I don't think this is just another bubble about to burst. I mean, the bubble bears have been talking about the imminently bursting bubble since 2016. The past couple years are what that burst bubble looks like. Hype-driven companies going out of business, disappearing unicorns, pullback on VC, massive layoffs, bank implosions, tons of tech stocks pulled back by 70-90%, consequences on the likes of Theranos, SBF, etc.
The current AI wave is 95% hype (ultimately useless/broken crap invoking LLM APIs or AI art app du jour) but some of the companies are clearly useful (transcription, summarization, categorization, code generation, next-gen search engine, etc.) and will disrupt traditional services and scale large.
And AI infra companies (AI hardware, AI software on top of hardware, and generic AI model SaaS) will make tons of money as those app companies scale.
What ElevenLabs is doing with synthesised voices is absolutely amazing. Not quite fully realistic yet, but they're the best I've ever heard.
In addition 2minute papers viewers have seen that AI generated media is coming fast, soon we'll go from Unity/Unreal having an AI "assistant" that can generate models "make a chair for two characters in the same style as this single person chair" to "based on the current information you know about this game world, generate a new zone for the player that includes x, y, z challenges, resources. Create models, textures, animations for all of this" etc. And this is only implications for making games, let along all the other stuff we could get it to do.
The video on automatic animations (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAbLsRymXe4 and others) is super cool, once refined it's going to be possible to have a system that can: generate a character model, texture it, automatically animate it for that particular character (young, old, how many limbs) and adjust as needed "right foot becomes injured, so limp" generated voices and unique dialogue set within the realm of the overall game world. I think main plots will still be controlled by game makers, but interaction with rando npcs/side-quests could be totally organic.
That is incredible, thanks for the link! It kind of reminds me of the invention of the music synthesizer. Suddenly you could create any sound, fluidly and interactively.
You are correct that the overall economic backdrop is quite different from the late 90s.
Nonetheless, the AI news cycle is continuous (like .COM was) and the attribution of NVDA's +25% romp to the prospects of AI grabs the attention of retail investors, who tuned in to see AVGO +20% and the likes of MSFT, TSLA, NFLX and GOOG add 5% in 2 days. The longer that goes on, the more we'll see investors looking for reasons that companies will benefit from AI and want to buy in, then, companies that don't have a strong AI story will need to get on the train and start buying all the AI startups that have materialized over the last couple of years. Then, we start seeting AI IPOs with increasingly sketchy histories. (sorry, .COM PTSD kicking in...)
All this could happen in a weak market. In fact, strong returns in AI during a weak overall market will simply call more attention to it.
The current AI wave is 95% hype (ultimately useless/broken crap invoking LLM APIs or AI art app du jour) but some of the companies are clearly useful (transcription, summarization, categorization, code generation, next-gen search engine, etc.) and will disrupt traditional services and scale large.
And AI infra companies (AI hardware, AI software on top of hardware, and generic AI model SaaS) will make tons of money as those app companies scale.