I remember there being a lot of innovation in all kinds of directions. The tech looks old and crusty these days if you look back on it but at the time it was exciting, it seemed like something cool and interesting was happening every week.

I think that’s the difference. Back then it was diverse and small companies could quickly gain market share by doing something new and different.

The current bubble is mostly based around a disconnect between what a LLM can actually do, and the hype, VC money, and established tech giants trying to sell a vision of what it might be able to do with more time and investment. There’s little diversity in the tech this time, it’s just LLMs being stuffed into various roles, some of which have utility and many which don’t. That’s why the bubble will burst soon. For every interesting use, like summarizing code there’s an AI powered fridge nobody asked for and nobody cares about.

The other big difference is that while the dot com bubble had the big players participating, many of which are still around today, there was potential for a startup to come along and eat their lunch. Now we just have a bunch of massive tech corporations who are out of ideas, so they’re pushing AI because that’s all they have left to hype because growth must continue at all costs, even if the average consumer couldn’t care less about ChatGPT or CoPilot.