AI is moving fast. Official Ireland is not |
Welcome back to the late 1990s. The Celtic Tiger is in full swing. You connect to the internet via a buzzing dial-up modem on your home phone line and use rudimentary search engines such as Ask Jeeves. And in the world of finance the dot-com boom is in full swing, with money flooding into new companies hoping to profit from what we are calling the “world wide web.”
In 2000 the dot-com bubble burst, stock markets collapsed and there was a rolling wave of liquidations as investors started to look at profitability rather than hope value. Companies such as Pets.com – a pioneer of ecommerce that sold pet supplies online – found they had an idea but no business model and went bust.
Looking at the AI boom now recalls that chaotic period. AI may be coming at us at a faster pace, but the large investment and the hope value of the stock market feels similar. Like the advent of the internet, nobody disputes that artificial intelligence is going to have a fundamental impact on all our lives. It is just that no one is quite sure yet exactly what it will look like.
Senior business executives talk of little else, but many are still trying to work out what it will mean for their companies. And like back in 2000, there are questions about the amounts of money being spent. This week Uber’s president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said it is getting harder to justify its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. Uber spent an eye-watering $3.4 billion on research last year, much of it AI related. To help fund this it cut its new hiring.
Where’s the Brazilian........