Can AI generate a way to pay for itself?

I’ve heard a lot of talk about how AI is going to make me — a journalist, someone in the workforce, a human — obsolete or whatever, and so I wondered: is that even true?

Here’s Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking in 2019: “I really do believe the work that we’re doing at OpenAI will, like, not only far eclipse the work that I did at YC [startup incubator Y Combinator], but the work that anyone in the tech industry does.” Why is that? Well, he believes that someone is going to build a software system that is “smarter and more capable than humans in every way,” and it might as well be him. “And very quickly, it will go from being a little bit more capable than humans to something that is, like, a million or a billion times more capable than humans.”

Now, Altman is highly motivated to hype AI. After all, dude runs a startup and needs investment. Still, there’s a lot of investment pouring into the field — about $94 billion in 2021, according to Stanford’s AI index, more than double the year before. In 2021, AI companies had 15 different funding rounds that were worth $500 million or more.

Code and GPUs and so on aren’t the real driving force in tech. Money is. AI is expensive! Altman and his ilk have to talk up a big game in order to get the massive sums of money in order to set up AI. His competitors — Google and Facebook — are basically money-printing machines that can afford to burn cash on experimental tech without having to hype it.

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