'We could hit a wall': why trillions of dollars of risk is no guarantee of AI reward

Datacentres and industrial complexes used by Google, Microsoft and Amazon in Medemblik, the Netherlands. Datacentres and industrial complexes used by Google, Microsoft and Amazon in Medemblik, the Netherlands. 'We could hit a wall': why trillions of dollars of risk is no guarantee of AI reward Progress of artificial general intelligence could stall, which may lead to a financial crash, says Yoshua Bengio, one of the'godfathers' of modern AI Will the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) lead us to a land of financial plenty - or will it end in a 2008-style bust? Trillions of dollars rest on the answer. The figures are staggering: an estimated $2.9tn (£2.2tn) being spent on datacentres, the central nervous systems of AI tools; the more than $4tn stock market capitalisation of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips powering cutting-edge AI systems; and the $100m signing-on bonuses offered by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to top engineers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. These sky-high numbers are all propped up by investors who expect a return on their trillions.