Look, financial speculation, low returns, and billion-dollar investments indicate that the billion-dollar AI bubble may burst.
Look at the level of spending by Big Tech companies; this is unsustainable in the long term.
To begin with, the enthusiasm for AI is surrounded by a technocratic, deterministic, and accelerationist ideology that guarantees that AI adoption will change everything.
This narrative has some basis in the wonders of AI – after all, anyone who has used a predictive chatbot (I, today, prefer the Chinese Deepseek for obvious reasons) knows that the technology can be an excellent tool for any type of work. But it is undoubtedly exaggerated and credulous regarding what AI can actually accomplish.
We still don't know very well what artificial intelligence will be used for in the future, and a lot of money has been spent on it.
An MIT study published in the middle of this year managed to quantify the difference between this "search" within companies that have AI projects and the real financial return. Of the 300 projects analyzed, 95% had no financial return. To reach this conclusion, the researchers also interviewed 150 directors of these companies.
Another problem is the formation of an oligarchy. This trend has raised alarm bells in recent years. OpenAI bought 10% of the chip company AMD, while Nvidia is investing US$100 billion in OpenAI. Microsoft, one of OpenAI's owners, is a client of the AI cloud computing company CoreWeave, which also has Nvidia as a shareholder. Microsoft accounts for almost 20% of Nvidia's revenue.
Of course, companies can collaborate. But what we are seeing here is the formation of an interconnected oligopoly that can stifle competition, control the future of technology, and concentrate power with little or no oversight.
Furthermore, the mere announcement of these agreements helps inflate the stock prices of all of them.
