There’s an old business maxim dating to the California gold rush: it’s easier to make money selling picks and shovels to aspiring miners than to strike it rich finding gold.
Artificial intelligence is in a picks-and-shovels phase right now. If gold, in this metaphor, is artificial general intelligence—a machine smarter than a human—or some version of a digital god, then tech companies are snapping up the tools to create one, including graphics-processing units, data centers, and trained A.I. models.
Insiders have described San Francisco as being in a new state of A.I.-gold-rush fervor, but the true gold has yet to be found; all of the major generative artificial-intelligence businesses are unprofitable. The race is on to find something, anything, that works.
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