Tell me if any of this sounds familiar.
In the early 2000, after the collapse of the Dotcom Bubble, new technology was created to change the pockets of humanity and linear inventors. Venture capitalists have invested billions in the Te Techniko. “This field will provide the greatest and most significant progress of the current century. It will cause real economic changes,” said John Wolff of the VC firm Lux Capital.
The technology, the VC money and the companies said, will change the way we all lived and worked. It would raise humanity. Numerous US presidents have boarded the Hype train and created agencies and initiatives to support the technology and manage its development. Conferences appeared across the planet named after technology, intended to feed it and discuss the ethics around it.
This is how people used to talk about nanotechnology. “At DFJ, we believe that Nanotech is the next great technology wave, the next phase of Moore’s Law, and the link of scientific innovation that revolutionizes most industries and indirectly affects the fabric of society. The next era with no less port than the Industrial Revolution, “Steve Jurvetson, then the managing director of VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson said in the mid-2000s.
It sounds a lot like people talk about AI now.
I thought of nanotechnology yesterday, as the bag fell after the revelation that AI company in China developed a competitor to chat at a a fraction of the cost. The week is not over, but Nvidia – who manufactures the GPUs critical for the development of AI systems – lose $ 600 billion value. This is the single largest loss in the history of the market.
In the 1990s, as the Internet appeared as a major market strength, Wall Street hastened to participate in the action. Each company with “dot com” or “e” in its name would receive millions of dollars of investment. Pets.com Mania took the nation. Its mascot, manifested from nowhere, was part of Macy’s Thanksgiving. It ended before 2000. People noticed that many of these sites did not raise money, or much from anything, and Pets.com lost their investors millions.
But all that VC capital and Hype had to go somewhere. For a while, it went into nanotechnology. Scientists have been inserted by doing things with very small materials for decades, but no one has paid much attention. After Do-Com crash, nanotechnology became a mouthpiece and billions of dollars flowed.
“Nano” has become a marketing Hype word as “Dot-com” before it, as “AI” in the future. Researchers were delighted during the money flowed into. Investors have promised that nanotechnology will release a new golden age. Naysayers rang the alarm of self-replicating nanotechnical robots that would eat all the biomates on the planet and Return it in gray goo. Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, even wrote a book about it.
President Bill Clinton gave Talk about nanotechnology at Caltech in 2000. He established the National Nanotechnological Initiative, an ambitious 20-year project aimed at grazing the Techniko. President George W. Bush Signed The Nanotechnology Research and Development Act in 2003. It gave more federal money for research into technology.
The promised “revolution” did not manifest and VC -hype passed away. The market adjusted. Nanotechnology didn’t go anywhere. Advances about doing things with very small molecules occur all the time and wildly improving our lives. Nanotechnology is used today in semiconductor manufacturing,, Food productionand medication. What is different is the level of VC -hype.
Artificial intelligence is in a similar space that nanotechnology was in the early 2000s, but the numbers are extremely different. There are tens of thousands of AI stations compared to 1,200 by Nanotech. Nanotech received billions in VC funding, AI received hundreds of billions. Nanotechnology was popular and changed the world, but it didn’t change the economy around sick Nuclear energy market.
What happens to the bag this week is weird. I won’t call it a bubble blast, but it’s a vibrant change. Supreme Chinese company has overthrew the world’s most popular talk boot at the top of Apple’s App Store. In a normal market that does not have to send shares of the hardware company responsible for training both AIS riots. It is a sign that as nanotechnology before it, AI promises the moon.
But, like nanotechnology in front of it, I think AI is here to stay. Both were not new when they captured the market. AI creates many terrible slopes, but it can also be used for well. We used Spellcheck every day without thinking about it as an AI system. But the original spell is a product of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It appeared in 1971.
What we need to do is keep false prophets. It’s not difficult to do. They are not very creative and from nanotechnology to AI, they use a lot of the same language. Consider Jurvetson’s small speech, which I quoted at the beginning of this article and look at the writing of the General Director of Openai, Sam Altman.
Altman once wrote a long blog he called “Moore Law is for everything. “The banner at the top was a sea of dollar banknotes. As a courtyard before him, he said that Ai would appear in a new phase of Moore’s law. As a legulent before him, he promised that AI was part of a new phase change in humanity At the same time as the industrial revolution. gives it away for free.
