AI has a ridiculous resource cost in electricity, and so far the news on productivity gains has been mixed or uncertain. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been partially successful at trading vaporware (stock price increases) for hardware (graphics cards), which is reckless to an absurd degree and an omen of a potential bubble.
There's no question that AI is a qualitative leap in technology. But aside from specific cases like decoding ancient tablets, what exactly is produced by better google searches and faster concept iteration that we didn't have before? And whatever that is, is it worth the cost?
For example: AI is famously just as good as junior software developers, or better, at writing code. But if it costs billions of dollars to accomplish that, is it worth it? What about replacing artists and journalists that are already paid like crap anyway?
AI also has the potential to replace huge swathes of white collar, like personal assistants, secretaries, various types of managers, HR, statisticians, etc. But a lot of those jobs are female welfare in the first place, so if efficiency was the point, they would've been gone already. Does anyone believe the entire girlboss economy is going to be thrown out on its pantsuit?
Also, does anyone know how liability will be handled with AI agents? I'm pretty sure that's one of the significant reasons we don't have autonomous cars yet. Contra the name "Full Self-Driving," Tesla requires you to have hands on the steering wheel because they can offload all responsibility for your death if you take a nap in the back seat and the Tesla headbutts a tree (which has happened). Under a fully autonomous system, do they pay out the lawsuits? What kind of sanctions will come from regulatory bodies?
Somewhat related, an AI that gets things right 99% of the time would seem to be unacceptable for certain applications, like driving or medicine. For example, getting 1% of medical facts wrong, while outperforming a real doctor on average, would inevitably result in catastrophic consequences for a random member of the public and make a human check & balance necessary, which nullifies a lot of the potential efficiency advantage.
I think there is a strong possibility that we'll look at today's landscape as the good old days when virtually unlimited queries were possible for a ridiculously low cost. When AI actually has to demonstrate ROI, there may be a future where each generation costs $5, or worse.
I’ll start by saying that I think some of it is hype. When I see “50% of people will be unemployed due to AI within three years” or “you have two years to escape the permanent underclass” or “10% chance Grok 5 achieves AGI,” I have my doubts. However, I do think that AI is around to stay, and will be revolutionary in the longer term. The reason I think that is because every argument about how it “isn’t profitable (yet)” applies to social media in the early stages. Every argument about it being too resource intensive would be equally applicable to computers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, were one trying to imagine the state of computers today.
Is there a bubble? Almost certainly. But it’s the kind of bubble that comes with speculation in a new field not quite knowing what will pan out, not with the field actually being useless. One might recall the early 2000s “dotcom bubble,” and notice that despite the crash of many sites, the internet as a whole has proved to be more enduring and transformative than that early speculation imagined, not less.
One (small or large depending if you agree with my point) difference between the dot com bubble was it was companies that were the bubbles not the entire internet as is the case with AI today.