The gut-wrenching catastrophe of my mid-career as a software developer, The Dot Com Bust, signaled the beginning of of the Internet and the World Wide Web as the primary communications platform of the twenty-first century. Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer expert working for CERN in Switzerland, formulated the World Wide Web: HyperText Markup Language (HTML) addressed and linked with Universal Resource Locators (URLs). In the 1990s, many people recognized its power but few had any idea how to use that power.
Nevertheless, the technical behemoths of today were born in the chaos of the Dot Com Bust.
The mountains of wealth eventually extracted from the computer network had no obvious source in the 1990s. Companies sprang up with the notion that disseminating information online, local high school sports scores for example, had value. Thousands of small and not-so-small companies were formed and attracted investors. The information on these sites was useful and people flocked to visit them. This was obviously important and world-changing, but there was no money to be gained from the sites. The boom fell flat when no return on the investments appeared and massive developer layoffs ensued.
Nevertheless, the technical behemoths of today were born in the chaos of the Dot Com Bust.
In the early two-thousands, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Harvard dorm room, a typical undergraduate male, scheming ways to strike up relationships with girls. Colleges at that time often printed a pamphlet of photographs, mostly high school graduation portraits, of the entering class to help them get to know each other. Zuckerberg latched onto the notion that he could post those photos online and make them interactive. His classmates could introduce themselves and exchange comments from the networked computers in their dorm rooms. The same idea was popping up all over– it was an easy and natural application of the World Wide Web.
As we all know, the idea was a tremendous success. Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Instagram, LinkedIn, and a flock of similar sites began to tie together the lonely geographic diaspora of families and social groups that has marked the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Computer screens and network connections became access ports into a society that was no longer constrained by spatial proximity and the ground-speed of tons of paper.
The fortunes of the twenty-first century were made from this new role for computers and their network, but only after the plumbing for network commerce was established.
Today’s richest man, Elon Musk, with fellow Silicon Valley mogul, Peter Thiel, began his fortune by building a tool for monetary exchange on the computer network: PayPal. Jeff Bezos developed the technology for his online store and brought retail to the network. Larry Page and Sergey Brin opened easy access to the web through their search engine and then laid the foundation for profiting from the deluge of network traffic through interactive online advertising.
The majority of projects that failed during the Dot Com Bust saw the power of the computer network but they did not use it with an effective business plan. Musk, Bezos, and many others saw the power and used it with business plans that made them tons of money.
Today, there’s something magical when ChatGPT produces a report in seconds that reads well and contains information and insights that would have taken a human hours or weeks to research and compose. The let down is that the report contains errors that take hours to find and correct. You publish a raw generative AI report at your peril. Worst, in the end, the report is lifeless and boring, lacking in human spirit, the kind of report that gives bureaucracy a bad name.
The magic is undoubtedly there, like the value of a web site in 1998, but have we found a way to effectively use the magic? I think not.
I am confident that the fortunes of the mid twenty-first century will be made from LLMs and generative AI, but not quite yet. I am prescient enough to tell you that the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of of the mid-twenty-first are coming up for LLMs. Judging from the reports from the business and economic journals, still smarting twenty-five years later from Dot Com giddiness, we are on the edge of an LLM bubble burst, but I guarantee that hundreds of as-yet-unknown innovators are at work in basements, garages, and bedrooms on ideas that will establish a new set of moguls who will dominate the global economy in years to come.
And I can assure you that they will have nothing to do with tariffs or federal troops in Portland or Chicago.