India Today AI Summit: Are we in the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble; is this an AI bubble? Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vianai Systems, Vishal Sikka, has an answer to that, but it is not as simplistic as it seems.
Firstly, this is not an one-off event. There has been hype about AI in the past too.
Sikka said how Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron was lauded as the machine that could mimic the human mind in the 1950s. Then there was hype round AI in the 1980s too with venture capitalists, hardware companies and services companies all focusing on AI.
Yet, it is not as straightforward as it seems. It is not only about innovation and ideas, but involves a whole lot of number crunching.
“If you look at the math, there are a few gaps,” said Sikka. “For example, Nvidia, which is one of the incredible companies and has done extraordinary engineering, if you look at their revenue, it is in the neighbourhood of $60 billion a quarter. So, that’s about $250 billion a year. They make a real product. They make a GPU that’s the size of a toaster oven, people buy that. So that’s $250 billion a year,” he said at the event.
GPUs or graphics processing units are electronic circuits that are used to speed up computer graphics and image processing on devices such as mobile phones, computers, video cards, system boards etc. GPUs reduce the time required for a device to run multiple programmes, paving the way for more advanced technologies such as machine learning, AI, and blockchain.
“On top of the GPU, cloud companies add another 2X the amount to make that available as infrastructure. So that’s around $750-800 billion a year of real spend, and then there are people expenses too. If you amortise this $800 billion over four years, that means you need $200 billion a year in revenue just to recover these $800 billion in spend. Where is that $200 billion? OpenAI is about $15-20 billion. There’s a huge gap, and that gap is a gap in the kind of applications people have not been able to produce yet,” said Sikka.
Sikka, who was the former CEO of Infosys, said that it is clear that there is a massive shortage of GPUs but at the same time there is a lack of applications of AI that enterprises or other people find worthwhile.
“You have to invest carefully, make sure there’s ROI. On the other hand if you are an application builder then the sky is the limit for you,” he said.
Watch the conversation here:
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