By this time 26 years ago, the “Dot-Com Bubble” was ready to burst. People who wanted to raise investor money claimed that they could sell anything affordably on a website; three companies were devoted just to pet food and buying ad space on broadcast television.So-called AI is enjoying a similar frenzy. Though they are still just Large Language Models (LLMs), and the best analogy for that is a fancy autocomplete, they are attracting huge levels of financial investment partly because of the potential and then primarily because people want to make money on stocks, not companies.
The Dot-Com Bubble did collapse but progress continued without the hype(1) you can buy dog food affordably on the the internet now, though the big money is artisanal dog food marketed toward wealthy elites. That may be the future for AI in 25 years also. For now, while AI is still a long way off, tasks that academics considered challenging for LLMs, like the 2020 Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark designed to evaluate ability using 57 topics, are now easy for the private sector to master.