By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 26th, 2024
The CEO said AI will be the world’s biggest bubble, but added that the stock market will punish companies that don’t use it appropriately.
The chief executive officer of open-source artificial intelligence company Stability AI has predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the “biggest bubble of all time”. Speaking to UBS analysts last week, CEO Emad Mostaque praised the technology but added that it is still in its early stages.
On the call, Mostaque said AI requires an investment of up to $1 trillion because it is more important than 5G and such a “massive market” that banks would have no choice but to use it. However, he said that although everyone can see its usefulness, AI is generally “not quite ready” for large-scale adoption in big industries. Nonetheless, he believes AI is a bubble, saying:
“I call it the ‘dotAI’ bubble, and it hasn’t even started yet.”
Mostaque also said that organizations that do not appropriately use AI could see a plunge in stock or valuation. The CEO used Google as an example, reminding that the company suffered a $100 billion loss within 24 hours after its Bard AI supplied false info in an ad. Shares of Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, fell 9% following the mistake.
In the ad, Google’s Bard stated that the James Webb Space Telescope “took the very first pictures of a planet outside our own solar system.” The information turned out to be false.
Mostaque also told the UBS analysts that he believes AI investment will skyrocket over the next few years. However, he doesn’t think that the AI investment market offers a lot of options.
“I think this is real. I think that there aren’t many investable opportunities here, and you’ll see people moving from the best chip manufacturers to companies that are using this to impact their bottom line and their top line appropriately. And you will see the market punishing those that don’t use this,” said he.
Mostaque Has Raised $100M despite Thoughts on AI Bubble
Stability AI is the artificial intelligence firm that collaborated on Stable Diffusion, a deep learning text-to-image AI model. Regardless of Mostaque’s belief that AI is a bubble, Stable Diffusion already has over one million users and has received $100 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatur.
Mostaque was recently at the center of accusations about his past. The CEO was accused of deliberately falsifying claims about his achievements and background. Early last month, Mostaque published a blog post where he directly responded to the allegations.
AI Oversight
Several stakeholders and regulators have called for proper oversight over the development and adoption of AI tools. Early this month, Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk spoke about regulatory involvement in the exploding AI sector. During a keynote address at an AI conference on July 5th, Musk specified regulation of several AI uses, including the adoption of self-driving vehicles and robots.
Musk also warned that developers must be careful with creating AI because it is “smarter than all humans at everything”.