Ask HN: Is the rise of AI tools going to be the next 'dot com' bust?
23 Dicey84 11 8/13/2025, 9:02:17 AM
For context, attended an Australian based tech expo / conference recently and whilst at the show (I’m sure there were marginally more) only two exhibitors didn’t have the term AI or Agent in there pitch or stand marketing..
And for reference, the two companies that stood out for non-AI capabilities made monitor stands.
This got me dwelling back into the post title, is this influx of AI tools going to be sustainable, or is there going to be an impending crash leaving only the ‘best and brightest’ on the other side?
- Everyone knew the Internet (and now AI) was going to be transformational.
- It was clear it would reshape economies and open up entirely new possibilities.
- But no one really knew what the killer use case would be, or how big any given Internet (now AI) business might get.
So, like a gold rush, huge amounts of money poured in, and everyone hoped their idea would turn into the next massive market.
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There’s also parallels between NVIDIA and Cisco.
When the Internet was in its infancy, Cisco stock soured because the thinking was that Cisco networking is what’s ultimately going to power the Internet. (Much like how NVIDIA powers AI).
But what happened was that, new networking companies entered the market and it was found that the Internet economics was so large it overshadowed the relatively small networking needed for it in comparison.
The way it usually goes is that the prize goes to best real life application. It's not entirely clear what that is just yet. I was involved in web commerce in the 90s and there was a good bit of casting around looking for applications. And not really any mobile use, though I did a bit of that too. It's hard to visualise the future.
These days it seems even a significant porting of the general public is aware of the overhype. But back then internet wasn't much of a thing so information didn't spread as fast so I imagine a lot of people didn't even know there was a huge hype around the internet.
Everyone knew there was this thing called the internet because cable broadband was being deployed everywhere and being sold for less than cost. That company whose name I couldn’t remember went bust I think around 2003(?) and I think AT&T took them over and doubled the price.
I remember someone showing me that you could do to domino’s pizza website and get a free pizza (unlimited orders) just for going to their website. I think that was 2002-3(?). There were lost of giveaways during that era. It all came to a stop as the internet grew and costs pilled up more so than the dot com bust.
A lot of late 90s to early 2000s hype has come true. Today we have substantial companies with no physical office and that have never used physical mail, delivery for everything, and ubiquitous connectivity for devices. It just took about 15-20 more years to get there.
I suspect we will have AI replacing programmers on non-trivial and non-slop projects in 15-20 years.
The social optimism of the late 90s and 2000s about the Internet was mostly wrong though. We didn’t really anticipate either surveillance capitalism or mass disinformation breaking whole segments of the population off from reality. Like most well intentioned people we had trouble even imagining the uses that “dark triad” personality types would have for the technology.
The pessimism around AI is, I think, an overcorrection from the excessive optimism around the net and the web.
Now there are n use cases (10 <= n <= 50?). There is no real moat.
What we don't know is, if there will be significant advances, and how useful they will be. But we also don't know that for any other area.
What we do know however is that breakthroughs are rare.
Everybody is now in the hype train. AI here, AI there. I find most of it just annoying.
My guess is this that a reckoning is more probable than the new super feature.
/s maybe
We are currently in the early phase where people are creating code messes with little oversight and future people will be expected to build on them, which will either take expanded effort or complete re-writes from scratch.
The quality of all products will suffer for the foreseeable future.
It's now a several times a day occurrence for me of trying to help someone figure out a problem, and when I ask them why they did that, the answer is always that the AI told them to.
If the people that are using these tools don't know right from wrong, it's a recipe for disaster.
This problem is amplified in non-technical fields where people are creating tools for businesses without even the knowledge of what a code review is.
AI will be around forever, and the problems it will create are immeasurable, but unfortunately, it will likely always be seen as the solution to the problem as well.