The post The $500bn question: Can AI justify its massive investment in 2026? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

After businesses and consumers spent 2024 testing out new AI tools and last year rolling them out widely, the technology now faces tough questions about whether it can deliver on its promises.  While hundreds of thousands of companies and several hundred million people put AI to work in various ways, some found it helpful while others ran into problems that led to costly mistakes. The coming months will see an intense examination of whether AI systems work reliably enough and make financial sense for the massive amounts of money being poured into them. Investment in AI equipment and infrastructure could reach $500bn in 2026, making it crucial for the industry to answer three major challenges. Growth strategy hits a wall as investors demand results The first issue centers on whether AI’s growth strategy has reached its limits. In 2019, researcher Rich Sutton published a piece called “The Bitter Lesson” that explained how feeding more information and computing power into deep learning systems proved the best way to make them stronger. Companies like OpenAI proved this approach right by creating increasingly powerful systems that needed more and more computing resources. However, Sutton now joins other researchers in believing this method is losing steam. This doesn’t mean AI development will stop making progress. Instead, companies will need to show investors they can write better computer programs and find other ways to advance the technology that uses less energy. Experts predict neurosymbolic AI, which combines current data-based systems with rule-following programs, will get much more attention this year. The second challenge involves whether major players can make money as AI becomes more common and ordinary. Tech giants like Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft will keep using AI to lower costs and improve services that already reach billions of people worldwide. But newer companies such…

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Filed under: News - @ January 2, 2026 5:27 pm