Imagine the following situation. In a class, 3 boys are sitting in a row. Dima, Sava and Vanya. Sava is in the middle. They are doing a Latin test. Dima and Vanya have prepared. Sava, on the contrary is a lazy boy. He has not prepared. In fact he hasn’t done any of the work all term. However, Sava is determined to get a good score. During the test he peeps, alternately, at Dima’s paper and at Vanya’s. Both Dima and Vanya are pretty good, but there are a few questions which they don’t know the answer to. They just leave these blank. Sava, is lazy but he isn’t stupid. He copies all the completed answers from Dima and all the completed answers from Vanya, resulting in a complete set of answers.
Luckily for Sava, the answer sheets are marked by separate examiners, so they don’t notice the similarity of his answers to Dima’s and Vanya’s. Also, due to his actuteness is copying what he needed from both Dima and Vanya, Sava gets top score. He is delighted.
The reality is that Sava has no understanding of Latin at all. Not only does he not understand in any way the content of the moving poem by Horace on which the exam was based, but he doesn’t even understand the literal meaning of the words he copied down. He is entirely dependent on the hard work of Vanya and Dima. If Vanya and Dima had not produced answers Sava would not have been able to produce a single line. Sava can produce nothing original.
At some point people outside the AI corporates will begin to realise the limits of pattern matching and prediction. You can only keep the promise that “AI reasoning is just around the corner” going for so long. (just as you can only keep the promise that Ukraine is about to win on the battlefield going for only so long). At some point reality bites.
Actually, most likely there won’t be a collapse of the share price. By the time people find out, they will have already integrated AI into everything and will have become dependent, via subscription payments, on the AI companies, and so there will be no real shock. This, I imagine is all known and understood in the boardrooms and by the smart equity holders.