Everyone is talking about how artificial intelligence is on the edge of a bubble, how that bubble is about to burst, and everyone draws the analogy with the dotcom bubble - the financial bubble that blew up during the years of wild, unregulated investment in the new web companies.
Back then there was an excess of blind investment. Too much money got spent, too far ahead of the market, exactly like now. And this is where a lot of economists flag the danger: back then, just like today, you started to see circular investments between the big companies orbiting around the technology. The textbook example: Nvidia buys a piece of one of the AI labs, and that lab commits to buying a few hundred thousand more GPUs from Nvidia over the coming years. There are plenty of these loops in the investments Microsoft has made too - Microsoft has its hands basically everywhere - and Amazon as well.
Black and white doesn’t convince me
Here is what I want to say. A lot of people want to look at this in black and white, and that does not convince me. Yes, the signs of an AI bubble are there. And in my opinion, if the bubble bursts and the people who poured so much money in so fast and so blindly get hurt, well, good. These are the same people who invented a pile of nonsense to convince everyone that artificial intelligence is either about to take control and destroy us all, or about to magically transform our lives. Those are propaganda narratives that pull on our most basic emotions, the kind that work on monkeys, and so, sure, they worked.
So honestly, if it blows up, they had it coming.
The dotcom crash never cancelled the web
But it is not true that if the bubble bursts then artificial intelligence is finished, worthless, or not worth experimenting with, understanding, trying, building. It is the opposite. The dotcom bubble did not negate the web. The dotcom bubble was the smack on the head taken by greedy people who threw themselves too fast at something they had not understood, because they wanted to get there before everyone else.
It is the same with artificial intelligence. Keep experimenting, keep understanding, keep building - and let the greedy ones hurt themselves.
