on A.I.

Over the last week or so, I have listened to a three part BBC series on AI, as well as us both attending a lecture last Friday on the subject.

Here are some thoughts:

The top seven companies in A.I: Google, Microsft and so on, have invested $20 trillion in the technoogy.On top of that, tere are 500 A.I. tech start ups valued at or than $1 billion each.

That is a lot of money.

The money either comes from internally in the "big seven", or in the 500, from venture capatalists.

Its still a lot of money.

The question, as far as I can see, is how is anyone going to make A.I. as it is at the moment, turn a proofit on the investment?

The big Large Langauage Models (LLMs), like Chat GBT does requests through it's website, free of charge, as far as I can see.

LLMs operate, generally, in two phases: learning and operational. And in the learning phase, scrape data to "learn". This comes from mostly the internet, where it scrapes copyrighted and uncopyrighted information. LLMs have said that if they had to pay the legally required costs for use of copyrighted material, their business model doesn't work, so have not paid, they just stole.

If obeying the law makes your business model fail, then you don't have a business model.

There are cirrently a number of class actions regarding copyright theft going through courts around the world, and it seems inevitable that the copyright holders will win, and that some sort of payment will have to be forthcoming.

Copyright costs are on top of the figures already mentioned above ($20 trillion and $500 billion). Huge sums that will have to be factored in in being able to turn a profit.

Not only that, using one of the A.I. tools for tasks, used about 400% more energy than non-AI, and data centres require power, land, and water to cool the banks of processors, in anticipation for the work it is expected AI to do. And that by the time the capacity currently being constructed is needed, it will probably be out of date.

A.I. has all the features of an economic bubble, promising huge returns on investments, and yet no clear explaination on how such returns will occur, or in what way it will make life better.

For the moment, A.I. seems to be stealing the work of creatives, and passing that theft to already rich companies, so they don't have to pay writes, painters, photographers and so on.

The question is either if or when the bubble will burst, and how big the impact will have on the "normal" economy. The real concern is when the start ups try to seel stock, then the contagion will be out and running. As it is, according to the Bank of England, approx 45% of the US Stock Market is on such tech stocks, and most of the growth of the Dow is done to the impossible values and returns on tech start ups.

I'm sure it'll all be fine, and there's nothing to worry about.

But if you use AI for anything, think of those whose work the tool has robbed, and how much poorer the world would be without them.