It's worse than it was. Here are some trends.

(1) Big Tech in the U.S. is like the way the car industry was in the 1970s in the U.S. Still thinking it is the best of the world and many onlookers agreeing but deeply rotten inside.

Facebook and Google, for instance, are still riding high on monopolies in two sided markets. Advertisers have nowhere to go because the audience is there, but without revenue from advertisers, new publishers and social media can't fund efforts that would get them an audience.

Amazon, Netflix, and Uber on the other hand look "successful" because they are overcapitalized and able to lose money on all or some of their product lines. You'd have an easy time selling half-priced taxi rides too if you had $25 billion of investor's money to spend.

The real innovation in e-Commerce and social media is happening in India and China because the markets aren't locked up tight by monopolists there, that's the real story behind Tik Tok. AMZN was a leader in e-commerce 25 years ago but... That was 25 years ago and that is how you say "Sears and Roebucks" in Internet time!

(2) Crypto and NFT are obviously an effort to move money from one pocket to another without any value being created or transferred, not much more to say there except...

(3) Facebook has been chasing the virtual reality dream for quite some time, you might recall there was an AR scam being pushed by "Magic Leap" in the last decade and Hololens was a thing too, the Army even was talking about buying a Hololens for each and every soldier until they discovered that soldiers couldn't shoot straight while wearing one.

Last year though, Facebook got universally panned when they linked their successful efforts in VR Hardware to their unsuccessful efforts in VR Software (Hint: Horizon Worlds isn't fun, it's like a summer camp where you're expected to entertain itself) and with the NFT moment. It was a big mistake. See the following for a good analysis of why "the metaverse" is doomed as it is conceptualized:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

(4) Eliezer Yudkowsky is up in arms about ChatGPT because ChatGPT is superhuman at bullshitting and can bullshit better than he can! People who were hoping they could get rich without trying with NFTs now think ChatGPT can write their pitch deck. Medium.com is in crisis because the kind of person who was too lazy to maintain or promote a blog was always too lazy to write a blog.

What I'll say is this though. NLP stuff that was beyond state of the art at a startup I was working at 5 years ago is now easy, and if you look here

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour

you'll see 13 uses of transformers listed and prompt-driven text generation is just 1 of them. Seduced by ChatGPT's bullshitting capabilities people will be amazed at the 70% accuracy of GPT-3, the 75% accuracy of GPT-4, the 77% accuracy of GPT-5, the 78% accuracy of GPT-6. People who learn how these models actually work how to train them on specific tasks will (a) run them on their own computers under their own control, (b) run models orders of magnitude smaller, (c) get 95%+ accuracy on well-specified problems with modest amounts of data, (d) have access to much better models 6 months from now.