to do with the web, started to put .com or www in their name and were seeing an immediate bump in their stock price (until it all burst, as we know now).
And every hype cycle / bubble is like that. We saw something similar with cryptocurrencies. For a while, every tech demos at dev convention had to have some relation to the "blockchain". We saw every variation of names ending in -coin. And a lot of company, that where not even in tech, had dumb project related to the blockchain, which for anyone slightly knowledgeable with the tech it was clear that it was complete BS, and they almost all the time were quietly killed off after a few month.
To a much lesser extent, we saw the same with "BigData" (who even use this word anymore?) and AR/VR/XR.
And now its AI, until the next recession and/or the next shiny thing that makes for amazing demos pops-out.
It is not to say that it is all fake. There is always some genuine business that have actual use case with the tech and will probably survive the burst (or get brought up and live on has MS/Google/AWS Thingamajig). But you have to be pretty naïve if you think 99% of the current AI company will live in the next 5 years, and believe their marketing material. But it doesn't matter if you manage to sell before the bubble pop, and so the cycle continue.