Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where Great Minds meet. I'm producer Mia Serente. For this episode,

we're rejoining for part two of our live event with author, New York Times columnist and CNBC

presenter Andrew Ross Sorkin. Ross Sorkin joined us recently at Conway Hall to discuss the lessons

of the 1929 financial crash and the parallels with today's political and

economic turbulence. He was in conversation with Gillian Tet, columnist at the Financial Times.

If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode and get up to speed.

Let's rejoin the conversation now, live at Conway Hall.

I'd say, you know, Silicon Valley, the people from Silicon Valley I speak to know the mass doesn't work.

I mean, they're all spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this AI buildout,

which can't possibly earn them back the kind of money, as you say,

unless we all lose our jobs and the AI runs everything. But they each think that they're going

to be the one company that wins and everyone else will lose and lose the money and everyone else will

crash but they'll be the survivor. And that I think is a mentality. But the thing that makes me

amazed is they're all betting on the same type of AI, which is large language models on the so-called transformers technology,

and they all seem to assume that that's the only dominant system that's going to be there forever.

And it's a bit like people betting on the wrong type of DVD early on or, you know, Betamax,

and then along came VHS or whatever it was. I mean, you've got things

like neuro-symbolic AI, which is coming up the tracks. You've got other types of AI, which could

end up leapfrogging what everyone's investing in right now. Yes, but I also think, but then I think to

myself, not to bring us back to 1929, I think about RCA. And RCA was like one of these stocks.

The company that no one in the room has ever heard of.

Well, except for the fact that RCA was a huge player, not just during the 1929 in the Great Depression,

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