The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Turkey has been ruled by one man since 2003. He's become increasingly autocratic and also increasingly old.

Now minds are turning to who might eventually succeed him.

And a French emigre from Nazi Europe, Georges Bouchard turned his childhood love of reading into a career. As a literary agent, he discovered Samuel Beckett, Ellie Visell and many more. Our senior culture writer remembers his life. First up, though,

Alphabet, Amazon, META and Microsoft planned to spend a combined total of $660 billion on AI over the next year.

Those massive sums signal the enormous hopes being pinned on the technology.

Yet they also make people nervous, because that's a lot

of cash to put in before those firms are getting very much out. Making some fear that the price of

stocks in the companies going big on artificial intelligence could actually be artificially high.

In recent weeks, we've seen big companies announce that they're going to spend absolutely

jaw-dropping amounts of money investing in AI.

Josh Roberts is our capital markets correspondent.

Whereas previously, investors were cheering those announcements.

Actually, lately, we've seen the stock market

wobble in response. It seems like they're getting a bit worried about whether they're going to

get returns on all of this money that companies are spending on this new technology.

So what exactly is it that's making the stock markets jittery?

Well, it's not just that investors are worried about the amounts that companies are spending,

although those amounts are vast. It's kind of this feeling that we've been here before.

So there are lots of times throughout history where you've had a new technology emerge and it looks like it's going to transform the world.

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