Tell me if any of this sounds familiar.
Venture capitalists invested billions in the tech.
This field will provide the biggest and most important breakthrough of the current century.
Japan’s chemical giant Toray unveils the new plastic made bloodtest chip, which enables to diagnosis various diseases with a drop of blood, almost hundredfold sensitivity of current glass made chip at the nano technology exhibition in Tokyo, 23 February 2005.© Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images
It will cause real economic changes, said Josh Wolff of the VC firm Lux Capital.
It would elevate humanity.
This was how people used to talk about nanotechnology.
It sounds a lot like how people talk about AI now.
Thats the single biggest loss in the history of the market.
Any company with dot com or e in its name would receive millions of dollars of investment.
Pets.com mania gripped the nation.
Its mascot, manifested seemingly out of nowhere, was part of the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade.
It was all over by 2000.
But all that VC capital and hype had to go somewhere.
For a while, it went into nanotechnology.
After the dot-com crash, nanotechnology became a buzzword and billions of dollars flowed in.
Nano became a marketing hype word like dot-com before it, like AI would be in the future.
Researchers were delighted as themoney flowed in.
Investors promised that nanotechnology would usher in a new golden age of plenty.
Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, evenwrote a book about it.
President Bill Clinton gave aspeech about nanotechnologyat CalTech in 2000.
He established the National Nanotechnology Initiative, an ambitious 20-year project aimed at shepherding the tech.
President George W. Bushsignedthe Nanotechnology Research and Development Act in 2003.
It gave more federal cash for research into the technology.
The promised revolution did not manifest and VC hype died away.
Advances in making stuff with very small molecules are happening all the time and wildly improving our lives.
Nanotechnology is used today insemiconductor manufacturing,food production, andmedicine.
Whats different is the level of VC hype.
There are tens of thousands of AI startups compared to nanotechs 1,200.
Nanotech received billions in VC funding, AI has received hundreds of billions.
Nanotechnology was popular and has changed the world but it didnt change the economics around an ailingnuclear energy market.
Whats happening to the stock market this week is weird.
I wont call it a bubble bursting, but it is a vibe shift.
An upstart Chinese company dethroned the worlds most popular chatbot at the top of Apples App store.
In a normal market that shouldnt send shares of the hardware company responsible for training both AIs tumbling.
Its a sign that, like nanotechnology before it, AI is promising the moon.
But, also like nanotechnology before it, I think AI is here to stay.
Both werent new when they captured the market.
AI creates a lot of terrible slop, but it can also be used for good.
We used spellcheck every day without thinking of it as an AI system.
But the original spellcheck is a product of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
It came out in 1971.
What we must do is beware of false prophets.
Its not hard to do.
Theyre not very creative and from nanotechnology to AI, they use a lot of the same language.
Altman once wrote a long blog he called Moore Laws for Everything.
The banner at the top was a sea of dollar bills.
Like Jurveston before him, he said that AI would usher in a new phase of Moores Law.
Like Jurveston before him, hes trying to sell you something.
And its not a dream of the future, not really.
Its just an App he wants you to pay him to use.
And hell, China is giving it away for free.
News from the future, delivered to your present.
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