Photo by Doug Cody, courtesy of O'Reilly Media
The mad sprint to develop generative AI has been given several labels: A long-term opportunity, for some, or an "arms race." For others, however, it's a bubble that may be short-lived.
"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."
In other words, Whittaker thinks the industry will hit a point when the amount of money being funneled into it isn't reflected in its output.
Earlier this month, the stock market revealed some concern among investors as Big Tech spent billions on AI while showing little promise of return. Investors, however, continue to pour money into OpenAI, the industry's leader, even as its top researchers leave, citing concerns that the company is moving too aggressively toward artificial general intelligence.
Whittaker is unsure when the bubble might finally burst, but she's betting that Nvidia, the American chipmaker fueling much of the development in AI, will reflect the first signs.
"I do think you're going to see a market drawdown. Nvidia's market cap is going to die for a second," she said. Nvidia's market capitalization surpassed both Amazon and Alphabet earlier this year, and is now a little over $3 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance.
Either way, she said regulation of the AI industry will be critical.
"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.
Her point is that the AI bubble should not preclude us from regulating the ills of surveillance capitalism. "There's nothing natural about the paradigm that exists," she said.
