AI has a lot of fans in business. But does it actually make money?
The growth of AI in the last few years has demonstrated two things.
One, that the technology is capable of producing a range of slick if highly suspect images and video. And two, that a whole lot of people are convinced it will soon suffuse every aspect of modern life.
From creating art to providing customer service to synthesizing reams of medical data, artificial intelligence has been hailed as transformational, leading to billions in investment and turning Nvidia — the California-based firm that makes the underlying processors — into one of the most valuable companies in the world.
The global consultancy PriceWaterhouseCoopers has forecast that AI could contribute “up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined.”
While AI’s inevitability has been a recurring refrain in much of the business media of late, there has been a small chorus of skeptics demanding proof of its ability to do what corporations need most: make money.
“There really has not been an industry like generative AI before, which just bleeds insane amounts of money while also really not doing enough,” said Ed Zitron, a Las Vegas-based tech critic and host of the podcast Better Offline, who has long talked about the apparent chasm between the promises of AI and its actual return on investment.
Late last month, Goldman Sachs joined the group chat, becoming one of the first major investment banks to question the hype around AI, with a report entitled Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?
In it, Jim Covello, the bank’s head of global equity research, said the sheer cost of the technology hampers any financial gains, that Nvidia’s monopoly means processor prices won’t come down anytime soon and “that 18 months after the introduction of generative AI to the world, not one truly transformative … application has been found.”
Zitron says the Goldman Sachs report represents a “serious” rebuke of the AI narrative.
“Generally, when the money people are saying, ‘I don’t know about this,’ that’s a bad time for everyone,” he said.
A world of promises
Artificial intelligence has been a going concern for decades, but the release of virtual assistant ChatGPT in the fall of 2022 publicly demonstrated the capabilities of large language models and captured the popular imagination.
While many people have been gobsmacked by ChatGPT’s ability to conjure computer code and whole essays based on a few prompts, its rise has been equally abetted by the futuristic scenarios laid out by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
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