By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
When you spend your days organising events and creating content – which is what we do 24/7 – one of the benefits is real-time insight into what’s occupying people’s minds, and of course it is no secret that AI is gobbling up a lot of mindshare these days. I would say it’s getting close to 95%. Here’s our view on what works and what doesn’t – and why it is time to start aligning industry efforts somewhat differently.
Just like during the days of overwhelming 5G hype of years past, it is important to emphasise that AI is not a solution to everything. Contrary to popular belief, AI is not the magic fairy dust you can sprinkle on anything to work wonders and make everyone rich. On the other hand, nothing functions without connectivity. In other words: AI is optional, connectivity is not.
Disclaimer: We are not against AI. AI is very useful and many companies within the Wi-Fi industry are indeed putting AI to good use towards excellent efficiency gains, better connectivity quality, new services, and more. But we do not believe that jobs are being lost because of AI at this time even though some companies claim that they are. Jobs are certainly being lost – but the reason is the economy, not AI.
Soon a lot more jobs will be lost. When we say AI is magic fairy dust, we mean this quite literally. This is the predominant thinking among a very large proportion tech industry professionals and it is even more prevalent among investors. And of course it is patently false. I won’t get into all the limitations of AI (and there are many) but simply ask the question: What happened to basic business acumen?
What happened to asking (and answering) the following the questions: “What problem are we solving?” or “where are the revenues going to come from?” If you’re like me you’ve been asked this question many times by colleagues and perhaps investors. Then there are moral questions: Can we trust AI output? Do we really want to replace humans with machines? Do we really want AI to chew on our data and make inferences all the time – whether we’ve asked these machines to do it or not?
It appears that nobody is interested in asking or answering these standard questions. I’ve tried on numerous occasions and all I get is crickets. The truth is that nobody really knows and instead most are pseudo-religious believers in the Magic Fairy Dust. For example: How does Nokia expect to generate revenue (or savings) from the US1$ billion Nvidia investment? What revenue-generating services will run on Deutsche Telekom’s new US$1 billion Nvidia server farm?
The answer is crickets. Nobody knows. In the meantime Nvidia is trading at 58 P/E ratio. It is without a doubt the most overvalued stock in world history. Michael Burry – famed from the excellent movie The Big Short – is now shorting the AI bubble to the tune of US$1 billion (you can read about it here). But the biggest problem is this: The AI hype is a lot more extreme than the 5G hype and a lot more problematic. Because when the AI bubble bursts, the entire stockmarket will tank and probably the world economy with it. 5G was never that consequential.
In the meantime – while we’re waiting for all this to play out – I suggest spending at least some time on topics that are likely to emerge once we’re on the other side of the inevitable crash. It’s time to figure out what those could be. One thing is for sure: Connectivity is not going away. It is not optional.
/Claus.
