All major technology giants need a global monopoly to support their success and market value. But among the giants that struggle at this time for supremacy in artificial intelligence, only one will be a kind of company of the east century of the 21st century.
At a time when most investors in the capital market are delighted with the financial promises of the great language models (LLMs) and the data centers needed for food, a weight investor in the technological sector launches the alert.
In an article published this Wednesday in, Roger McNameecareer investor who in the past has successfully bet on companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, warns, in a dark tone, that the IA industry is already on the way to collapse.
According to McNamee, Until the end of 2025 the technology industry will have invested more than 700 billion dollars in LLMS – A value that, says the investor, companies should return to invest in next year, if no catastrophe has not happened.
The problem, however, is that This catastrophe may already be around the cornersays McNamee: Underneath this entire investment vacancy in AI, the economy presents worrying signs.
“In my more than 43 years of investment careerin technology, I never saw Nothing that remotely compares to the IA phenomenon Based on large language models, ”says McNamee.
“Big tech, journalists, politicians, executive presidents and investors are all convinced that AI is inevitably the next great revolutionwhich will transform the economy and society for the better, ”notes the investor.
What few have pondered, warns McNamee, is a central contradiction: “Even if technology fulfills its promise, many, if not the majorityof the current protagonists are condemned to failure. The chain consequences of these bankruptcies can be catastrophic, especially for investors. ”
For McNamee, we are a penant a frantic race between 5 or 6 giants technological, which develop virtually identical models. Among them are Google, Amazon, Goal, Xai and the Microsoft / Openai partnership.
Each of these companies is spending thousands of millions in the hope of becoming the Dominant actor in the universe of llms – In practice, in search of a global monopoly, A kind of company of the Eastern Indies of the 21st century.
But, as the investor points out, A monopoly is by exclusive definitionwhich means that giants that cannot reach the lead will have to compete the remaining crumbs.
McNamee’s analysis finds echo in economic science itselfnote o. Already in the mid -nineteenth century, the economists stressed that there was a trend of capitalist systems for the formation of monopolieswhenever there was no government regulation to guarantee healthy competition.
To one’s own Adam Smithconsidered the father of modern economic thinking, warned against this trend. In his celebrated work of 1776, “The Richness of the Nations,” criticized the British monopoly on his thirteen colonies.
“Found a great empire with the sole purpose of create a client people It can, at first glance, look like its own project only of a nation of tenants. In fact, it is a totally inappropriate project for a nation of tenants, but very convenient for a nation whose government is influenced by retailers“, he wrote.
The important difference, Roger McNamee points out, is that the monopolies of the past still produced something of valuesomething that the current AI tycoons have not yet been able to demonstrate.
“The day will arrive, tearlier than many expectin which shareholders, administrators and executives will require evidence that massive investment in LLM technology generates sufficient return. The answer will be negative for many, if not for the majority, and Accounts will be ugly for all”He concludes.
