> "Much ink has been spilt and many keys pressed to figure out whether AI is a bubble."
Are there any technologists following this left who don't think AI is most likely currently in a significant financial bubble?
There are some. But more importantly, many of those those who know it is a bubble find value in it.
Bubbles pop, but they don't always vanish entirely. Sometimes they do: tulips, NFTs, Mississippi. But many have a nugget of value in there, and when the bubble pops, the people who got it right still made a ton of money.
The dotcom bubble produced the FAANGs. People who invested in competitors lost everything, but if you bought stock in one of those, early on, you did pretty well.
Today, you can invest in 10 AI companies. Nine will fail; one will be worth 100x what you bought it.
Maybe. Or the entire thing could prove to be a vast boondoggle of no value whatsoever.
I think it's closer to the former than the latter, even though I don't believe they're on the path to general AI and will get only incremental improvements from here. But I'm also not investing right now.
None of this makes sense to me unless the people behind it believe that (1) they're on the verge of creating what's essentially life, in which case the invention transcends economics, or that (2) they'll be able to displace most human labor, which turns economics on its head.
It's also possible that some people believe one of those will eventually happen (but not in the next three-ish years) AND those same people have a personal vested interest in continuing the current hype that's bidding up valuations as if there will be huge payout within the next three-ish years. Making those people "true believers" long-term but compelled by self-interest toward short-term dishonesty (either by omission or commission).
And beyond the insider founders and employees, there are legions of investors who have sunk serious money into AI bets. While many of those investors have pulled back on making more AI bets (probably due to now realizing it's a bubble), they have every reason to keep that realization to themselves and continue amplifying the hype. Finally, as the article observes, there's a huge ad hoc carnival of AI newsletters, pundits and media benefiting in smaller ways from perpetuating AI hype.