Futurism reports:

Whether you use AI in your personal life or not, there is no longer any escaping the grasp of the industry’s tendrils. There are multiple trillions of dollars now resting on AI’s success, much of it bound up in speculative debt. As everybody knows, debt is only an issue if you can’t pay it off — and as top AI labs fail to bring in enough revenue to cover skyrocketing costs, alarms are blaring that the entire global Jenga tower could soon topple.

As a new analysis by the DC-based think tank OpenMarkets concludes, this debt trap means that the “odds of a deep and severe AI crash are rapidly increasing.”

The report, cheerfully titled “Brace For Impact,” looks at the long-running and somehow still-disputed narrative around the AI bubble. As the researchers at OpenMarkets write, the interconnected and highly-concentrated nature of the speculative AI gold rush carries profound risks for the rest of the tech industry — and indeed, the economy writ-large.

“If the AI industry can’t pay back its mounting debts,” the report warns, a “financial crash could follow — and it could spread well beyond the tech sector.” [Continue reading…]

Earlier, Futurism reported:

Fears of an AI bubble have been growing for years. And now the International Monetary Fund is the latest to sound the alarm.

In its Global Financial Stability Report published last week, the global financial institution warned that markets everywhere are increasingly at the mercy of precarious AI investments.

The untold billions poured into AI has driven economic growth, the IMF says, but the boom could quickly invert if profits, which so far have largely proven elusive, never come to fruition — or at least not proportionately with the epic investment levels. AI stocks would tank, and the resulting market correction would send powerful shocks across the global economy.

“Growing leverage could be a catalyst for such a correction,” the IMF warned in a blog post about its findings. “Hyperscalers, as the largest data center operators are known, are borrowing more and more, while investors have been leveraging to invest in AI stocks.” [Continue reading…]