The frantic race to create generative AI has been dubbed an arms race by some, or a long-term opportunity by others. Though, for others, it’s just a temporary bubble.
“I think this generative AI moment is definitely a bubble,” Meredith Whittaker, the president of messaging app Signal, told Wired.
“You cannot spend a billion dollars per training run when you need to do multiple training runs and then launch a fucking email-writing engine. Something is wrong there,” she said.
Put another way, Whittaker believes that the industry will reach a point where the amount of money flowing into it isn’t commensurate with the quality of its output.
The stock market earlier this month showed signs of investor concern as Big Tech invested billions in AI with little indication of a profit.
Even as its top researchers depart, investors are still flooding the market with cash into OpenAI, the industry leader, citing worries that the business is approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) too quickly.
Whittaker is unsure of the exact moment when the bubble will pop, but she is placing a wager that Nvidia, the American chipmaker driving a large portion of AI research, will show the first indications.
“I do think you’re going to see a market drawdown. Nvidia’s market cap is going to die for a second,” she said.
According to Yahoo Finance, Nvidia’s market capitalization surpassed both Amazon and Alphabet earlier this year, and is now a little over $3 trillion.
She said that regulation of the AI sector will be essential in any case.
“Things like structural separation, where we begin to separate ownership of the infrastructure from the application layer, would perturb these businesses,” she said.
“I think meaningful privacy regulations could go a long way. These include tamping down on the amount of data companies can collect and their authority over how it’ll be used to shape the world,” she added.
Her argument is that we should still regulate the negative aspects of surveillance capitalism despite the AI bubble.
“The current paradigm is not natural in any way,” she declared.
