Just posted a blog post on the AI hype like late 1990 s feed

Question

Just posted a blog post on the AI hype like late 1990 s feedback apprecaited <https twitter com imcharliegraham status 1703876476423356922>

Andreas Ramos · Answer

in 1994 6 people didn t quickly realize anything it took a long time it was 98 99 that it began to really grow

Andreas Ramos · Answer

the dotcom boom crashed because there was massive fraud traffic was wildly exaggerated both future traffic and actual traffic investors realized most of it was fake and they pulled out however good companies also crashed

Andreas Ramos · Answer

I worked through all of this came to SV in 1992 bought my house in Palo Alto in 98 worked at many dotcoms

Andreas Ramos · Answer

today similarities dotcom boom all over again energy excitement an entirely new kind of thing huge potential However this time it s much faster HTML appeared march 93 it was in 95 96 the first serious investing and the public began to notice three years ChatGPT exploded into the world like Minerva we ve gone through five years of dotcom evolution in three months VCs are not going to sleep this time nearly every VC fund has money in AI

Andreas Ramos · Answer

However AI so far is LLMs there are very few consumer services the vast majority of users don t understand how to prompt any mom could use Yahoo in 1996 OpenAI doesn t bother trying to reach the public either a useful consumer product appears in 2024 or the public will lose interest

Charlie Graham · Answer

Thanks for your take and sharing your perspective < Andreas Ramos> I was a 96 undergrad at Harvard and grew up in the SF Peninsula I remember the exact moment of downloading the first image on Netscape in 94 95 It was a game changer for me and all of my roommates and CS buddies There was palpable excitement And then I co founded a chat co browsing company 1998 in the bay area that lasted until 2004 so I also had a front seat on all of this IMHO there was definitely fraud Worldcom etc but the dotcom crashed as everyone was going after eyeballs instead of real revenue and few consumers were willing to spend money on the web as there was too much fear of inputting in your CC At some point investors realized there was no profitable model and the market crashed Fraud also contributed but I didn t remember Fraud crushing Webvan or most of the big names during that era I felt was more imho that they ignored profitability as a metric and that the infrastructure userbase was not there to make the market and cost structure match their aspirations I could be mis remembering though

Charlie Graham · Answer

As for LLMs I may be wrong but I believe LLMs have been around for a few years Using LLMs to write blog posts marketing content has been around since 2021 and before then if you include GPT2 Companies like jasper were all built on that I thought about building one of those in April 2021 GPT4 is definitely a huge improvement though However playing with GPT 4 a lot I believe GPT has big limitations that people are not realizing unless they use it very frequently Tell it to write 100 children s stories and use whatever prompts you want and you ll start seeing it becoming repetitive I stopped after about 30 It feels like it gets to a local maxima of what it thinks is the best children s story And you can find similar limitations with code answering questions etc

Charlie Graham · Answer

Chatting with a lot of people starting AI companies based on LLms I found it super interesting that very few are in production mostly because of accuracy issues They can t get it accurate enough to sell yet They can demo it but can t seem to nail it 98+ of the time which is often required for it to work at scale The ones that are live are the ones where customers are ok with errors or where it is just used as a suggestion It feels like we are still far off from getting a high enough accuracy for a lot of use cases but I could totally be wrong

Andreas Ramos · Answer

the fraud was the wildly exaggerated future traffic hockey sticks investors believed that it wasn t basic fraud like Worldcom there was lots of that it was carnival barker fraud of impossible promises remember Webvan I worked in startups where NYC and LA bizdev people came in and announced traffic projections and the engineering team would burst out laughing it s happening again Sam Peter and others declare AGI will replace 50 of all jobs etc AGI doesn t even exist yet

Charlie Graham · Answer

Ah So totally bogus projections I don t consider that fraud as much as totally irrational projections based on everyone thinking the technology would progress faster than it did I mean Webvan was right Think Instacart Amazon Fresh <http Pets com|Pets com> was right too Their projections were just 5 10 years early

Charlie Graham · Answer

I mean I would argue we have the same thing with AI companies not just AGI but almost all AI companies rn thinking AI will progress at the same rate it did between GPT 3 and 4 For example that eveyrone will use an AI Agent for travel instead of Google Trips Expedia in the next 2 years

Charlie Graham · Answer

Or that GPT will replace Google search in the next year

Charlie Graham · Answer

It proves my article slightly smiling face

Andreas Ramos · Answer

yes very good example Microsoft believed LLM would replace Google search even Google believed it now v unlikely

Andreas Ramos · Answer

there was no web Analytics back then we counted server hits A web page with one cat pix was two hits it took only a short while for some to figure out that a photo could be sliced into ten slices Bingo ten hits OMG eyeballs traffic spikes Why not one hundred slices and 20 pixs on a page Wall Street went bonkers all because they didn t understand hits I still hear this today

Charlie Graham · Answer

Hah I did not know that Thx for sharing I mean it s not much different than today s ad hits where the ad is below the fold I guess People gaming the system Did Webvan or <http Pets com|Pets com> do that or just other more shady sites

Jocelyn · Answer

interesting conversation all else aside I do agree that the zeitgesit does feel eerily reminiscent of the first boom although as this conversation demonstrates its sort of a subjective as to how far that analogy reaches once you get into the nitty gritty The feeling is definitely there though

Charlie Graham · Answer

or as supposedly said by Mark Twain History never repeats itself but it does often rhyme