By 2025, AI Technology Will Lead a Global Investment Boom Worth $200 Billion
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Globally, artificial intelligence (AI) is experiencing a multi-billion-dollar investment boom, with major tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon actively participating. According to Goldman Sachs estimates, by 2025, up to $200 billion will flow into the AI sector, which is expected to fundamentally transform business and society.
However, this AI boom has also raised concerns, as unconstrained AI development by some tech companies is seen as potentially endangering humanity's future. MIT physicist and AI researcher Max Tegmark has called for halting this "race to the bottom." In April of this year, he organized an open letter signed by thousands of tech industry figures, including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The letter calls for a pause on massive AI experiments to establish AI safety standards and ensure sustainable and secure AI development. Tegmark pointed out that while AI holds exciting potential, unregulated and unrestricted development of powerful systems could threaten economic, social, and life safety. Therefore, regulation is crucial for safe innovation.
Image source: AI-generated image, licensed by MidjourneyAdditionally, a policy document released this week was co-signed by 23 AI experts, including two "founding figures" of modern AI. The document argues that governments should have the authority to halt the development of ultra-powerful AI models. According to Gillian Hadfield, a co-author of the document and director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto, models several times more powerful than those currently in operation will be developed within the next 18 months. Currently, there are almost no regulations governing what these models can achieve, prompting experts to call for governments to issue licenses, pause development if necessary, implement access controls, and require cybersecurity measures to prevent attacks by state-level hackers.
For those advocating stricter AI regulation, unconstrained artificial general intelligence (AGI) development is a major concern. Amazon recently announced plans to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a startup founded by former OpenAI executives, which will gain access to proprietary data on Amazon's cloud services. Microsoft has also invested $13 billion in OpenAI, the parent company of the wildly popular ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E3. Google has invested approximately $120 billion in AI and cloud computing since 2016, including UK-based DeepMind Technologies, its generative AI tool LaMDA, and its consumer-facing Bard. Meanwhile, Meta, Facebook's parent company, plans to invest $33 billion in AI, focusing on its open-source large language model, Llama.
These massive investments in AI will drive global economic and GDP growth and are expected to bring widespread societal changes. At the same time, new AI companies have secured billions in funding, with investment growth in this sector outpacing other tech investments. Global AI investments reached nearly $18 billion in Q3, a 27% year-on-year increase, while funding for global tech startups fell 31% to $73 billion during the same period.