Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of some of the world’s largest companies. It has also captured a sizable portion of their spending — without giving much back. Big Tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and others, are struggling to profitably monetize their generative AI products due to the costs that the models require to produce, develop and train, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday. AI represents a new phase shift in technology, one that breaks away from the known and familiar economies of scale of existing software products. “A lot of the customers I’ve talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models,” Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky told WSJ, speaking of the industry broadly. A study published Tuesday (Oct. 10) titled “The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence” found that by 2027, AI servers could be responsible for as much energy use as the entire country of Sweden, or around 0.5% of the entire world’s electricity. While the AI economy is still in the initial development stages, where companies are seeking to generate public interest in their products and capture customers for their platforms, the technology is entering the end of its first full year of commercialization without having cracked the profitability nut. The high cost of AI, driven primarily by the computing power an AI model requires — which grows in step with the number of customers using the product — is an uncomfortable and expensive reality that businesses need to adapt to in order to remain competitive.
Full story : Big tech companies are bleeding millions while trying to adopt artificial Intelligence.
