Move to San Francisco and it’s exhausting to not be swept up by mania over synthetic intelligence (AI). Ads inform you about how the tech will revolutionise your office. In bars folks speculate about when the world will “get AGI”, or when machines will change into extra superior than people. The 5 massive tech corporations—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, all of which have both headquarters or outposts close by—are investing huge sums. This yr they’re budgeting an estimated $400bn for capital expenditures, totally on AI-related {hardware}, and for analysis and growth.
On this planet’s tech capital it’s taken as learn that AI will remodel the worldwide economic system. However for ai to fulfil its potential, corporations all over the place want to purchase massive tech’s AI, form it to their wants and change into extra productive because of this. Buyers have added $2trn to the market worth of the 5 massive tech corporations previously yr—in impact projecting an extra $300bn-400bn in annual revenues based on our tough estimates, about the identical as one other Apple’s price of annual gross sales. For now, although, the tech titans are miles from such outcomes. Even bullish analysts assume Microsoft will solely make about $10bn from generative-AI-related gross sales this yr. Past America’s west coast, there may be little signal AI is having a lot of an impact on something.
