Karpathy's Slack bot 'paradigm' shows AI is a bubble, just like dot-com

A former OpenAI and Tesla AI leader calls Anthropic's Claude-in-Slack a 'new paradigm,' while critics see hype. The author argues the AI boom mirrors the dot-com era, where both skeptics and believers were right. He proposes a framework: ask what AI enables that we couldn't do before, rather than picking a mood. He plans to test this hypothesis in a series, starting with the assumption that models won't become dependable enough to settle the debate.

The only thing separating right twice from backwards twice was understanding.
  1. bko

    Was dot com a bubble?

    If you could transport yourself to the late 90s, would you try to convince people that the internet's impact on the economy would be no greater than that of the fax machine by 2005.

    Or was it just some companies were overvalued?

  2. madeofpalk

    The instructive part about the comparison is that believing "AI is a bubble" doesn't mean saying that AI is worthless. After all, after the dot-com bubble burst the internet still existed and continued to transform the whole world.

  3. wulfmann

    AI on AI

  4. topheroo

    This might be interesting, but it reads so strongly like AI slop I had to stop.

  5. sublinear

    This blog post is so rambly that I don't think this discussion will go anywhere beyond the usual AI good/bad arguments. This is exactly the sort of thing that frustrates HN.

    Since we're not banning these submissions outright, we should maybe move them to their own filter (like "new", but exclusively for "AI" rants)? Somewhere, anywhere, very very far away from the rest of HN.

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2026-08-05