Mark Cuban to Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft: You are overspending on AI, only one you will ...

Billionaire investor and Shark Tank judge Mark Cuban has now issued a warning to leading artificial intelligence companies including Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Meta. Cuban has argued that all these companies are overspending in the race to build the world’s most powerful AI model. As reported by Business Insider, speaking in the Pioneers of AI podcast, Cuban compared today’s AI arms race to the search engine boom of 1990s. The search engine boom ultimately ended with Google dominating the market and leaving all the rivals behind.

“You’ve got five, six, whatever it is, companies that are trying to create the ultimate foundational model that we all depend on,” Cuban said. “It’s almost like in the ’90s when all the search engines were competing pre-Google… Now, we know with search engines it’s Google, and then there’s Bing, as, like, 1 or 2% and DuckDuckGo has got a half a percent. So it’s effectively a winner-take-all.”

Overspending and the AI Bubble

Like many other world leaders and analysts, Cuban has also cautioned that the massive investments done on AI could ultimately lead to the creation of a bubble. “They may be overspending,” he said. “And if they overspend or get too caught up, the bubble is in the competition between all those models because that could pop just like that with any new technology.”

Along with this, he also raised concerns about the infrastructure costs behind AI, majorly the massive and expensive data centers which are being built to power large models. “I just can’t imagine over a 10-year period that we aren’t going to improve the technology enough that if you overspend on today’s technology, it just doesn’t feel right to me,” Cuban added.

Disruption will come from the unexpected

Cuban also emphasised that the disruption AI will not come from incremental improvements but from something “incredible” that no one sees coming. “Somebody’s going to come up with some incredible shit, right? If I knew what it was, I’d do it,” he said, suggesting that the current race may be blindsided by a breakthrough outside the existing competition.

Take lessons from the dot-com era

Cuban said he recognizes the same mix of hype, excitement, and overspending now playing out in AI. “They anticipate for at least another decade spending every penny they have,” he said of the major model developers. “I mean, if that’s not ripe for disruption to come up with better ways, I don’t know what is.”