It could unwind cleanly as long as we don't let it infect the banking system too much, which it has started somewhat doing with more debt financed deals instead of equity financed and probably book values making it into bank balance sheets.
Truck driver wages are $180-280 billion annually and seems like something that will get replaced and should justify $1 trillion of the spend or more, economically. I think Tesla for instance only spends single digit billions in R&D most years though, so the spending may not be going to where the most immediate solid/lasting economic impacts will come from. I'm not sure what Waymo's spend is.
Do any of these make sense economically right now? The Tesla one is mainly being piloted hauling potato chips for Pepsico because they are so light weight. Few of the Tesla Semi numbers from the presentation seemed to come true (and the part about having autonomous follower convoys working in ~2017...), and you had the guy from Nikola rolling it down a hill and needing a presidential pardon.
tl;dr no it's not economically viable right now, but my point is that it's an extra expense, and self-driving is more complicated/fraught than even an EV truck. trucking companies want either a very easy cost savings, or stick to what they know. (to give you an idea of this: many companies still use paper and pencil to manage driver schedules/routes)
1. Quite a lot of companies are not publicly traded, and therefore are not reflected in the stock market. AI companies have an incentive to be publicly traded because it's all venture-capital stuff.
2. Technology in general is always going to be over-weight anyway because these are companies that tend towards "growth" (re-investing profits into future expansion, offering to buy back stocks at a higher price as a means of compensating investors, etc.) rather than "value" (compensating investors by paying out an explicit cash dividend on shares). This tends to push their P/E multiples higher.
3. Publicly traded companies, and thus stocks, generally are valued based on speculation about future cash flows, not according to current holdings.
4. The companies that you have to add up in order to come to a figure like "one third of the stock market", are doing a lot of things outside of AI. People still play video games, and they still do GPU-accelerated data analysis with conventional techniques. People still want their computer to include an operating system, and still use their social media to talk to accounts that they know are operated by people they know in real life.
5. The term "AI" is now used as if it exclusively referred to LLMs, but other AI systems have existed for a long time and have been actually accomplishing real things in the economy.
> The economy is going to collapse
There are a great many people out there who have predicted a hundred or so out of the last seven recessions. You don't know this, and there are many reasons to doubt it.
Suppose some anti-AI deity snaps its fingers tomorrow and every LLM simply spontaneously ceases to function. It's not as if we've lost the knowledge of how to do things without LLMs. It's not as if the things we created without LLMs disappear, or anything else. We at worst, at a very conservative, scare-mongering estimate revert to that level; and things were pretty tolerable at that level. And technologies that are not LLMs have also advanced since the release of ChatGPT.
How long did Apple keep going up following the smartphone revolution?
Let AI diagnose the avg cold, now AI took over the household / local doctor for 90% of cases.
Use AI for support, now AI took over the call-center business.
AI can already code. It might not be perfect, it might not be always good but NO ONE assumed that 2025 some matrix multiplication can mimick another human being so well that you can write with it and it will produce working code at all.
thats the hype, thats the market of ai.
And in parallel we get robotic too. Only possible because of this AI thing. Because robotic with ML is so much better than whatever we had before. Now you can talk to a robot, the robot can move, the robot can plan actions. All of these robots use some type of ML in the background. Segment Anything is possible because of AI.
Thats the reason why this 'AI crap' is so hyped.
All of that pushes everything forward: LLMs and any other architecture to LLMs, GenAI for images, sound and video, movement for robotics, image feature detection.
Segment Anything 2 was a breakthrough in image segmentation, for example.
The latest Google Weather model is also a breakthrough.
All progress in robotics is ML driven.
I don't think any investor thinks that OpenAI will achieve AGI with an LLM. Its Data + Compute -> Some Architecture -> AI/ML Model.
if it will become the golden model which will be capable of everything or a thousand expert models or the Model of Expert model, we don't know yet.
Have you ever talked to AI Support?
It’s easy to name a random industry and assume you’ll automate it with a few clicks. It’s harder to actually do it.