Isn't the dot com bubble a far better proxy? Notably, todays spending is both higher and more concentrated in a few companies that a large part of the population has exposure to (most dot com companies weren't publicly traded and far smaller vs MSFT, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, NVDA making up most investment today) by way of pension funds, ETFs, etc.?
Sure, but all of the above have solid businesses that rake in lots of money, revenue based on AI is a small percentage for them.
An AI bust would take the stock price down a good deal, but the stock gains have been relatively moderate. Year on year: Microsoft +14%, Meta +24%, Google +40, Oracle +60%, ... And a notable chunk of those gains have indirectly come from the dollar devaluing.
Nvidia would be hit much harder of course.
There is a good amount of smaller AI startups, but a lot of the AI development is concentrated on the big dogs, it's not nearly as systemic as in dot com, where a lot of businesses went under completely.
And even with an AI freeze, there is plenty of value and usage there already that will not go away, but will keep expanding (AI chat, AI coding, etc) which will mitigate things.
