AI is hitting a wall just as the hype around it reaches the stratosphere

(CNN) – NEW YORK – It’s been two years since OpenAI bestowed ChatGPT upon the world and set off a kind of gold rush for artificial intelligence. Billions of dollars are pouring into AI-focused and AI-adjacent companies on the promise that the technology is going to accelerate – or possibly obliterate – every aspect of modern life.The narrative from Silicon Valley is that the AI train has left the station and any smart investor had better hop on before these products become “superintelligent” and start solving all the world’s problems. (To the true believers, that’s not hyperbole, and those expectations have helped turn once-niche companies like chipmaker Nvidia, which reports earnings on Wednesday, into some of the most valuable assets on the planet.)Related Stories Of course, the key to that narrative is the promise that large language models – or LLMs – like ChatGPT keep improving at an exponential rate.Some AI skeptics have warned for years about “scaling laws” – the idea that you can continually improve a model’s output just by throwing more data and computing power at it. These aren’t so much laws as they are educated guesses, though. And the truth is, even the scientists who build...