> We did not know mobile phones and e-commerce were going to be huge back in the 90s.
Eh? We did. The whole dot-com boom was predicated on that assumption. And it wasn't wrong. But most of the dot-com investments went sideways. In fact, they imploded hard enough to cause a recession.
In the same vein, even if we all agree that AI is fundamentally transformative, it doesn't mean that it's wise to invest money into it right now. It's possible that most or all of these early products and companies will go bust.
I think this is the right sentiment. I know a handful of AI startups that have raised 10's to 100's of millions. All of them were crushed with gpt-3 and subsequent models. None of them have any real revenue, have crazy burn rates with their compute spend, and generally haven't proven any value with their AI platforms. Most seem to be working on tech to find a problem rather than the inverse. Funds are throwing money on ideas.. that haven't panned out for years now. I worked with one and they were spending 10's of millions per researcher on AI compute... which makes sense if it's directed but most of the researchers were just running off on their own and the company hoped one would figure something out. Very disorganized for the stacks of cash being spent. Similar things have happened in the Cyber Security field just at a lesser scale.
But hey, Nvidia is investing in companies.. to spend money on Nvidia .. infinite money glitch!
Eh? We did. The whole dot-com boom was predicated on that assumption. And it wasn't wrong. But most of the dot-com investments went sideways. In fact, they imploded hard enough to cause a recession.
In the same vein, even if we all agree that AI is fundamentally transformative, it doesn't mean that it's wise to invest money into it right now. It's possible that most or all of these early products and companies will go bust.