Will the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) lead us to a land of financial plenty – or will it end in a 2008-style bust? Trillions of dollars rest on the answer.
The figures are staggering: an estimated $2.9tn (£2.2tn) being spent on datacentres, the central nervous systems of AI tools; the more than $4tn stock market capitalisation of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips powering cutting-edge AI systems; and the $100m signing-on bonuses offered by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to top engineers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
These sky-high numbers are all propped up by investors who expect a return on their trillions. AGI, a theoretical state of AI where systems gain human levels of intelligence across an array of tasks and are able to replace humans in white-collar jobs such as accountancy and law, is a keystone of this financial promise.
It offers the prospect of computer systems carrying out profitable work without the associated cost of human labour – a hugely lucrative scenario for companies developing the technology and the customers who deploy it.
There will be consequences if AI companies fall short: US stock markets, boosted heavily by the performance of tech stocks, could fall and cause damage to people’s personal wealth; debt markets wrapped up in the datacentre boom could suffer a jolt that ripples elsewhere; GDP growth in the US, which has benefited from the AI infrastructure, could falter, which would have knock-on effects for interlinked economies.
David Cahn, a partner at one leading Silicon Valley investment firm, Sequoia Capital, says tech companies now have to deliver on AGI.
“Nothing short of AGI will be enough to justify the investments now being proposed for the coming decade,” he wrote in a blog published in October.
It means there is a lot hanging on progress towards advanced AI, and the trillions being poured into infrastructure and R&D to achieve it. One of the “godfathers” of modern AI, Yoshua Bengio, says the progress of AGI could stall and the outcome would be bad for investors.
“There is a clear possibility that we will hit a wall, that there’s some difficulty that we don’t foresee right now, and we don’t find any solution quickly,” he says. “And that could be a real [financial] crash. A lot of the people who are putting trillions right now into AI are also expecting the advances to continue fairly regularly at the current pace.”
But Bengio, a prominent voice on the safety implications of AGI, is clear that continued progress towards a highly advanced state of AI is the more likely endgame.
“Advances stalling is a minority scenario, like it’s an unlikely scenario. The more likely scenario is we continue to move forward,” he says.
The pessimistic view is that investors are backing an unrealistic outcome – that AGI will not happen without further breakthroughs.
David Bader, the director of the institute for data science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, says…
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