In Silicon Valley history, there are few spectacles as tantalizing—and as perilous—as the sight of countless billions being funneled into a single technological frontier. AI is, next to impressing us all, also starting to show signs that it might just be the next bubble waiting to burst.
Despite the euphoric predictions and benchmark crunching we hear for awhile now, a growing chorus of investors and analysts are starting to pump the brakes. Goldman Sachs' Jim Covello recently remarked, "Despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful." Google's latest earnings report underscores this sentiment, revealing very modest profit margins and surging costs. The tech behemoth plans to spend $49 billion on capital this year, an eye-watering 84 percent increase over its historical average. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, insists that the risk of underinvesting is greater than that of overinvesting, a stance echoed by his peers at Microsoft and Meta. Yet, the stark reality remains: AI is burning through cash at a staggering rate, with little revenue to show for it. This year alone, investors are expected to pour $60 billion into AI development—enough to create 12,000 products the size of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Do we need that many? Is this the paradigm now? The parallels to past tech bubbles are striking, such as dot-com crash and the autonomous driving hype of 2017. Capital continues to be vacuumed into the AI sector with very little to no attention being paid to company fundamentals. What of the immediate financial hemorrhaging—such as OpenAI's projected $5 billion loss this year? So, with all this in mind, is it still the right time to invest in a cluster of Nvidia A100s and walk boldly into the future? To the computer and AI specialists reading this: Do you still see the incredible potential in large language models (LLMs) that justify the current hype and investment? Has this technology made your lives easier, or made you 10x more productive, fulfilling Jensen Huang's prophecy that "People don't have to learn programming anymore to develop software themselves"? And finally, where are all the killer apps built by hordes of agents conferring with each other and debugging and refining their code constructively? On Wednesday, July 24, 2024 at 5:18:53 PM UTC+2 John Clark wrote: > It looks like Mark Zuckerberg is going to do to AGI what Linus Torvalds > did to Unix, and I am delighted. It also looks like during the next few > years the big money will not be made by software companies but by hardware > companies such as ASML, Nvidia and TSML. And lack of powerful hardware is > the one disadvantage that China has. > > Zuckerberg goes SCORCHED EARTH. Llama 3.1 BREAKS the AGI Industry > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyRWqJehK7I> > > John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis > <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> > zma > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/672f3715-ff3f-40f0-b5fc-4748a150ad33n%40googlegroups.com.
