The global broadband network that is the physical internet took about 10 years and $1T to build, mostly between 1998 and 2008 and it made the internet massively better every year of the build-out. That's also precisely as much time and money as has been put into this generative AI bubble.
The internet was adding a trillion dollars to the global economy by 2008 and the end of that rapid expansion, where AI is still sucking hundreds of billions a year into a black hole with no killer use cases that could possibly pay off its investment, much less begin adding trillions to the global economy.
And a decade before the web and internet explosion, PCs were similar, with a massive build out and immediate massive returns.
This excuse making for AI is getting old. It needs to put up or shut up because so far it's a joke compared to real advances like the PC and the Internet, all while being hyped by VC collecting companies as the arrival of a literal God.
We look at CPUs or the transmission of digital data and these seem to have improved exponentially but these are rather exceptions and are composed of multiple technologies at different stages. Like how we went from internet through phone lines, to dedicated copper lines for data, to optic fiber straight into to people's homes.
Eg: look how the efficiency of solar cells has progressed over the last 50 years
True, but the religion of the Singularity that fueled this round of financing was premised on this improvement growing exponentially fast, thanks to the support provided by the current version of AI tools. There's no sign this will happen anytime soon.
I think you mean "invention". Innovation describes how products change over time and doesn't necessarily imply insight or value-adds. Sometimes it just means the packaging gets updated.
People are expecting it to get exponentially better, but these kind of innovations are more a inversed power law.