Tell me if any of this sounds familiar.
In the early 2000s, after the collapse of the Dotcom bubble, a new technology was established to change the pockets of the inventors of humanity and the lines. Risk capitalists invested billions in technology. “This field will provide the largest and most important advance of the current century. It will cause real economic changes, ”said John Wolff from the firm VC Lux Capital.
Technology, said the risk of risk capital and companies, would change the way we all live and work. Would raise humanity. Multiple presidents of the United States arrived at the Bombo train and created agencies and initiatives to support technology and manage their development. The conferences appeared throughout the planet that bear the name of technology, aimed at promoting it and discussing the ethics that surrounds it.
This was how people used to talk about nanotechnology. “In DFJ, we believe that Nanotech is the next great technological 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. Historians will review the next time with no less portento than the industrial revolution, ” said in the mid -2000s.
It sounds a lot like how people talk about AI now.
I thought about nanotechnology yesterday when the stock market fell after the revelation that an AI company in China had developed a competitor to chat at a fraction of the cost. The week is not over, but Nvidia, which manufactures the criticism for the development of AI systems, $ 600 billion in value. That is the biggest loss in market history.
In the 1990s, as the Internet emerged as an important market force, Wall Street hastened to participate in the action. Any company with “Dot Com” or “E” in its name would receive millions of dollars of investment. Pets.com Mania seized the nation. His pet, apparently manifested from nothing, was part of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Everything ended in 2000. People realized that many of these websites did not earn money, or much of anything, and Pets.com lost their investors millions.
But all that capital and risk capital hype had to go somewhere. For a while, he entered Nanotechnology. The scientists had connected doing things with very small materials for decades, but no one had paid a lot of attention. After the accident at the point-com, the nanotechnology became a fashion word and billions of dollars flowed.
“Nano” became a word of marketing hype like “dot-com” before, as “ai” would be in the future. The researchers were delighted as the Money flowed into. Investors promised that nanotechnology would mark the beginning of a new gold era of abundance. The detractors sounded the alarm of self -replicating nanotechnology robots that would eat all biomatter on the planet and Render it in Gray Goo. Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, even wrote a book about it.
President Bill Clinton gave a Speech on nanotechnology In Caltech in 2000. He established the National Initiative of Nanotechnology, an ambitious 20 -year project aimed at guiding technology. President George W. Bush signed The Nanotechnology Research and Development Law in 2003. It gave more federal effective for technology research.
The promised “revolution” did not manifest and the exaggeration of VC disappeared. The adjusted market. Nanotechnology I went anywhere. The advances to do things with very small molecules are happening all the time and wildly improving our lives. Nanotechnology is used today in manufacture of semiconductors, Food productionand medicine. What is different is the pump level VC.
Artificial intelligence is in a space similar to that which nanotechnology was in the early 2000s, but the numbers are very different. There are tens of thousands of new companies compared to 1,200 Nanotech. Nanotech received billions in VC funds, AI has received hundreds of billions. Nanotechnology was popular and has changed the world, but did not change the economy around a sick nuclear energy market.
What is happening to the stock market this week is strange. I will not call it a bubble, but it is a change of vibes. A more important Chinese company dethroned the most popular chatbot in the world at the top of Apple’s app store. In a normal market that should not send actions of the hardware company responsible for training the fall of AIS. It is a sign that, like nanotechnology before, AI promises the moon.
But, also like nanotechnology before, I think AI is here to stay. Both were not new when they captured the market. AI creates a lot of terrible slope, but it can also be used forever. We use the spelling concealer every day without thinking about it as an AI system. But the original spelling concealer is an product of the Stanford artificial intelligence laboratory. He left in 1971.
What we must do is be careful with false prophets. It is not difficult to do. They are not very creative and, from nanotechnology to AI, they use a lot of the same language. Think about the small jurvetson speech that I cited at the beginning of this article and take a look at the writing of the CEO of Operai, Sam Altman.
Altman once wrote a long blog he called “Moore’s law is for everything. “The banner at the top was a sea of dollar tickets. Like Jurveston before him, he said that AI would mark a new phase of Moore’s law. Like Jurveston before him, he promised that AI is a part of a new phase change in humanity with the industrial revolution. I pay you to use.