After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product
Heh. I noticed in the article that Mozilla is regretting betting heavily on VR. Good thing they're moving those resources into something sure to win, like AI.
"Since early 2023, we have experienced a shift in the market for 3D virtual worlds. With the exception of gaming, education, and a handful of niche use cases, demand has moved away from 3D virtual worlds. "
Who could have predicted that AIVR, while potentially compelling in the long term, was, in the current form, just a fad, in 20242014?
A bunch of us did, but we were told we didn't understand how truly revolutionary the technology was.
LLM AI is a fad, but not the same kind of fad as VR. It doesn't need to be integrated into everything, but the technology has genuine utility and will not be going away.
I think the trend for "AI in everything" is stupid, yet I'm running a Vscode plugin that integrates local LLM models and it's very useful.
This is the same sort of thing that can be useful in a browser too. The web is so spammy these days that feeding it to an LLM to summarize and filter it is a legitimate use case.
So, the consumer tech industry relies on hyping up technologies and blanket applying them EVERYWHERE in order to get investor funds. That's literally the reason why. There's investor money in AI and there's also money to be made by lying to people and having them pay for AI-based services.
The answer, as always, is capitalism.
When we're off this AI hype train, keep an eye out for what the "next big thing" is according to techbros and examine it very critically.
I couldn't find any kind of history of tech bubbles that wasn't pro-bubble. Going backwards: "AI", VR, Blockchain/Crypto, ..., Dot Com bubble? I feel like there have to be more examples in there that I'm missing.
The dotcom bubble is a good example of a bubble that's different from VR and crypto.
Massive investments, lots of dumb projects, the underlying tech (the web) still finds widespread use and past the bubble, the dotcom projects that survived are still a massive industry
People think bubbles necessarily collapse to zero because that's what web3 did. It just means the market is inflated
Most of the times they have some value under the hype