“Of course AI is a bubble,” argues tech activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow.
The real question is what happens when it bursts?
Doctorow examines history — the “irrational exuberance” of the dotcom bubble, 2008’s financial derivatives, NFTs, and even cryptocurrency. (“A few programmers were trained in Rust… but otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.”) So would an AI bubble leave anything useful behind?
The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They’re expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run…. Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That’s the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms