Is tech industry already on the cusp of an AI slowdown?

Dr Demis Hassabis, one of the most influential artificial intelligence (AI) experts in the world, has a warning for the rest of the tech industry: Don't expect chatbots to continue to improve as quickly as they have over the past few years.

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SAN FRANCISCO - Dr Demis Hassabis, one of the most influential artificial intelligence (AI) experts in the world, has a warning for the rest of the tech industry: Don't expect chatbots to continue to improve as quickly as they have over the past few years.

AI researchers have for some time been relying on a fairly simple concept to improve their systems: The more data culled from the internet that they pumped into large language models - the technology behind chatbots - the better those systems performed.

But Dr Hassabis, who oversees Google DeepMind, the company's primary AI lab, now says that method is running out of steam simply because tech companies are running out of data.

"Everyone in the industry is seeing diminishing returns," Dr Hassabis said in December in an interview with The New York Times (NYT) as he prepared to accept a Nobel Prize for his work on AI.

Dr Hassabis is not the only AI expert warning of a slowdown. Interviews with 20 executives and researchers showed a widespread belief that the tech industry is running into a problem many would have thought was unthinkable just a few years ago: They have used up most of the digital text available on the internet.

That problem is starting to surface even as billions of dollars continue to be poured into AI development.

Last week, Databricks, an AI data company, said it was closing in on US$10 billion (S$13.5 billion) in funding - the largest-ever private funding round for a start-up. And the biggest companies in tech are signalling that they have no plans to slow down their spending on the giant data centres that run AI systems.

Not everyone in the AI world is concerned. Some, including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, say progress will continue at the same pace, albeit with some twists on old techniques.

Mr Dario Amodei, CEO of AI start-up Anthropic, and Mr Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, are also bullish.