Experts again warned of the possibility of AI bubble collapse, saying it was similar to the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.
According to CNBC, the advertisements that will be inserted into the NFL final game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, which began at 3:30 p.m., were sold for an average of $8 million on a 30-second basis. Major advertisers included a number of companies leading the AI development market, including Google, OpenAI, Anthrax, Meta and Amazon.
Their Super Bowl commercials focused on promoting chatbots and AI devices. Google put Gemini, OpenAI put ChatGPT, Amazon put Alexa, and Meta put smart glasses on the front of the ads. Small and medium-sized businesses such as Wicks, which serves website-making tools, and Base 44, which serves customized app development tools, also bought the ads.
Some experts say that AI companies’ spending on advertising for the Super Bowl could be seen as a sign of the bubble burst. They say that competition to expand the number of users through advertising, not technological advances, is a sign of collapse that also appeared even during dot-com bubbles.
“The Super Bowl game is not Seattle versus New England, but Antropic and OpenAI,” said PitchBook, a market data company. “Both companies have begun fighting to secure market share as they prepare for an initial public offering (IPO).” OpenAI decided to insert ads in ChatGPT to generate revenue, and Antropic ran ads that satirized them ahead of the Super Bowl. In the meantime, PitchBook shed light on the fact that Petts.COM, an online pet product sales startup, went bankrupt in January 2000, just before the dot-com bubble burst.
“Of course, companies want to compete with new features and technology competitiveness, but now they realize that brand image is important,” said Matthew Isaac, a marketing professor at Seattle University. “Their goal now is to survive by getting as many users as possible.”
Gary Smith, an economics professor at the University of California, California, and Jeffrey Funk, a technology consultant, also warned, “This year’s Super Bowl ads suggest that the AI bubble is about to burst.”
“Of the 61 television advertisements aired during the Super Bowl in 2000, 14 were Internet startup advertisements,” the two said. “This year’s Super Bowl advertisements promote AI extensively, and it may be the only indicator of whether AI is a bubble that will burst soon.”
“People often invest not because of the success of a company, but because of the belief that others will also buy the stock,” they said. “This belief leads to the ‘more serious stupid theory’ that there will be a fool who will buy the stock at a higher price than me. This is the definition of a bubble.”
“The key problem is that LLM (large-scale language processing models) are not worth paying for because they are not useful and reliable enough,” they said. “Optimists take Amazon, which overcame its initial losses and achieved stellar success, but Amazon began to make profits 10 years after its establishment, and its cumulative losses have reached $3 billion so far.”
“With no profit, IT companies are emphasizing the old indicator of ‘number of users’ that was popular in the era of dot-com bubble,” he said. “In the past, the number of users meant ‘number of paid users’, but due to the success of SNS such as Facebook and Instagram, the perception that it is okay to exclude the word ‘pay’ has spread.” The success criterion for the number of users is also looser than that of dot-com bubble. Finally, he said, “Generative AI is the fastest-growing technology in history based on the number of users,” but added, “But we prefer profits as a standard of success.”
SAM KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
