One of the entrepreneurs hit hard by the dotcom crash of 2000 says there is room for optimism amid fears of the artificial intelligence bubble bursting.
"It's definitely a bubble but it's a different kind of bubble," Tom Herman, co-founder of GovWorks, told The National. GovWorks, founded in 1998, promised to revolutionise how citizens interacted with government agencies.
The first feature it pushed allowed people to pay their parking tickets online. At the time the idea caught the attention of many investors with deep pockets. GovWorks became a media darling, the poster child of a technology boom that promised to lead to unprecedented prosperity.
GovWorks's story was so intriguing that a documentary crew followed Mr Herman and fellow co-founder Kaleil Isaza Tuzman around, as investor money flowed in and the company started hiring at a breakneck pace.
But with smartphones non-existent at the time and many Americans still without high-speed internet, GovWorks's business model fell far short of expectations and the company was among the many dotcom start-ups of the era to crash.
But Mr Herman – who has since founded Meta Carbon, a company that specialises in using technology for offsetting emissions – does not necessarily see parallels to current concerns over an AI bubble.
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