AI is a work in progress—and progress is getting harder. By one estimate, today’s biggest models cost $100m to train; the next generation could cost $1bn, and the following one $10bn. Likewise, asking a model to answer a query comes at a computational cost of anything from $2,400 to $223,000 to summarise the financial reports of the world’s 58,000 public companies. It is hard to see how that adds up to a viable business model.
We thought about illustrating this with a half-finished automaton. But, as so often with AI covers, we immediately ran into the objection that artificial intelligence and robotics are different things. In addition, some of us were reminded of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker”—and not in a good way. The sculpture has become something of a visual cliché. |