Artificial intelligence will be ‘bigger than the internet’, but the bubble is likely to burst, a top tech boss has warned.
Chuck Robbins, chairman and chief executive of Cisco Systems, said there’ll be winners from the AI boom but that there will be ‘carnage along the way’.
Cisco, which was founded in the 1980s, was a victim of the dotcom collapse but has since rebuilt and pivoted to AI infrastructure. It counts giants like Nvidia among its partners.
Robbins told the BBC that there are valid concerns that AI could follow a similar path to the dotcom bubble.
‘There’s been a lot of discussion about: ‘Is this a bubble?’. And the answer is probably yes, but we had a bubble in 2000 with the internet. And look at where we are today.
‘So the winners emerge, and there’s carnage along the way, but it is going to be bigger than the internet’.
AI bubble fears: Cisco CEO warns it will burst and there’ll be ‘carnage’ along the way
He added: ‘It feels a lot like it, but what happens is you’ll have money that will be invested in companies that won’t make it, but the winners will emerge, the applications and use cases will begin to evolve.’
It follows warnings over recent months that the surge in share prices has been overdone.
Big technology firms with sky-high valuations continue to pump investment into AI, but critics say it is driven by hype and ‘fear of missing out’.
Google boss Sundar Pichai has previously said there is some ‘irrationality’ in the AI boom, while JP Morgan vice-chairman Daniel Pinto told a Bloomberg conference last year that AI stocks were overvalued and due a ‘correction’.
This week, the co-founder of AI giant Anthropic penned a 20,000 word essay on what the technology revolution will mean.
Dario Amodei warned that AI will ‘test who we are as species’ and that ‘it is deeply unclear whether our social, political and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.’
While China and the US have become the dominant AI powers, Robbins said the UK had ‘pretty good odds’ of becoming one too.
However, he told the BBC that the increased sophistication of AI is ‘going to make our cyber attacks better. It’s going to make the scams that people see in their inboxes seem more real’.
He added: ‘Every time we’ve had a big technological revolution, there’s always a security risk associated with it, and the industry is pretty good at figuring out and actually building technology that helps protect from those kinds of things.’
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