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Chief Scientist of Zoho, Sridhar Vembu, on Wednesday weighed in on whether artificial intelligence (AI) is entering bubble territory, drawing a striking parallel between the current AI boom and the dot-com era.
In an interview with ANI, when asked whether AI is a bubble, Vembu pointed to growing signs of slowdown in the US technology and financial sectors, saying, "As of last week, already there are signs in the US technology sector, the US stock market, that there is a pronounced cooling... We are talking about two, three trillion-dollar investment commitments, and not sufficient even revenue, leave alone profit, to pay for all that investment." Vembu also referenced recent reports of OpenAI's executives discussing the need for a potential government backstop. "This whole current hype cycle is cooling off. This doesn't mean that AI is, you know, that's not true," he explained. "The internet, we had a dot-com bust. Only after that, the internet really took off. So first we have to cool the hype in anything, by the way, it's the same thing with other type," he added. He emphasised that Zoho's approach is focused on long-term technological development rather than operating in a pure hype environment. "Thank goodness we are not a public company. Because if we are public, the stock would have gone to the moon and then crashed. We don't want that," he said. According to Vembu, the AI sector's rise and expected correction are both natural and healthy for innovation. "It's just shot to the moon and now it's coming down to earth," he said. Vembu added that Zoho continues to invest in AI technologies with a long-term vision. "But still, the technology, there is a lot of valuable things you can do with technology. We are doing it. We are doing our own AI technologies here. But it's a long haul effort," he said. In July this year, Zoho announced a series of AI offerings, having wide-ranging use cases for businesses and enterprises. This included the successful launch of its own large language model, Zia LLM, which was built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI-accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind--ranging from structured data extraction, summarisation, RAG, and code generation--Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. (ANI)
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