Is The "AI" Bubble About To Burst? 🫧📌

Does this image accurately represent “AI”? Photo by Lanju Fotografie on Unsplash.

Predictions are worthless.

That is especially true for my predictions. At ISTE, Adobe Education Evangelist Jesse Lubinsky told me he thought the New York Knicks would acquire Brooklyn Nets Forward Mikal Bridges. My response was that the Knicks would probably make few moves this offseason. Minutes after this conversation, we learned the Knicks acquired Bridges from the Nets.

Having established the value of predictions, we should consider recent arguments that the “AI” bubble is about to burst. Beyond OpenAI CEO Mira Murati admitting, “Inside the labs, we have these capable models and you know they’re not that far ahead of what the public has access to for free,” we are seeing experts say the bubble is about to burst. One entity with a cold, rational perspective thinks so (see below).

Recent Media Saying The “AI” Bubble Will Soon Burst Or That “AI” Has Had No Impact

Adam Conover and Ed Zitron

I have long enjoyed Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything, Factually, and The G Word With Adam Conover. He recently spoke about the “AI” bubble with Ed Zitron of Better Offline and Where's Your Ed At?

Conover’s introductory monologue perfectly summarizes the current state of “AI:”

• “While we’re seeing all this investment, what we’re not seeing yet is anything approaching a revolution.”

• “Large Language Models require material written or generated by humans to train on and a recent study found that they might already run out of training data in just the next couple years which means those models won't be able to get much better.”

• “ChatGPT loses $700,000 every day that it's running.”

• “Google has had to deal with the humiliation of people posting examples of their AI giving insane answers to boring normal questions. No, Google AI, you should not put glue in your pizza sauce and it's kind of weird that your brand-new product told me that I should.”

• “There's the suspicion growing that AI is nothing but marketing hype that it's the same as crypto web 3 and the metaverse: Just a new way for these tech companies to prop up their stock prices because they don't have any other real ideas.”

The video or podcast is worth your time to learn about the current state of “AI.”

The Goldman Sachs Report

At the end of June, Goldman Sachs released a report, “Gen AI: too much spend too little benefit?”

While Drs Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, Emily M. Bender, and other experts are motivated by concerns about bias and environmental racism, Goldman Sachs is motivated by “AI’s” ability to make a profit.

Two quotes from the report stand out:

• “Given the focus and architecture of generative AI technology today... truly transformative changes won’t happen quickly and few—if any—will likely occur within the next 10 years.” - MIT professor Daron Acemoglu.

• “AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.” - Goldman Sachs’ head of global equity research Jim Covello.

Write-ups of the report worth reading include:

• Pop Culture by Ed Zitron for Where’s Your Ed At?, July 8, 2024.

• Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable by Jason Koebler for 404, July 12, 2024.

Other “AI” Bubble Voices

Another voice motivated by profit, MicroStrategy research firm founding partner James Ferguson, said on the Merryn Talks Money podcast, “AI still remains, I would argue, completely unproven…And fake it till you make it may work in Silicon Valley, but for the rest of us, I think once bitten twice shy may be more appropriate for AI.”

Listen to the episode here.

Writer Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic:

“An important thing to realize about the grandest conversations surrounding AI is that, most of the time, everyone is making things up.¹ This isn’t to say that people have no idea what they’re talking about or that leaders are lying. But the bulk of the conversation about AI’s greatest capabilities is premised on a vision of a theoretical future. It is a sales pitch, one in which the problems of today are brushed aside or softened as issues of now, which surely, leaders in the field insist, will be solved as the technology gets better.”

The Economist wrote on July 2, 2024: “So far the technology has had almost no economic impact…Beyond America’s west coast, there is little sign AI is having much of an effect on anything.”

Reading about this potential “AI” bubble has a song playing repeatedly in my head.

I Have Questions

These recent voices sound very different from what I heard about “AI” at ISTE 2024. I have questions:

• If “AI” is a bubble, are K-12 teachers doing students a disservice by not training them how to use it?

  • Why is teaching children how to use “AI” K-12 teachers’ responsibility?

• ISTE had 252 sessions about “AI.” Considering its minimal impact and unprofitability, should conferences cap the percentage of “AI” sessions?

• How do we refocus on pedagogy if the “AI” bubble bursts?

Continuing The Conversation

What do you think? How is your school preparing to refocus on pedagogy if the “AI” bubble bursts? Comment below or Tweet me at @TomEMullaney.

Does your school or conference need a tech-forward educator who critically examines AI and pedagogy? Reach out on Twitter or email mistermullaney@gmail.com.

Post Image: The blog post image is by Lanju Fotografie on Unsplash.

AI Disclosure:

I wrote this post without the use of any generative AI. That means:

• I developed the idea for the post without using generative AI.

• I wrote an outline for this post without the assistance of generative AI.

• I wrote the post from the outline without the use of generative AI.

• I edited this post without the assistance of any generative AI. I used Grammarly to assist in editing the post. I have Grammarly GO turned off.

• There are no generative AI-generated images in this post.

1. Bold formatting was added by Tom.