Big names in Silicon Valley collectively seem to be saying the same thing about the AI boom lately, namely that it is looking more and more like a bubble, and that the rush to AGI (artificial general intelligence) may be very misguided.
The Wall Street Journal has a report today that Meta's widely buzzed-about AI hiring spree is coming to an abrupt halt, likely due to scrutiny by high-profile investors who are balking at the massive sums being thrown at poached AI researchers and engineers.
And that tidbit about Meta dovetails with this Bloomberg story about options traders who are bracing for a tech-stock sell-off with "disaster puts," or put options that give investors the right to sell an asset at a specific price if it starts trending down. These traders are reportedly "increasingly nervous about a plunge in technology stocks in the coming weeks and are grabbing insurance to protect themselves from a wipeout."
Sam Altman spoke to The Verge reporter Alex Heath and other reporters at a dinner this week saying that yes, investors probably are "overexcited" about AI right now.
"When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth," Altman reportedly said. "If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited."
New York Magazine further links that quote up with recent comments by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and an op-ed he published this week in the New York Times, co-authored by Selina Xu, titled, "Silicon Valley Is Drifting Out of Touch With the Rest of America."
Schmidt and Xu say that the current "frenzy" in Silicon Valley over AGI gives them "pause," mostly because it seems like the wrong end goal right now.
"It is uncertain how soon artificial general intelligence can be achieved," they write. "We worry that Silicon Valley has grown so enamored with accomplishing this goal that it’s alienating the general public and, worse, bypassing crucial opportunities to use the technology that already exists. In being solely fixated on this objective, our nation risks falling behind China, which is far less concerned with creating A.I. powerful enough to surpass humans and much more focused on using the technology we have now."
Schmidt and Xu cite the dizzying sums being spent, not just on AI talent, but servers and the training of models, with xAI reportedly burning through $1 billion a month, and some estimating it could cost $100 billion to train a new model in the coming years.
They also cite how, as China continues to try to incorporate existing AI capabilities into all kinds of everyday tasks, the Chinese populace is more optimistic about the technology than Americans, who have been fed all sorts of doomsday scenarios about AGI and the disappearance of jobs.
They ask, for instance, why American farmers aren't, like Chinese farmers are, having competitions to see who can best use AI to improve harvests.
"Instead of only asking 'Are we there yet?' it’s time we recognize that AI is already a powerful agent of change," Schmidt and Xu say.
But without a fantastical goal on the horizon, won't investors start to get skittish anyway?
Photo by Alex Knight
