AI Will be the Biggest Bubble of All Time
It’s an investment with six zeroes.
If you know medium.com, you know what AI is. It’s a waste for me to put a definition into this article. But, however, I think you’ll need to know what an economic bubble is. It’ll be important.
Economic bubbles form when a product is priced far higher than its actual value. Examples include the Dotcom, the US housing market, and student loans. Soon, AI might enter the realm of those, because some say it’ll be the largest economic bubble in history.
Emad Mostaque is the CEO of Stability AI, which according to itself is the world’s leading open source artificial intelligence company. Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, a very popular generative AI tool. And according to Mostaque, the AI wave will be the largest economic bubble in history. Speaking with UBS analysts on a call last week, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque said of AI: “I think this will be the biggest bubble of all time.”
Generative AI has been the focus of many an aspiring scholar, bold executive, and even young school students, for its ability to draw from a planet of data and create eerily humanlike results. AI has long been around, with the technology now a common feature of most contemporary tech used daily by billions. Beyond consumer applications, the technology is being used in almost every field you can think of. By the day, AI is becoming smarter and quicker, while gaining more public demand and interest as a result. With all of this in mind, there’s no wondering why prices and costs on the end of both producers and consumers are increasing.
Combine this with an increasingly younger and tech-minded investor population coming out of COVID, who also value things like accuracy and transparency. With the combination of an exploding market and a new demographic of investors, I personally think it’s clear AI has the potential to create a bubble of some variety.
Mostaque also goes on to comment about AI replacing coding and development: “outsourced coders [in India} to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you’ll never fire a developer [Due to better workers protections],” Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, said in a call with UBS analysts.
It’s hard for me to disagree with his point of view. While AI is not necessarily as proficient as a human programmer worth their salt, it’s becoming increasingly capable of doing so and poses a risk to the job market in coding and programming in many parts of the world and in many sectors.
But there’s still a reason not to share his pessimistic view. There’s a solid belief that many hold that AI will take on the role of an assistant more than assume the entire job description of a computer science role. This is already what is happening: a GitHub Copilot, Microsoft’s AI codewriting system, is an AI-powered code tool developed in collaboration with OpenAI. It uses machine learning models trained on a vast corpus of public code to suggest code snippets and even entire functions as developers type. So, this could even mean that using AI as a programmer or coder could end up making you more valuable in the job market.
How AI will effect the economy overall seems clear-cut, but this might not be definite. We’ll have to see how new developments may impact different sectors and parts of the economy in different ways.
