Amid real advances, there is so much hype that people forget the Dotcom Bubble (1995–2000) and its inevitable bust — too much hype chasing too little value.

Here are links amid the tumult:

● Last month at Futurism, Victor Tangermann reported, “Economist Warns the AI Bubble Is Worse Than Immediately Before the Dot-Com Implosion — The top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s.” He was quoting Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok and AI critic Ed Zitron, who compares it to the 2007 sub-prime meltdown.

Tangerman asks, “How long investors will continue to prop up sky-high valuations of the key players in the AI race remains to be seen. Despite an explosion in popularity for tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, revenue still pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars being spent on data center expansions.”

● A critical problem, as Mind Matters News authors like Gary Smith have been pointing out, is that AI is not showing a huge return on investment: “The fundamental problem is that LLMs [chatbots] are not useful enough to yield much revenue.”

AI analyst Gary Marcus likewise notes that companies spending a lot on AI are not seeing a big return. Marcus noted earlier this month that AI agents (chatbots doing jobs) have been mostly “a dud” so far:

Current systems can mimic the kinds of words people use in completing tasks, often in contextually relevant ways, but that doesn’t really mean that they understand the things that they are doing; they have no concept of what it means to delete a database or make up a fictitious calendar entry. Whether they commit such blunders or not is mainly just a matter of what they happen to mimic. Sometimes mimicry works, and sometimes it doesn’t. As I have often emphasized, that’s when we get hallucinations and boneheaded reasoning errors. August 3, 2025

And yes, he says, even the much-awaited ChatGPT5 is mired in the problem: “GenerativeAI had a truly bad week. The late and underwhelming arrival of GPT-5 wasn’t even the worst part. But before we get to the worst part… let’s review GPT-5’s shambolic debut.” (August 9, 2025)

The main thing to see is that, as technology consultant Jeffrey Funk notes, the hype is aimed at attracting more investors; it is not a faithful description of the products. And that’s how bubbles happen.