Every investor knows not to put all your eggs in one basket. So why is Silicon Valley betting on just one way to build artificial intelligence? This year the world’s four largest tech firms will spend $344 billion on AI, mostly on data centers used to train and run so-called large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT that can process text, audio and visual content. The technology is largely underpinned by the same technique of predicting tokens that appear next in a sequence. Their spending isn’t all in vain of course. Personal-use chatbots are already growing quickly, with some AI startups starting to break even and businesses still in the early stages of boosting themselves with generative AI. Large language models represent the first AI technique to achieve mainstream adoption at enormous scale: More than 700 million people use ChatGPT each week, for instance.

Full opinion : AI companies’ bet on prediction token-based LLMs may make them vulnerable to disruption by a novel approach, especially as new models face diminishing returns.