Although hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into AI development, nearly 75 percent of businesses have failed to deliver the return on investment promised to them. The hyped up tech is notoriously buggy and in some ways now actually getting worse, with project failure rates on the rise.
Despite staring into the maw of a colossal money pit, tech CEOs are doubling down, announcing plans to increase spending on AI development, going as far as laying off armies of workers to cut down on expenditures.
And while some investors footing the bill for big tech's AI bacchanalia are starting to wonder when they'll see cash start trickling back into their pockets, private equity billionaire Robert Smith isn't one of them.
Speaking at the SuperReturn conference in Berlin last week, Smith told a crowd of 5,500 of his fellow ultrarich investors that at least 60 percent of them would be out on the street within a year thanks to the power of AI.
"We think that next year, 40 percent of the people at this conference will have an AI agent and the remaining 60 percent will be looking for work," Smith lectured. "There are 1 billion knowledge work