It’s a pertinent query, so I turned to an AI for insight and followed its suggestion to check a resource authored by human experts. There, I learned that an investment bubble typically undergoes five stages, much like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief: displacement, boom, euphoria, profit-taking, and panic. Let’s examine how these stages align with our current experience with AI.

Starting with displacement, it’s clear: ChatGPT was the catalyst. When it launched on November 30, 2022, the public reaction was explosive. Suddenly, all the vague chatter about AI crystallized into a vivid demonstration of its capabilities. People were captivated by the idea of conversing with a machine that could respond with articulate sentences. This was reminiscent of the spring of 1993 when Mosaic, the first widely accessible web browser, appeared. It illuminated the real potential of the internet, much like Netscape’s IPO in August 1995, which sent its stock soaring and began inflating the first internet bubble.

Second stage: The introduction of ChatGPT disclosed that major tech companies had been experimenting with AI technologies for years but kept quiet due to the technology’s unpredictable nature. Once OpenAI, the creator behind ChatGPT, disclosed this advancement, a wave of FOMO (fear of missing out) swept across the industry. The situation intensified when it became clear that Microsoft had quietly secured a strategic investment in OpenAI, thus gaining exclusive access to the advanced GPT-4 large multimodal model. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, perhaps too boldly, declared his goal to make Google “dance.” This strategy appeared effective as Google, previously viewed as a frontrunner in machine learning, hurriedly launched its Bard chatbot prematurely, only to face widespread criticism and ridicule.

The third stage of the cycle – euphoria – is the one we’re now in. Caution has been thrown to the winds and ostensibly rational companies are gambling colossal amounts of money on AI. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, started talking about raising $7tn from Middle Eastern petrostates for a big push that would create AGI (artificial general intelligence). He’s also hedging his bets by teaming up with Microsoft to spend $100bn on building the Stargate supercomputer. All this seems to be based on an article of faith; namely, that all that is needed to create superintelligent machines is (a) infinitely more data and (b) infinitely more computing power. And the strange thing is that at the moment the world seems to be taking these fantasies at face value.