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[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script from my radio report yesterday on whether
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (PRIVACY Forum mailing list)
Tue Aug 6 13:57:56 2024
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2024 10:47:32 -0700
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Below is the script of my national network radio report from yesterday
discussing questions of whether AI will turn a big profit as Big Tech
hopes, or flush billions of dollars down the sewer. As always, there
have been very minor wording changes from this script as I presented
this report live.
- - -
So yeah, today was an interesting day. The stock market took a hit --
though most analysis I've seen seems to suggest it was a short term
reaction and not a long-term structural problem, and Google lost a
major antitrust case regarding Search, which of course is going to be
appealed probably all the way to the Supreme Court, so that story has
quite a ways to go yet.
But in the meantime, and this is very much longer term, there seem to
be a lot concerns among investors about the enormous amounts of
money -- billions of dollars -- that Big Tech is pouring into Artificial
Intelligence, especially generative AI.
So more and more you're seeing questions raised about when generative
AI is going to make a profit -- if ever -- and the longer it actually
takes, irrespective of what Big Tech execs may be saying -- the more
that major tech investors seem to be getting concerned, and
understandably so. Because many of them are starting to wonder if
these aspects of AI are a money pit rather than a profit center. And
it's pretty easy to see why they're worried.
To be sure there are some aspects of AI that are showing remarkable
usefulness, for example in medical research and some kinds of medical
diagnostic scanning, just to name a couple. But the aspect of AI that
seems to be getting the lion's share of attention and the really big
bucks is generative AI like chatbots and Google's Search AI Overviews
and the aspects of generative AI that generally seem to produce
results of questionable accuracy -- to be charitable about it.
Sometimes they're right, often wrong, often partly right, often right
mixed up with wrong, and typically mediocre. You might recall that I
recently discussed that horrible ad for AI that Google was running
during the Olympics, with a dad using Google Gemini AI to write a
Olympic athlete fan letter for his daughter. And this ad was panned
as one of the most inappropriate ads ever, that showed so much wrong
with AI and how it really shouldn't be used. And there was so much
blowback that Google ended up pulling it off the air, yet they
claimed it tested well, and I found myself wondering where did they
test it? Maybe on Pluto.
Anyway, this is the aspect of AI that these firms really are pushing
and that where they hope the serious money profits will be. But like I
said many tech investors are getting very antsy about this and
starting to wonder if they're putting money into AI projects that
might never pay off or take so long to pay off that from an investment
standpoint they could have done far better in other investments.
And this doesn't even really take into account other factors that
could impact the potential profitability of AI in various ways. This
includes governments and regulators around the world. They're getting
increasingly concerned about pretty much all aspects of AI. They're
considering or in some cases have already passed new regulations
and/or laws about AI that could reign in perceived AI abuses and so
also impact potential profitability.
Ultimately it appears that many of these tech investors are worrying
that they may have been sucked into a deep, dark, and expensive well
of AI hype, and that they might end up losing a bunch of money as a
result.
Meanwhile the Big Tech AI firm executives seem to mostly be telling
everyone to stay cool, be patient, AI is gonna be great, nothing to
worry about, the big profits will eventually show up. And maybe
they're right. But if they're wrong, and given the current state of AI
at least, and the rising tide of criticism that these systems have
been getting from so many quarters -- especially given the vast
amounts of money being poured into these systems -- these execs could
eventually find themselves with a lot of explaining to do.
We shall see.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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