Over the past year, AI startups have raised some impressive amounts of money. OpenAI raised $10 billion, Anthropic did $6 billion, Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion, and dozens of companies closed rounds in the hundreds of millions.
It's so weird: I got really interested in stocks around 2018, and got pretty good at investing/trading during the pandemic (me and Gen Z, I guess). I read through all of Buffett's letters to shareholders, and since then I've devoured maybe 50 books on investing (audible, mind you - I'm not some psycho or something). I thought a lot about that hype cycle that I lived through in 1995-2000, and how fascinating it would be to live through a similar mania.
I thought maybe that mania was here with crypto, but then meme stonks stole the stage, but both of those combined pale in comparison to this wave. Like the dot com bubble, the claims of fantastic things in the future will, in fact, come true, but like dot com, many people will lose their shirts.
Crypto definitely felt similar within tech/Silicon Valley circles. I got caught up a bit in it myself - it's a long story, but some friends and I managed to get our hands on ~300 GPUs at below market rates and build some very beefy Ethereum mining rigs. But the main difference with AI is how quickly it's spread outside of tech people and is causing both excitement and alarm in the wider world.
I agree! I was curious if this would happen with crypto, but I think the barriers to entry have been just way too much (of course, that all changed about 2 weeks ago with the launch of the first ETF). Ai has taken off like a rocket ship, largely because it's super duper easy to start using and become familiar with. Crypto (from a layperson's perspective) requires some kind of PhD even to get started.
It's so weird: I got really interested in stocks around 2018, and got pretty good at investing/trading during the pandemic (me and Gen Z, I guess). I read through all of Buffett's letters to shareholders, and since then I've devoured maybe 50 books on investing (audible, mind you - I'm not some psycho or something). I thought a lot about that hype cycle that I lived through in 1995-2000, and how fascinating it would be to live through a similar mania.
I thought maybe that mania was here with crypto, but then meme stonks stole the stage, but both of those combined pale in comparison to this wave. Like the dot com bubble, the claims of fantastic things in the future will, in fact, come true, but like dot com, many people will lose their shirts.
Crypto definitely felt similar within tech/Silicon Valley circles. I got caught up a bit in it myself - it's a long story, but some friends and I managed to get our hands on ~300 GPUs at below market rates and build some very beefy Ethereum mining rigs. But the main difference with AI is how quickly it's spread outside of tech people and is causing both excitement and alarm in the wider world.
I agree! I was curious if this would happen with crypto, but I think the barriers to entry have been just way too much (of course, that all changed about 2 weeks ago with the launch of the first ETF). Ai has taken off like a rocket ship, largely because it's super duper easy to start using and become familiar with. Crypto (from a layperson's perspective) requires some kind of PhD even to get started.