Simon Johnson: belief

Transcript context

…Shares of Nvidia — they’re definitely up, but they’re not up by so much. It’s not become one of the world’s largest companies. There seems to be more and more evidence that AI can be commodified. You have a lot of competitors. There’s talk of training systems on a single GPU [graphics processing unit]. So, doesn’t AI mean we’ve entered this new age again, where the gains mostly don’t go to corporations? Well, possibly. That, I think, could be quite positive. Of course, we thought that about crypto, as well, at the beginning. And there were many discussions I recall — I’m sure you recall — around the beginning of the internet, where there were thoughts that, oh, this could become a more distributive model. Maybe power seeps away from large corporations. I think we tend to recombine things in this country in particular, Tyler. Again, we get big quickly, and we let people get powerful quickly. I think in the case of social media, we regretted that. Look, I think it’s very hard to stand in the way of these powerful social processes like the adoption of technology like GPT. We can maybe find some policy adjustments along the way. I think we can certainly push people to find ways to use the technology, the ways to use the technology that would enhance creativity, enhance productivity in a distributive way so all the gains don’t go to corporations, but no guarantee at all we’re going to get that outcome. The people who said all along that social media are more competitive than they look — haven’t they been proven right? TikTok and Facebook, Google competing with Bing, Amazon laying people off repeatedly. Those companies have lost their luster. They don’t look like unassailable giants anymore, to say the least. Meta shares were down, what, three-quarters in value not too long ago?…

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