Naomi Girson | opinions editor

Generative artificial intelligence is by no means going away, but it isn’t going to be like this forever.

Right now, the computer chip manufacturing company Nvidia is responsible for between 70% and 95% of the market share for chips used to run AI tools, according to Mizuho Securities.

The company has a market value of $5 trillion dollars, according to Bloomberg, and is the first company to ever reach that milestone.

With so much money going into AI consistently, and with no plans to stop anytime soon, companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Meta continue to invest heavily in AI. In the next 12 months, these companies plan to spend a combined $440 billion. For reference, Nvidia’s revenue in the fiscal year 2020 was $11 billion, but is predicted to be $285 billion by the end of the current fiscal year.

But where is it all going? The digits keep going up, up, up, but this can’t last forever. In some ways, we’ve seen this before. There was a similar breakthrough in technology with the public deployment of the web, and we cannot forget that bubble popped too.

The same thing happened with the internet between the 1990s and 2000s during the dot-com bubble.

There were far too many unprofitable online startups. Excited by the promise of the internet, overzealous investors funded them without fully thought-through plans, on how to make them succeed, according to Investopedia.

With this new revolutionary technological wonder, anyone who has seen too many episodes of “Shark Tank” wants to get in on the AI money. There are over 10,000 startups (closer to 60,000 depending on your definition of an “AI startup”), according to Ascendix Tech.

That’s thousands of companies that are trying to become the next unicorn of the tech industry, and there are 1,300 with valuations over $100 million dollars, from companies like OpenAI, according to CNBC.

It is simply too early in the life of generative AI for anyone to know exactly how it’s going to be used, even one year in the future. But entrepreneurs and self-labelled “trailblazers” can’t hide the dollar signs behind their eyes and just have to get in on the ground floor.

With the rising stock market, all attention is fixed on the S&P 500, an index of the top tradeable companies in the U.S.

With Nvidia, breaking the ceiling on company revenue by trillions of dollars, they make up the biggest chunk of the S&P 500.

The less diversified the S&P, the worse for the economy. Right now, 40.2% of the S&P 500 is made up of just 10 companies.

And the market is volatile. Just yesterday the S&P and the Nasdaq saw their largest one day drop in over a month, according to The Guardian. It seems like the bubble is edging closer to bursting everyday.

Hedge fund investor Michael Burry who inspired “The Big Short,” a movie based on Burry and other Wall Street investors betting against the housing bubble in 2008, just put $1.1 billion dollars on stock options, essentially betting that stock prices for Nvidia and Palantir, another AI-data company, will fall, according to his hedge fund management company Scion Asset Management.

“Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play,” Burry wrote on X.

And to add insult to injury, the so-called “strategic relationship” between Nvidia and OpenAI, where Nvidia’s systems train OpenAI’s data on OpenAIs dime and Nvidia invests their money back into OpenAI, is completely incestious.

This isn’t the dot-com bubble, this is worse. There is a greater amount of money in play, and AI as a business has not exactly been cited as profitable.

A recent MIT study showed that 95% of organizations found zero return despite billions of dollars invested into generative AI. It seems as though companies and big wigs have money to spend, their eyes (and pockets) are bigger than their brains. There are practical uses of AI that can give way to better efficiency and company turnover, but not every large language model is a winner.

We know all about AI, how to use it and what it’s doing. But we just don’t know where it is going down the line, and these investors can’t know either, no matter how much money they give to the cause.

The AI bubble will burst too, but that doesn’t mean AI will go away.

The dot-com bubble burst, but we still have the internet, in a more grounded, steady and practical form.

I’m not saying any one company is going to monopolize the AI industry, but there are some that will win and conquer, and ones that are already out the door.

And mom, please help me diversify my assets when I get home tomorrow.

Naomi Girson can be reached at girsonn@duq.edu