Tech
Nobel Prize winner Romer says AI hype risks repeat of cryptocurrency bubble
Unbridled faith in artificial intelligence risks repeating the mistakes of the crypto hype bubble of just two years ago, economics professor and Nobel laureate Paul Romer has warned.
“Right now, there is too much confidence about the future trajectory of artificial intelligence,” Romer told Bloomberg TV at the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday. very serious mistake.”
OpenAI triggered a wave of AI enthusiasm with its wildly popular ChatGPT in late 2022, leading to huge investments in computing power and cloud capacity from tech giants from Microsoft Corp to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. This turned Nvidia Corp into a multi-billion dollar company. company, as its chips are better at handling AI training. But Romer warned that it is dangerous to expect the current rate of improvement in AI services to continue indefinitely.
“We have benefited from increased processing and the acquisition of large amounts of data,” the former World Bank chief economist said. “Increasing processing is pretty simple. It’s just more machines, more chips. But what will happen is that we won’t have enough data.”
The main caveat in Romer’s eyes is the example of autonomous vehicles. Companies like Tesla Inc have been promising fully autonomous cars for years, but their automation systems continue to be plagued by reliability issues and edge scenarios that prevent that promise from being realized.
Two years from now, people will probably look back at the present moment and say “it really was a bubble, we overestimated where it was going,” Romer concluded. – Bloomberg