I disagree that it was over hyped. It has transformed our society so much that I would argue it was vastly under-hyped. Sure, there were a lot of silly companies that sprang up and went away because they weren't sound, but so much of the modern economy is based on the internet that it is hard to say any business isn't somehow internet related today. You would be hard pressed to find any business anywhere that doesn't at least have a social media account. If 2000 was over-hyping things I just don't see it.
pets.com was valued at $400 million based almost completely on its domain name. That's the classic example. People were throwing buckets of money at any .com that resolved to a site and almost all of it failed. I'm not sure how that doesn't meet the definition of over-hyped. It feels very similar to now. Not even to mention - the web largely doesn't consist of .com sites anymore, it's mostly a few centralized sites and apps.
There were no smartphones in 2000, so the Web was overvalued at that point in time... until we all started carrying the Web in our pockets in the form of a portable rectangle.
Given that this is the case, why can't this be analogously true of “AI” as well? There's plenty of reason to believe that we're hitting a wall, such that, to progress further, said wall must be overcome by means of one or more breakthroughs.
'smartphones' needed a reason to exist, the internet provided that. I doubt we would have had them without it. AI will drive whole new product categories that didn't exist that will then transform our society even more.
I think everyone knew the internet would change everything and thus be very valuable. At the time the web was the primary manifestation of the internet. Domain names felt like an oil rush to carve up the internet. But it was actually a rush to carve up the web, and no one realized yet that things like Google search and app stores would make domain names far less valuable over time.
