Transcription
What do you know about Moonshot?
Well, Lorna, I knew nothing about it until the weekend really. So, and I don't think anybody else did either. It came from a bolt, like a bolt from the blue. It's a Chinese startup and it's got a new AI platform called uh Kimmy K3, which apparently is almost as good as well, it's it's pretty much identical to um the the main programs that both Anthropic and Open AI produce. I think they've got a slightly updated version now and it might be just lagging behind those ones, but clearly it is right up there in terms of the technology and what it can do.
And a surprise at that goodness. Um, when does it come out and and and how and where will people access it?
There have been some early releases of it. So, it has been looked at and dis, you know, it's, you know, been assessed on that basis. But I think the full release is about a week from now and then it'll be subjected to to full testing. It's different to the American ones in that it's what's known as opensource. So pretty much anybody can access it and then you know use the AI to develop their own sort of you know structure in which in how they use it. Whereas the American models are um it's a corporate model where they'll sell you the uh access to their.
And it's very expensive. I mean that's how these companies are making their money. Could this emergence of moonshot which has come out of nowhere trigger some sort of price war between access to to AI?
Well, this is the big problem and that's exactly what everybody is fearing at the moment because you know the American firms have been throwing trillions of dollars at developing artificial intelligence and not just the artificial intelligence models and the platforms themselves but also the chips that go into them, the data centers. I mean, there's vast amounts of money that's being thrown out here. There's been concerns for quite some time about whether or not the the Magnificent 7 or it's really about Magnificent 10, I guess, whether these companies can actually recoup the the money that they've spent on the development of all this. And the only way they could do that is if they really acted as a I guess a cartel, almost a block where they could charge enormous amounts of money for corporations and governments to use their their artificial intelligence. If you've now got another player in the field that is actually producing extra, that's a more supply of the same product, then the prices have to come down. If you've got players in the field that are producing pretty much what you can produce, but at 40% of the cost, that is a big problem.
And it's a problem for the future as well, isn't it? Because these companies, I mean, we've talked before about the tech bubble and might it might it not burst, but these companies need future investment to keep doing what they're doing. Are investors going to be reluctant to dip into their pockets if they can see the bubble starting to burst?
Well, that's right. And I mean, you know, the the skyhigh valuations from these big tech companies which have really driven our superanuation returns for the past few years. Really, these valuations have all been predicated on the idea that these companies will be able to charge enormous amounts of money and make big profits into the future. If you've got somebody then undercutting that whole business model, then that could shake the foundations of the boom that we've seen and probably result in some kind of a pullback, correction, whatever you want [laughter] to call it.
Yeah. Um, is it having an effect or will it have an effect on on the global markets?
Well, yeah. And look if you look at the way markets have performed in the past four years really since the pandemic what happened is we had a recovery in technology stocks which drove the early you know Wall Street really dominated there and American technology companies the recovery in them really drove global stock markets and you know our superanuation returns and then for the past two years those very same companies have been involved in this race for domination of artificial intelligence and that has really you know investors have just gone crazy for this for these kind of stocks and not just on Wall Street either. I mean if you look at the South Korean market for instance in Soul um the Cosby index the market there has trebled in the past 12 months trebled not gone up 30% it's come off 30% in the past few weeks because of these concerns about overvaluation but it's just been an extraordinary run but the concerns are that it's been overvalued.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. Ian Ver, thank you very much. And if you want to understand more about Moonshot, what it means for the AI race, the ABC News website is where you'll find it. Ian's written an article there. All will be explained and you too can become an expert on Moonshot.