MongoDB CEO says if AI hype were the dotcom boom, it is 1996
Analysis It is 1996 in terms of the business adoption of AI if it were put on the dotcom era timeline, according to MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria.
Speaking to investors at a Goldman Sachs event earlier this week, the boss of the NoSQL database company argued the tech industry was still early in the rise of AI, a development which - we're all told - will transform business and enterprise technology.
"I believe that AI is not a question of if, but when. I view the world we're in today [compared with] circa 1996, maybe 1997. Netscape was just launched a couple of years earlier. People were excited about the web, but the web was still very basic, static web pages, and it wasn't that interesting. People [were] starting businesses on the internet, maybe Amazon, eBay and a few others, but you weren't seeing a plethora of companies exploding onto the market," he said.
In its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2024 edition, released last month, analyst company Gartner said GenAI is about to enter the dreaded "trough of disillusionment." Arun Chandrasekaran, Gartner distinguished VP analyst, told The Register at the time that expectations and hype around GenAI were "enormously high," but maintained it would have a "long term impact."
