this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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In 2 interviews, the interviewees claim that the investors may lose faith in return of investment if "the killer application of AI" is not available in 18 months. In other words, if the AI is a bubble, my interpretation is that it will burst in only 18 months. EDIT: I am referring to the actual paper https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf?ref=404media.co
Financially? Yeah, AI is a bubble for sure. Gobs of money are being poured in with few results to show for it. That bubble will burst. But just like the dotcom bubble, that doesn't mean the technology is useless or won't change the world, just not instantly over night with a single investment, which is what the investment groups expect.
This technology requires finance. You can't train a model without millions of dollars.
If the money goes the technology is dead until the cost of the training machines comes down a few orders of magnitude.
At least in the US, the research is fairly isolated from capital markets. The military pours huge amounts of money into research on new tech like this, often over ambitiously and with no real expectation of short term returns. Even if there is a financial bubble burst that shuts down a lot of the commercial operations, universities and military contractors will continue working and publishing papers improving the state of the art until industry decides it’s time to try commercializing it again. It’s the basic pattern that has brought us most of the major tech innovations in the US.
That seems like a fair assumption. I would argue we are at the peak of the bubble and only recently we've seen the suits (Goldman Sachs and more broadly analysts at banks) start asking questions about ROI and real use cases.