Not to say the internet is in a great state now, but I suppose it's better than the projected state had the bubble never burst. 🤷‍♂️

I'm not sure AI in this form will ever find a trillion-dollar problem to solve that would justify the sheer amount of money being burned on it. It's too limited in its capacities and too inefficient for what little it can do reliably.

If a significant technological breakthrough comes along that permits actual reasoning and evaluation, coupled with some capacity to reliably extract such reasoning tasks from natural language input, its capabilities might expand enough to actually fill some of the roles it has been hyped up for.

Simultaneously, it would need a massive improvement in efficiency (both in terms of cost and in energy and water demand) to make it financially feasible.

I think the comparison would work better if, say, some new removable storage medium LargeDisk had been all the rage for transfering large amounts of data, and everyone was building LD factories and founding LD Express services to facilitate fast delivery of large amounts of data. You just call a data distributor, such as a video rental service, order a few movies and a few hours later a courier arrives. You hand them the LD from your last order to return, then take the new back to your home cinema and plug it in.

Then along comes high-speed internet. Suddenly, transferring LDs is cumbersome and slow, when you can just stream those movies faster. No more ordering in bulk to make the delivery fee worth it, no more waiting for hours. LDs persist, but they become part of your home cinema instead, the place where such movies are stored.

Sure, the demand for LDs will briefly collapse, then steadily rise as more people build their own home cinema, but it won't be for the LD's merit alone.

Oh god.