The AI Rally's Parallels

We are now a little over two months away from the four year anniversary of the release of what kicked off the AI era in earnest. On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT first became available, and in the nearly four years since then, the world has obviously seen a lot of change thanks to the technology. However, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

While AI releases have dramatically altered the tech world, the rally in the tech heavy Nasdaq Composite has been remarkably similar to how the index performed in the wake of the release of the first internet browser, Netscape, in late 1994. As shown below, throughout the past few years, the Nasdaq's gains have been at times directly comparable to the rally the index saw after the release of Netscape in December 1994. At the present moment, the Nasdaq is up 146% since ChatGPT's release, which is actually slightly outpacing the Netscape run, which would put us in late September 1998 based on that timeline.

We have also compared the AI rally to other major technological releases over the past few decades, and as you can see, the Netscape parallel remains the strongest.