My family got our first computer in 1998, equipped with a state-of-the-art 56k modem. It is difficult to overstate just how exciting the internet was in 1998.
Today, having access to the internet is about as exciting as having electricity or municipal water. It’s just another necessity. Back then, it was an incredible novelty. I could get on my preferred search engine — AltaVista — and type anything I could imagine into the search bar, then find dozens of websites that catered to my exact niche interest. Believe it or not, there was even a time when it was exciting to receive an e-mail! Any e-mail! It is difficult to imagine.
Back in the 1990s, the internet was nearly indistinguishable from magic. How many terrible ‘90s movies are there where a hacker uses the internet to do something impossible, like take control of an airplane or jam a bad guy’s gun? It was a time when the internet seemed to have limitless potential.
But then, of course, the dot-com bubble burst, and we all gradually learned that the internet is mainly useful for selling people stuff and turning teen boys into Nazis.
The dot-com bubble was a delusional period where investors were pumping massive amounts of money into online startups that could potentially be hugely profitable while actually being deeply unprofitable.
Take, for example, Webvan. Founded in 1996 and beginning operations in 1999, the now-forgotten company was the first online grocery store. Located in a handful of cities nationwide, Webvan was a website where you could order groceries and have them delivered right to your door.
Webvan raised about a billion dollars from investors and then promptly blew through all of it in a couple years. The business model required extensive infrastructure and overhead and the company hemorrhaged money. Its stock value peaked at $25.44 per share in December of 1999; in July 2001, it was down to six cents per share and the company declared bankruptcy.
Obviously, ordering groceries online wasn’t a bad idea; 25 years later, it’s become commonplace. But Webvan was too far ahead of its time and the technology and infrastructure wasn’t where it needed to be in order for the company to succeed.
In 2002, it was estimated that those who invested in the online start-ups of the late ’90’s had lost $5 trillion when the bubble burst.
So why the history lesson? Because a whole lot of people are beginning to think it’s about to happen again.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is valued at half a trillion dollars. Investors are pouring billions upon billions of dollars into AI and the sprawling power-hungry data centers necessary to keep AI running. And all of this investment isn’t based on how profitable AI is now, it’s based on how profitable AI will surely be in the future.
Just as it was in the days of the dot-com bubble, investors are claiming that AI will be able to do anything. But what can it do now? Well, it can make soulless art. It can write bland and repetitive articles. And if you want to bring some ideas into a work meeting, just ask ChatGPT to give you a handful of bullet points that read like the output of a focus group comprised of four of the most boring people you’ve ever met in your life and one drunken idiot. And based on some recent articles I’ve read, AI can also talk teenagers into killing themselves and send old men grappling with senility to die in New York as they try to find a Facebook bot that invited them to meet despite not existing corporeally.
In a couple of decades, AI will likely fulfill the promises its CEOs are making today. As it stands now, however, I feel like the dot-com bubble had more potential than the AI bubble. At least back then we got the Pets.com sock puppet dog and some funny Super Bowl commercials instead of computer-generated slop and dried up creeks.
