Born in Canada and living in Los Angeles, California, Cory Doctorow is an essayist, activist, teacher, and author (The Internet Scam: How to Take Advantage of Computing MediaVerso, 2023; The bezelTor Books, 240 pages, untranslated). Chronicles the development of digital technology since the beginning of the Internet, on his site Pluralistic and in various media, such as, in February, in the Financial Times Criticize the evolution of large platforms and social networks.. In December 2023, he mentioned artificial intelligence (AI) in a column as “bubble”, a topic that has sparked growing debate in the sector in recent months. Doctorow questions the economic balance between the costs of large AI models, such as those on which ChatGPT conversational robots are based, and the revenues from different use cases.
“AI Interviews” from “Le Monde”
“Le Monde” is launching “Interviews on AI”, a series of interviews to shed light on the debate surrounding artificial intelligence, its prospects and the questions it raises. We will regularly publish in this section our conversations with personalities from various backgrounds: executives of companies in the sector, experts in the fields most affected by this technology, observers, essayists, researchers. Find all the interviews in the series here.
Why do you think AI is a “bubble”?
Artificial intelligence is a bubble because it has all the hallmarks. We see entrepreneurs adding the word “AI” to their products to boost their stock price, without really knowing what this technology will bring them. This goes back to the days when blockchain [technologie qui permet d’authentifier des actions, comme des transactions en cryptomonnaies] It was fashionable.
We also see a lot of investment flowing into AI model makers, who often lose money. The promise is that these companies will convince customers willing to pay enough to amortize the cost of this software, but they have a hard time explaining how they will do this. Finally, it seems that everyone seems to want to talk about AI, about any topic, sometimes seemingly unrelated, such as climate change…
Why do you doubt the business model of the big AI models?
There is a gap between very significant costs and potential revenue. Many of the highest-revenue AI applications are susceptible to what the industry calls “hallucinations” or errors. [comme une réponse factuellement fausse dans un texte]However, no one in AI has a convincing theory about how we can eliminate these errors.
When we talk about these sensitive use cases (health, autonomous vehicle driving, etc.), AI companies typically propose adding a human to the loop to verify the decision or content produced by the software as a solution. But the practical and financial interest of these AIs is, according to their creators, that they are supposed to act much faster than humans. And if we need people to review each of their actions, this limits profitability and potential productivity gains.
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