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【经济学人】
这是商业史上最大的冒险，但事实证明，人工智能的应用并不完善
背景：AI的热潮席卷而来，被视为商业史上最大的一场赌博。自2022年11月ChatGPT推出后，AI迅速成为焦点，吸引了大量用户和投资者。然而，多数企业对AI的实际能力和最佳应用方式仍迷茫。在整个经济领域，仅5%的美国企业在产品和服务中应用了AI，AI初创企业盈利者寥寥。AI模型制作面临能源和数据的双重限制，投资者热情与商业现实的差距日益凸显。在创新前沿，训练大型模型能耗巨大，这限制了技术的推进速度。为在投资者热情消退前，让AI更高效、实用，2025年成为关键之年，一场激烈的竞赛已然开启。
It is the biggest gamble in business history—but adoption of AI is proving patchy
It may be the biggest gamble in business history. Today’s mania for artificial intelligence (AI) began with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022. OpenAI’s chatbot attracted 100m users within weeks, faster than any product in history. Investors also piled in. Spending on AI data centres between 2024 and 2027 is expected to exceed $1.4trn; the market value of Nvidia, the leading maker of AI chips, has increased eight-fold, to more than $3trn.
And yet most companies are still not sure what the technology can or cannot do, or how best to use it. Across the economy, only 5% of American businesses say they are using AI in their products and services. Few AI startups are turning a profit. And the energy and data constraints on AI model-making are becoming steadily more painful. The disparity between investor enthusiasm and business reality looks untenable—which means 2025 is shaping up to be a crunch year. The race to make AI more efficient and more useful, before investors lose their enthusiasm, is on.
Start at the cutting edge of innovation. Several constraints are slowing the pace at which the technological frontier is being pushed out. Training big models needs huge amounts of energy. The electricity used to train GPT-4, the large language model underpinning ChatGPT, could have powered 5,000 American homes for a year; the equivalent figure for GPT-3, its predecessor, was 100. Developing ever larger and whizzier models thus requires ever deeper pockets.
