Remember When Nanotech Was the Next Big Thing?

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar.

In the early 2000s, after the collapse of the dotcom bubble, a new technology was set to change humanity and line inventors pockets. Venture capitalists invested billions in the tech. “This field will provide the biggest and most important breakthrough of the current century. It will cause real economic changes,” said John Wolff of the VC firm Lux Capital.

The technology, the VC money and the companies said, would change the way we all lived and worked. It would elevate humanity. Multiple U.S. presidents got on the hype train and created agencies and initiatives to back the tech and steward its development. Conferences popped up all over the planet named after the technology, aimed at fostering it and discussing the ethics around it.

This was how people used to talk about nanotechnology. “At DFJ, we believe that nanotech is the next great technology wave, the next phase of Moore’s Law, and the nexus of scientific innovation that revolutionizes most industries and indirectly affects the fabric of society. Historians will look back on the upcoming epoch with no less portent than the Industrial Revolution,” Steve Jurvetson, then the managing director of VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson said in the mid-2000s.

It sounds a lot like how people talk about AI now.

I thought about nanotechnology yesterday as the stock market tumbled following the revelation that an AI company in China had developed a competitor to ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost. The week isn’t over, but NVIDIA—which manufactures the GPUs critical to the development of AI systems—lost $600 billion in value. That’s the single biggest loss in the history of the market.

In the 1990s, as the internet emerged as a major market force, Wall Street rushed to get in on the action. Any company with “dot com” or “e” in its name would receive millions of dollars of investment. Pets.com mania gripped the nation. Its mascot, manifested seemingly out of nowhere, was part of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was all over by 2000. People realized that many of these websites didn’t make money, or much of anything, and Pets.com lost its investors millions.

But all that VC capital and hype had to go somewhere. For a while, it went into nanotechnology. Scientists had been plugging away at doing stuff with very small materials for decades, but no one had paid much attention. After the dot-com crash, nanotechnology became a buzzword and billions of dollars flowed in.

“Nano” became a marketing hype word like “dot-com” before it, like “AI” would be in the future. Researchers were delighted as the money flowed in. Investors promised that nanotechnology would usher in a new golden age of plenty. Naysayers sounded the alarm of self-replicating nanotech robots that would eat all biomatter on the planet and render it into grey goo. Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, even wrote a book about it.

President Bill Clinton gave a speech about nanotechnology at CalTech in 2000. He established the National Nanotechnology Initiative, an ambitious 20-year project aimed at shepherding the tech. President George W. Bush signed the Nanotechnology Research and Development Act in 2003. It gave more federal cash for research into the technology.

The promised “revolution” did not manifest and VC hype died away. The market adjusted. Nanotechnology didn’t go anywhere. Advances in making stuff with very small molecules are happening all the time and wildly improving our lives. Nanotechnology is used today in semiconductor manufacturing, food production, and medicine. What’s different is the level of VC hype.

Artificial intelligence is in a similar space that nanotechnology was in the early 2000s, but the numbers are far different. There are tens of thousands of AI startups compared to nanotech’s 1,200. Nanotech received billions in VC funding, AI has received hundreds of billions. Nanotechnology was popular and has changed the world but it didn’t change the economics around an ailing nuclear energy market.

What’s happening to the stock market this week is weird. I won’t call it a bubble bursting, but it is a vibe shift. An upstart Chinese company dethroned the world’s most popular chatbot at the top of Apple’s App store. In a normal market that shouldn’t send shares of the hardware company responsible for training both AIs tumbling. It’s a sign that, like nanotechnology before it, AI is promising the moon.

But, also like nanotechnology before it, I think AI is here to stay. Both weren’t new when they captured the market. AI creates a lot of terrible slop, but it can also be used for good. We used spellcheck every day without thinking of it as an AI system. But the original spellcheck is a product of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It came out in 1971.

What we must do is beware of false prophets. It’s not hard to do. They’re not very creative and from nanotechnology to AI, they use a lot of the same language. Think back to Jurvetson’s little speech I cited at the beginning of this article and take a look at the writing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Altman once wrote a long blog he called “Moore Law’s for Everything.” The banner at the top was a sea of dollar bills. Like Jurveston before him, he said that AI would usher in a new phase of Moore’s Law. Like Jurveston before him, he promised that AI is part of a new phase shift in humanity on par with the Industrial Revolution. Like Jurveston before him, he’s trying to sell you something. And it’s not a dream of the future, not really. It’s just an App he wants you to pay him to use. And hell, China is giving it away for free.