Elon Musk: The massive AI tidal wave has arrived, draining the world's life-saving funds
Elon Musk warns:
The AI riptide is already underway.
Over the past year, the global usage of AI inference Tokens has surged 25 times.
In response, Brett Winton, Chief Futurist of ARK Invest, made a startling statement describing an unexpected scenario he envisioned:
The payback period for AI infrastructure investment is surprisingly short, with an absurdly high internal rate of return. Even at an incredibly large scale, this force will directly drive up the cost of capital and drag a large number of traditional enterprises into the abyss.
Elon Musk reposted this view and expressed the sentiment mentioned above.
Elon Musk's AGI Countdown: The Giant AI Wave Has Arrived
To truly understand why Elon Musk used the word "riptide" at this moment, we must first grasp his latest judgment on the ultimate end of human technology -- AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and the Technological Singularity.
The terrifying part of a riptide is that the surface of the sea appears calm, but an extremely powerful undercurrent has long formed underwater, irreversibly dragging everything towards the abyss or the open ocean.
The "giant wave" Elon Musk refers to is by no means just the upgrade of a few chatbots.
He has issued multiple countdown-like warnings on many occasions:
In a very short period of time, AGI will most likely be smarter than the smartest human being on the planet; further down the line, the total digital computing power on Earth will exponentially surpass the total biological computing power (the sum of all human brains).
This is the suffocating "The Singularity".
Once this critical point is crossed, AI will have the ability to self-iterate and self-evolve. Human technological progress will no longer be driven by humans themselves, but taken over by super machines, showing a vertically upward explosive growth.
"The giant wave of AI has arrived", Elon Musk is confirming that the Singularity is approaching.
When everyone realizes that AGI is no longer a science fiction concept decades away, but can be successfully realized in the next one to two years simply by piling up computing power, energy and data, the flow of capital across the entire world has undergone extreme distortion instantly.
Under the huge gravitational pull of the Singularity, the "inference Token usage" of large AI models has increased by about 25 times in just one year.
The total amount of tokens on OpenRouter doubles every ~11 weeks
Please note, it is 25 times, not 25%.
"Cathie Wood" predicts that the usage of Tokens is growing exponentially, penetrating layer by layer into the entire economy, which is likely to push the annual real GDP growth rate into double-digit ranges, a scenario that many people and companies simply cannot comprehend.
Because the vast majority of investors have never experienced growth at the "25 times" level in their lives, when they hear "25", their brains automatically process it as "25%".
In the long history, a 25% growth rate is truly remarkable. However, 25 times is in a completely different investment universe: it means that 100 units do not slowly increase to 125, but directly skyrocket to 2500 out of thin air!
Cathie Wood further pointed out:
At present, the world's cutting-edge AI laboratories have achieved an explosive 5 to 10-fold increase in annualized revenue in just 6 months to 1 year; even for those traditional mature enterprises that stand on the "right side" of the AI revolution, their originally gentle revenue growth rate has been forcibly raised from 25% to more than 30% or even 40%.
Faced with this money-printer-level growth on the eve of the approaching Singularity, countless traditional entrepreneurs are like "deer caught in the headlights" -- vaguely feeling the vibration of the ground and the dazzling strong light, but their brains cannot process information at this level at all, and can only freeze in place.
The World's Most Sensitive Sense of Smell: Enterprises Die From "Oxygen Deprivation"
Now that the path to AGI is clear and the countdown to the Singularity has begun,
Next, the pure profit-seeking instinct of capital has been triggered.
This is the core insight put forward by Brett Winton, Chief Futurist of ARK: Capital Transfer and Crowding Out Effect.
The global capital pool is limited within a certain period of time. Where the money flows depends on where the rate of return is the highest and the payback period is the shortest.
Brett Winton pointed out:
The payback period for AI infrastructure investment is getting shorter and shorter, with an absurdly high Internal Rate of Return (IRR). As long as this return continues, capital will keep pouring into GPUs, data centers and AI companies.
In the current venture capital (VC) market, you simply cannot raise money unless your business plan is full of references to AI and computing power.
The capital in the primary market has formed an extreme "AI siphon effect". But this is just the beginning, and this trend is spreading frantically downstream.
To embrace AGI, the construction of super AI data centers requires massive amounts of capital.
In addition to using their own funds, tech giants will also issue a large number of bonds. Logically, issuing bonds requires paying interest. But for the builders of AI data centers, there is an extreme shortage of computing power in the market now, and the completed computing power centers are completely unsalable with extremely high profits. Therefore, they are fully capable of bearing, and even willing to accept higher financing costs.
What is more surreal is that NVIDIA's chips have now become "hard currency". As long as the data center purchases equipment under the NVIDIA system, they can directly use these chips as collateral for debts.
Extremely high rate of return + strong tolerance for high interest + collateral as good as hard currency has transformed computing power infrastructure into "a new type of asset class that is more stable and has investment-grade attributes" in the eyes of Wall Street.
This is the "capital black hole", which is not only devouring the money of equity investors, but also frantically swallowing the money of the global bond market.
And the global capital pool is limited.
When the AI water pump siphons off most of the water in the pond, the available capital in other industries is drained in the short term.
Step one: the high rate of return in the AI track has driven up the expected rate of return across the entire market, causing the financing cost of traditional enterprises to skyrocket, and they cannot even raise money at all.
Step two: funds in the secondary market vote with their feet, stocks unrelated to AI are removed from core positions by institutions, with their valuations halved and liquidity dried up.
Step three: when old debts mature, they need to be rolled over into new debts at higher interest rates, the interest coverage ratio deteriorates, and enterprises with fragile cash flow are crushed directly.
Step four: talents follow wherever capital flows, and traditional industries fall into the spiral of "no capital -- cannot retain talents -- backward efficiency -- even less capital".
Elon Musk fully agrees with this.
Cathie Wood's summary is: market sentiment is shifting from the initial blind carnival over "AI hype" to "Oh NO" and "Oh YES" judgments on each individual stock.
Elon Musk replied three words below: "You are right."
"I will destroy you, and it has nothing to do with you."
In the business world, this sentence is about to come true in the most realistic scenario:
AI will eliminate many traditional enterprises, not even because AI understands your business better than you do, but because AI has directly siphoned off all the "capital oxygen" that supports your survival.
Conclusion
Every leap in productivity in human history has never been accompanied by a gentle handover, but a bloody redistribution of resources.
When the steam engine replaced horse-drawn carriages, not only did the carriage drivers lose their jobs, more importantly, all the capital invested in stables and feed poured into railways and steel mills overnight.
When the mobile internet exploded, not only did traditional media decline, more importantly, trillions of dollars in venture capital withdrew from traditional channels overnight, giving birth to the giants of the mobile internet era.
Today, the intensity of the AI riptide will be ten times or a hundred times that of the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution.
As Cathie Wood said: "Facts are stubborn things."
Capital shows no mercy, it has already made its choice and is voting with its feet at a rate of tens of billions of dollars per day.
The giant wave has risen, and the strong light has illuminated the dark night.
References:
https://x.com/CathieDWood/status/2093739536509436149https://x.com/MaxForAI/status/2093775774402969662
https://x.com/wintonARK/status/2093403858890629434
This article is from the WeChat official account , written by David, authorized for release by 36Kr.