The great fight for AI

We live exceptional moments. For the first time in history, a robot has been faster than man and in the recent humanoid Olympics, it has shattered the 100 meter dash record that Usain Bolt had held since 2009. Without a doubt a good example of the speed at which technology and artificial intelligence progress.

Over time it has been proven that, when phases of strong technological development occur, investment skyrockets, economic growth accelerates and productivity increases significantly, but doubts also often arise about the human capacity to adapt. Beyond Heidegger's idea that technology reduces everything to exploitable resources—including humans—the emergence of AI is by no means the first great threat to labor in history. Without going any further, in the face of automation and electrification, Keynes spoke in 1930 of “technological unemployment” in his essay The economic possibilities of our grandchildren. A writing that could not be more fashionable today in which he dared to predict that, by 2030, we would have a 15-hour work week and that the challenge for humanity would not be work but leisure. Although he was wrong in the magnitude of his prediction, he was right in what was most important: the direction.

To glimpse the future, we cannot ignore man's extraordinary capacity for adaptation nor assume the present elements as constant over time. If not, let them tell great thinkers like Malthus or Ricardo. Looking forward, man, as he has always done, will reinvent himself and define new jobs to contribute to society.

In parallel to the question of man, the race for AI is so fierce that there is a real struggle to dominate the technology, which generates a fight to find financing and control basic resources. The main hyperscalers have stopped financing their heavy investments in AI with cash. The five large cloud data providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Oracle – which, until last year, covered the entire investment with their huge profits, have become large issuers of debt and, in a very few months, have come to account for 20% of the issuance of the North American investment grade bond market. The change is not minor: the race for AI is causing risk to no longer concentrate solely on the profitability of investments, but also on balance sheets and credit markets.

This colossal mobilization of capital demonstrates that, at the peak of technology, no one can afford to blink. As Lewis Carroll once said, “you need to run as hard as you can to stay in the same place.” Hyperscalers have discovered that, in the fight for AI, the biggest debt is not financial, but falling behind.