Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:
When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.
This has been pretty much the way of the Tech Industry since the Internet bubble burst around 2000 - people who didn’t ride that bubble up to its peak were almost immediately trying to inflate a new bubble (along with some people who did ride that previous bubble up but wanted to make even more money) hence ideas like “Web 2.0” popping up already in the early 2000s.
It’s why the Tech Startup ecosystem has never again been the domain of naive techies trying to do cool stuff that it was in the 90s and now it’s all about Pitching and Networking To Find Investors and the Founders are mainly people from salesmanship-heavy backgrounds (Finance, Marketing, MBAs) rather than people from a STEM background.
The entire thing is now a machine to pump up investment bubbles.
Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:
From the incomparable line goes up
This has been pretty much the way of the Tech Industry since the Internet bubble burst around 2000 - people who didn’t ride that bubble up to its peak were almost immediately trying to inflate a new bubble (along with some people who did ride that previous bubble up but wanted to make even more money) hence ideas like “Web 2.0” popping up already in the early 2000s.
It’s why the Tech Startup ecosystem has never again been the domain of naive techies trying to do cool stuff that it was in the 90s and now it’s all about Pitching and Networking To Find Investors and the Founders are mainly people from salesmanship-heavy backgrounds (Finance, Marketing, MBAs) rather than people from a STEM background.
The entire thing is now a machine to pump up investment bubbles.