*Warning: long but hopefully worthy comment.*

I think the term bubble is getting mistreated here. Poor little thing.

If enthusiasm and investment is a measure of “bubble” then every new investable technology wave that comes along will be one.

If “bubble” means “getting more resources thrown at it than its potential justifies” then we have an entirely different conversation going on.

So, which is AI? I’d argue the potential for AI is larger than the entire Internet thus far, though whether LLMs specifically are going to pan out is another thing entirely.

What we have is the tendrils of capitalism reaching out to try to fund the next general purpose technology (gpt!) wave, which when you think about it makes a lot of sense. They aren’t bubbles, they are experimentation phases while the mechanisms of our society attempt to determine the breadth and depth and general utility of the new innovations. Call that a bubble if you must, but it’s really something else.

Rather than use the bubble terminology, I prefer to think of things as waves as it’s entirely more accurate.

Here’s a well written summary by Nicholas Bergman so I don’t have to write so much:

Charles A. Beard warned almost one hundred years ago: “Technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity.” This image of technology is bleak at best, but there is a lot of truth tucked away inside this Technological Determinist statement.

Throughout the history of mankind, significant changes in how society, business and culture function has followed key developments in our technology. Across thousands of years, humanity has ridden five distinct technological waves – waves that have all uniquely impacted how we experience the world, and waves that have all eventually taken backstage and given way to a new on one.

The five waves that have crashed into our society so far are as follows: “Early Mechanisation” (1770s to the 1830s), “Steam Power and Railways” (1830s to 1880s), “Electrical and Heavy Engineering” (1880s to 1930s), “Fordist Mass Production” (1930s to 1970s) and “Information and Communication” (1970s to 2010s). We are now beginning to see the surge of mankind’s sixth wave: “Miniaturization”.
How do we know? Because all prior waves have been charged by the same forms of technologies: General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) to be exact. GPTs are paramount in connecting the past with the present, and, in the most reductionist sense, a GPT is a single generic technology that develops over time but can still be described as the same technology over its lifetime – the printing press, the wheel and the computer are three quintessential examples of GPTs. Initially, these technologies have immense space for growth and are eventually widely adopted – permeating different sectors and industries over time.
In order for a new technological wave to grow, there must be at least one, but often multiple GPTs that drive it. These technologies themselves must go through a three-step process in order to reach widespread adoption: experimentation, expansion and transformation.

Taking cars as an example, at first, no-one really understood the applications of this new technology, it wasn’t viewed as a great method of transportation and was just a novelty way of getting from A to B – this was its experimental phase. Following this, the expansionist phase, where we begin to see interesting innovative use cases as businesses incorporate the technology into their scopes, and a democratization of the technology due to increased affordability and reliability. Finally, we see the transformational phase, characterized here by the emergence of suburbs, drive-in cinemas and shopping malls. Essentially the technology began to transform how society worked, how society was now experienced was determined by this new technology.

So, calling it “a bubble” cheapens what it is. It’s phase 1: experimentation. And in many ways Cory is following the same template when he talks about whether it will leave anything behind or not, but it’s not a pessimistic process like the term bubble is implying. It’s a deeply healthy and recurring process of humans exploring new technologies in order to determine whether they are a general purpose technology and whether it can be, and how, widely deployed.

This really puts some perspective on the crypto wave as well. If you think of it as a giant beta to see what worked and what didn’t, with eventual deployment of solid working solutions for digital exchange finding foothold, it’s hard to see it as a “failure” as that nomenclature is again a diminishment of what is simply the healthy and natural process of exploring new technology waves for broad purpose and suitability.

Whether you believe that “miniaturization” is the wave is not the point though. We may not know exactly what form the wave will take until it’s quite obvious, or every investor would be right 100 percent of the time. But the pattern is the point.

If you want to read more, this is where the quotes are from:

https://www.maize.io/cultural-factory/technological-waves/