Railroads revolutionized transport and yet railway mania was undeniably a bubble. Something can be both very useful and yet also overvalued and overhyped leading to significant malinvestment (sometimes, everyone wins to the detriment of the investors, sometimes just everyone loses out because a huge amount of effort was spent on not useful stuff, usually somewhere in between).

I'm shocked by this perspective, and I'm deep into the LLM game (shipped 7 figure products using LLMs). I don't feel like anything has been revolutionized around communication - I can spot AI generated emails pretty easily (just send the prompt, people). On the learning front I do find LLMs to be more capable search engines for many tasks, so they're helpful absolutely.

I'm an AI fan, but there's clearly a desperate attempt by just about every tech company to integrate AI at the cost of genuinely productive developments in the space, in a manner that one might describe as a "bubble." Microsoft's gotta buy enough GPUs to handle Copilot in Windows Notepad, after all...