AI Bubble

In Money AI Bubble, the author argues that the market is in an AI bubble. Dumb money is pushing stock prices up despite any real improvement in their businesses, and this will eventually lead to losses. As the author contends, most of this is actually an Nvidia bubble.

The AI bubble isn’t due to advancements in software but advancements in hardware. We are riding on the coattails of hardware (GPUs) which have real costs/materials/environmental impact. (I saw the connection from a comment on HN).

The algorithms (software) are getting better, but the long pole is the training, the enormous storage, and compute needed to create LLMs. The amount of money, infrastructure, manufacturing, environmental impact etc., needed to build large-scale generative AI is staggering (and being gobbled up mostly by Nvidia). This also makes development prohibitive to only the largest and best funded companies (leading to a VC bubble?).

Our understanding and explanations of intelligence are no closer to the knowledge needed to create the most useful applications of artificial intelligence (self-driving cars, scientific research). What if we didn’t get closer to AGI? What if we just found what’s possible with a particular kind of fast parallel computation made possible by years of advancement in hardware?