Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, discussed his views on the potential of AI as an investment opportunity and its importance in various industries, such as banking, in a conference call with UBS analysts last week. And boldly predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will become "the biggest bubble ever".
Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model that is one of the more popular generative AI tools besides OpenAI. Has over 1 million users and has successfully raised over $100 million in funding from investors including Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
According to Mostaque, AI development is still in a very early stage and is not yet ready for mass adoption in industries such as banking. " I call it the dot AI bubble, and it hasn't even started yet ". Mostaque refers to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, also known as the Internet bubble.
During the Internet bubble period, many Internet start-up companies appeared one after another and had high valuations; some optimistic investors firmly believed that the Internet would revolutionize all walks of life, which led to a rapid rise in the stock prices of Internet-related companies. Between 2000 and 2001, the dotcom bubble burst and many internet companies went bankrupt due to high valuations, unsustainable businesses, unrealized profits, and plummeting stock prices.
But Mostaque also pointed out the value of the artificial intelligence industry, "which will be one of the biggest investment themes in the next few years." He sees AI as a $1 trillion investment opportunity "because it's more important than 5G as a knowledge infrastructure". It is suggested that companies in the financial services industry, especially banks, should embrace artificial intelligence technology.
He also said that companies that do not properly use artificial intelligence in their business will be taught by the market. And take Google’s Bard AI chatbot as an example: Because it provided inaccurate information at the time of release, Google’s market value evaporated $100 billion in one day.