Questions mount over what an AI ‘slowdown’ would look like

In the UK, we have heard about plans to roll out the tech more widely within the NHS to improve patient care, and how AI gave the UK economy a much-needed boost over the summer. We are all being encouraged to use it more and more at work, in education and in our personal lives.

The industry is a key part of the UK’s strategy to drive economic growth. “There is no plan B” a former government adviser told me, so could a slowdown wreck future prospects here in Britain?

The AI industry is burning through enormous amounts of money and natural resources and so far, is not creating nearly as much revenue. There are multiple reports suggesting a number of firms adopting the technology are disappointed by it.

Economists widely speculate that even the current giants are not all likely to survive and that some kind of “levelling” is coming – also known as a bursting bubble. But those firms which do make it could end up becoming the most powerful mega-corporations the world has ever seen, and that comes with its own issues.

OpenAI choosing to halt its march to the stock market could be seen as an epiphany-like moment of taking responsibility for public safety – but it could also be the move of a company which has realised it might not get the lucrative payout it needs while its entire product is perceived to be lethal.

“One of the probably the biggest challenges that we have right now is that no one can predict with certainty how this technology is going to evolve,” says Alexander Voicu from the UK AI company Synthesia.

“We know that these systems are getting more powerful, but we don’t know where and how they’re going to be used, and we haven’t figured out essentially a way of taking full advantage of their potential. My only concern in rushing to regulate now, where there’s still a lot of open questions, is that it could actually backfire.”

We also can’t deny the fact that underpinning this entire tech revolution is an ocean of investor cash.

“I’m not worried about the existential risks of AI, I’m worried about the corporate greed of the companies that are creating it,” says Sasha Luccioni, the founder of Sustainable AI.

Leading computer scientist Professor dame Wendy Hall, who has advised the UN about AI, says the current crisis is all about the companies not behaving responsibly enough.

She likens the current situation to a farmer having a bull in a field which escapes and causes destruction – and the farmer blames the bull.

“Of course it’s not the bull’s fault – it’s the farmer,” she says. Clearly, the fences weren’t robust enough, and that is exactly what she says we are seeing with AI guardrails right now.

But if those guardrails become too restrictive, could this spell the end of AI?

Some believe there is a more secretive, politically-motivated push for a rules-based clampdown in order to “regulate AI into oblivion” as Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Conservative-leaning Capital Research Centre think-tank, put it on X this week.

His post was viewed nearly eight million times. It is an extreme and unproven view but it shows that not everybody is on board with the idea of regulation saving the day.

Whatever the reality, the storm currently engulfing the AI industry could already have caused reputational damage to the firms currently in pole position forever.

As Professor Hall puts it: “Would you invest in a company that says it’s going to bring about human extinction?”