Cloud based AI Data Lakes

I think the technology industry, particularly the computer software contingent of it has to be the leader in the field of making up new words for things (or ideas) that already exist! Typically things that have had some small improvement or change to them eventually hit the radar of marketing teams such that they get hyper-excited about the possibility of "launching" something (seemingly) new! In reality the only thing that's really being "launched" are the new words they've invented with which to relabel it and possibly a few meaningless Powerpoint slides with which to warp the existent thing into something that resembles the made up words that are supposed to describe it in the first place, in old fashioned terminology, a case of the "tail wagging the dog"! The underpinnings of this behaviour are complex but usually sit within broader cycles of actual innovation and feed off them like some kind of biological parasite, sucking new ideas dry and discarding their empty husks before moving onto the next wave.

Actual disruptive and innovative things come along once in a blue moon, and when they do they're mostly ignored or positively shunned, since the parasitic overlords of these industries don't usually have the expertise or knowledge to recognise them or understand their potential! The way innovative things eventually become mainstream in my experience is that technically competent people discover them first, they recognise potential and become early-adopters, word spreads and eventually a critical mass of geeks are using the new thing. At this point the money men (another species of parasite!) figure out something is going on, they wade in, buying everything in sight and vastly inflating valuations for the entire eco-system around the new thing. Only then does the parasitic layer in the industry finally realise that there's a new band-waggon in town and desperately engage their marketing people to try to invent ways to make it seem that what they were doing all along is in fact some derivation of the new (then valuable) thing, most fail but some manage to drum up some new revenue off the back of someone else's innovation. Eventually the road-show moves on and the excitement (and funding) fades at which point the whole cycle repeats. Along the way, many firms disappear and many new ones are born around the inevitable next wave.

I think the trick to investing in tech is to be able to recognise those firms and people who are honest about innovation, who don't fake it! It doesn't have to be totally revolutionary necessarily but there has to be a concrete evolution or step-change in whatever field they are operating in, something that can a) be quantified and b) be copied and morphed by the parasitic underbelly into revenue. If these two things are true, then you may well have a lucrative hype-cycle on your hands.