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Is the AI industry racing toward the point where technology progress stops or slows down? Many experts, including a fundamentalist in the field, think it is possible.
Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, said, “There is a clear possibility that we will hit a wall, that there is some difficulty that we just did not expect, and that we do not find a solution quickly.” told Guardian.
“And it could be a real (financial) crash,” he said. “Many of the people who are pouring trillions of dollars into AI right now are also expecting progress to continue at the current pace.”
Part of the problem is that the AI industry has stretched itself into an impossibly high-risk situation. Finding specific uses for AI in certain industries is not the basis that has raised trillions of dollars in investment; Instead, the end game is building a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a hypothetical AI system that matches or surpasses human cognition. David Kahn at powerful Silicon Valley investment firm Sequoia Capital said as much in an interview October blog post quoted by Guardian: “Anything less than the AGI will not be high enough to justify the proposed investments for the coming decade.”
Highlighting the ambiguity of the AGI mission, the more specific points of what constitutes AGI are hotly debated, and some tech leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman began to distance myself from the terminology. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s meta is in favor of calling it – whatever “it” is – an AI “superintelligence” instead.
Concerns about an AI “bubble” due to the AI ”wall” or “winter” have been rising since the bullishness began three years ago, and were rekindled last summer with the disappointing launch of OpenAI’s GPT-5 model, which saw only modest benchmark gains compared to its predecessor, and many fans felt it was subjectively worse.
However, some confidence in the industry was restored in November. With the launch of Google’s Gemini 3 modelsPlus Google’s new video generating models are capable of creating surprisingly lifelike footage. At least for the time being, doubts over the future of the industry were replaced by doubts about OpenAI’s ability to lead, with Google carrying the banner.
Regardless of who comes out on top, the stakes are very high, due to the rapid construction of AI data centers Launched by Morgan Stanley With Meta alone, it will reach $2.9 trillion by 2028 Saying It will spend $600 billion on American infrastructure.
A lot of attention has started to be paid to the “circular” nature of the deals being struck between major AI players, such as AI chip maker Nvidia. Promise to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAIWhile OpenAI agrees to buy billions of dollars worth of Nvidia’s AI chips. The fear is that these deals are helping to build a trillion-dollar house of cards that could collapse catastrophically if investors are scared off the AI wall.
In some cases, calls are coming from inside the house itself. Meta’s recently ousted chief AI scientist and fellow “godfather” of AI Yann LeCun is a vocal skeptic of the large language model architectures used to power industry-leading chatbots, believing that an entirely new form of AI “world” model, trained on physical data rather than just language, is the path to building truly advanced AI.
But Bengio, the other godfather of AI, ultimately remains optimistic about the future of the industry.
“Stopping the advance is a minority scenario, just as it is an unlikely scenario. The more likely scenario is that we continue to move forward,” he said. Guardian.
On the economic side, technology analyst Benedict Evans argues with equal optimism that AI spending is not as outrageous as it seems compared to other industries like oil and gas, which spend around $600 billion each year.
“These AI capex figures are a lot of money, but not an impossible amount,” Evans said. Guardian. “You don’t have to believe in AGI to believe that generative AI is a big thing. And what’s happening here isn’t, ‘Oh wow, they’re going to create God’. It’s ‘This is going to completely change how advertising, search, software and social networks — and everything else that our business is based on — is going to work,'” Evans said. “This is going to be a huge opportunity.”
On the other hand, oil and gas companies can justify that expense because their goods and services are the basis of modern society as we know it. Can AI chatbots even come close to doing this?
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