In the past several years, so-called artificial intelligence (“AI”) has exploded onto the scene. According to a recent Gallup study, 99% of Americans use at least one AI-enabled product weekly, though most don’t realize it. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, says that the rise of artificial intelligence could be “the biggest, the best, and the most important” technology revolution ever. Earlier this year, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, predicted that Altman’s company, responsible for generative AI products such as ChatGPT, will become the first “multitrillion-dollar hyperscale company.” Bill Gates predicted that, within the next decade, humans won’t be needed “for most things,” and white collar employees like doctors and teachers will be replaced by AI.
The ultimate innovation prophesied by AI optimists is the inception of “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. AGI is a theoretical future form of AI possessing independent consciousness and human cognitive function. I highly doubt that humans are going to be able to create artificial consciousness anytime in the near future, putting me in disagreement with many of our new captains of industry in Silicon Valley.
On Saturday, Elon Musk announced that he believes that Grok 5, a chatbot currently being developed by his company xAI, has a “10% and rising” chance of “achieving AGI.” In a blog post released at the beginning of 2025, Altman declared that OpenAI is “now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.” Months before, he even stated that AGI might be achieved by the end of 2025 itself. Microsoft, a major backer and partner of OpenAI, released a paper stating that the company’s GPT-4 model showed “sparks of AGI.”
In 2023, Shane Legg, co-founder of Google DeepMind, suggested that there is a 50% chance that AGI is achieved by 2028. Huang has proposed that AGI could be reached by 2029. In 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner, an AI researcher and former OpenAI employee even said that AGI by 2027 is “strikingly plausible.” Eric Schmitt, former Google CEO and current tech investor, said in April that we would see AGI “within three to five years.”
As these entrepreneurs and their tech firms race towards AGI, ridiculous sums of investor money have poured after them. So far this year, US venture capitalists have invested $161 billion into AI. Together, the combined valuations of the top 10 AI companies have reached nearly $1 trillion. OpenAI alone is now worth $500 billion. However, these companies are operating at a loss. The investor confidence in them comes from their promised future product: AI so advanced it could transform the entire economy.
Tech companies are spending absurd amounts of money building massive data centers across the country on the bet that AGI will soon become advanced enough to be profitable by eliminating the need for many jobs. At a recent White House dinner, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg estimated that his company’s spending through 2028 would be about $600 billion.
In the last three years, AI hype has been immense. AI chatbots have been called the fastest-adopted business technology in history. Whether it actually has potential to boost productivity enough to make a return on investment, however, remains unclear. In a 2024 study, 96% of C-suite leaders expected the use of AI tools to increase their company’s overall productivity levels. Of the companies in the study, 39% had already mandated the use of AI tools among employees, and another 46% encouraged their use. However, nearly half of their employees said they had no idea how to achieve these expected productivity gains, and 77% said that use of the tools had actually decreased productivity and added to their workload.
Another study from 2025 found that the adoption of AI across workplaces in Denmark had a negligible effect on earnings and recorded hours in any occupation. A recent study following a team of experienced software developers found that the use of AI tools caused their tasks to take 20% longer. They would’ve been more productive if they’d refrained from using the technology.
A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab found that 95% of organizations were getting zero return on their investments into AI tools. Recent research conducted by BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab found that one reason for this phenomenon could be the proliferation of “workslop,” a term they use to describe “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”
“Workslop” refers to output such as research reports, summaries of academic papers, or computer code that a worker creates using a large language model (“LLM”) and passes off as their own. Not all AI-generated content is “workslop;” it becomes “slop” when it is inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise deficient in some way due to the nature of its creation. Creating “workslop” may save time for one employee, but it causes their colleagues to expend even more effort correcting mistakes, decreasing a firm’s overall efficiency.
Business leaders and media outlets loudly proclaim imminent economic disruption, but three years after ChatGPT’s release, AI has had no discernable effect on the labor market, and research shows it isn’t to blame for the recent hiring slowdown. The industry loses billions of dollars per year, and evidence that LLMs fundamentally cannot achieve AGI is growing. More and more, the AI boom is being called a bubble, and one researcher has even estimated it to be 17 times bigger than the dot com bubble and four times bigger than the devastating 2008 housing bubble. Tech CEOs like Huang had better hope that AGI really can be reached within this decade, as Bain & Co projects that investors will be short $800 billion on revenue to fund 2030’s data centers, even with AI-related savings. Deutsche Bank research indicated that, while tech stocks account for about half of the stock market growth captured by the S&P 500, AI technology and services haven’t meaningfully contributed to the GDP of the United States. According to the research, the United States would be close to a recession if not for the current unsustainable levels of investment into AI. Altman himself admits that investors are acting irrationally, and that “Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money — we don’t know who.”
Of course, no one can predict what the far future holds. It’s not impossible that a large amount of white-collar jobs will be automated someday. However, for all the hype fostered by industry leaders, there isn’t evidence that AI is on track to boost productivity or slash labor demand to any extent that comes close to justifying the mind-boggling sums of money invested into it. When is it time for investors, and the public, to stop listening to these CEOs every time they proclaim that AGI is imminent?
I think we should all keep in mind that many of the people who are the most publicly confident that AI is about to change everything, like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang, may be knowledgeable about the field, but they’re hardly impartial experts. They are businessmen who need to sell a product. The futures of their massive businesses rely on continued investor confidence in the power of AI, and on widespread demand for its services. It is of utmost importance to these tech giants that investors, businesses, and consumers believe that they are on the cusp of revolutionary AI, regardless of the truth, because that’s what makes the money flow.
The opinions expressed within this piece represent the views of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jefferson Independent.
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