Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week’s edition is a team effort: my colleague Heather Stewart reports on the plans for AI’s world domination at Davos; I examine how huge investments have followed AI companies with little to their names but drama and dreams; and Nick Robins-Early spotlights how lax regulation of autonomous driving in Texas allowed Tesla to thrive.
AI at Davos
When they weren’t discussing Donald Trump, delegates at the World Economic Forum last week were being dazzled by the prospects for artificial intelligence.
Up and down the main street of the Swiss Alps town, almost every shopfront was temporarily emblazoned with the neon slogan of a tech firm – or a consultancy promising to tell executives how to incorporate AI into their business. Cloudflare’s wood-panelled HQ urged delegates to “connect, protect and build together”, and Wipro’s shouted: “Dream Solve Prove Repeat.”
At the conference, tech CEOs laid out their hopes for how the physical manifestations of AI will blanket the world in the coming years. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told a rapt audience about how “token factories”, as he calls datacenters, will have to be distributed across the world, to diffuse the benefits of AI globally.
“To me, a long term, scalable solution is to have all of these token factories part of the real economy connected to the grid, connected to the telco network – and that’s what will drive that scale, whether it’s in the global south, or in the developed world,” Nadella said.
Meanwhile Google was showing off the latest iteration of its Google Glasses to excited delegates; and there were endless sessions in the Davos congress centre about the technology’s potential benefits – including a breathless chat with late addition to the schedule Elon Musk, though with the SpaceX IPO apparently looming, he was keenest to talk about going to Mars.
Away from the glitzy shopfronts, though, there was significant concern being expressed that all this proves to be an epic bubble.
In an interview with the Financial Times, DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis warned that some aspects of AI investment do look, “bubble-like”, but insisted that, “if the bubble bursts, we [ie Google, not society at large] will be fine”.
Nadella offered one test for how we would know if it is a bubble – which I didn’t find reassuring. “A tell-tale sign of this as a bubble, is if all we’re talking about are the tech firms,” he said.
Just drama and dreams: AI companies without products still score billions
Much of Silicon Valley has been captivated over the past week by a “very human drama”, as the Wall Street Journal put it. Thinking Machines Lab, a startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati,…
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