Go ahead and cut me a check
In the unlikely event anyone should do so, cash it immediately before their bigger debts are called in.
While "investment" may be soaring and the "investors" are feverishly bidding up their own costs the funding is coming from the financial equivalent of those fictitious "free energy" machines that AI has propagated across social media. AI slop is ultimately valueless, making it a tempting source of cheap material on which to train subsequent generations of AI, but it's pretty clear this inhuman centipede is not the work of genius its creators imagine and even those dazzled by the promises of riches are going to notice when their wallets are ultimately empty. The technologists may cry "let them eat fake", but history has not been kind to any self-appointed aristocracy constantly raising taxation, even on the gullible.
That's not to say the technology does not have useful applications and may well be helping analyse CT scans or in the synthesis of novel molecules or even in navigating the complexity of legal texts. But it's not going to displace real intelligence in those fields and still less is it ever going to be the oracular font of all human knowledge. There is, without doubt, significant money to be made in specific domains. The hubris is in concluding this is not enough.
The real danger here is not that the Internet becomes a cesspit of lies and half-truths - it's been that for a long time. The risk is that new knowledge and creative endeavours are going to end up increasingly walled off from public access precisely to prevent the new information overlords from asset-stripping the work of others. Now the genie is out of the bottle, the only way to fix that is through legislation. Unfortunately, we may have to wait until sufficient money has been burned that it's no longer a significant gravitational pull on political discourse.
