AI to boost world economy by over 15 trillion dollars in seven years

Artificial intelligence (AI) could boost the world economy by up to $15.7 trillion by 2030 by better capitalizing on data, according to a report released for the first time in Israel by Bank of America.

The report, “Thematic Investing,” written and prepared by Israeli Haim Israel – Bank of America’s head of Global Thematic Investing Research – was first sent to banking stakeholders last month. This week, Israel provided a copy of the report to The Jerusalem Post.

According to Israel’s predictions, the global AI market – software, hardware and services – could reach $900 billion by the end of 2026.

Although AI has existed for around 70 years, according to Israel, the world is only now about to experience the AI revolution.

Israel compares the situation to the “iPhone moment” of the early 2000s or the Internet boom of the 1990s for four reasons:

1 – Democratization of data

2 – Unprecedented mass adoption

3 – Warp-speed technological development

4 – The abundance of commercial use cases

"We are at a defining moment," he told the Post. "This is not about technology; this is a revolution."

In his report, he highlights how today, more data is created in an hour than was made in an entire year just two decades ago – and the rate of global data production is expected to double every two years. Moreover, as generative AI, which enables machines to understand natural language and produce human-like dialogue and content, becomes adopted by the masses, society can better and more fully capitalize on the produced data.

“It took ChatGPT just five days to reach 1 million users, 1 billion cumulative visits in three months and an adoption rate which is three times TikTok’s and 10 times Instagram’s,” it said in the report. “The technology is developing exponentially. In the last decade, computing power to train the AI datasets doubled every three months, outpacing Moore’s Law by six times. In the past four years, the number of parameters for large language models grew 1,900 times. And within a decade, AI models could be 1 million times more powerful than ChatGPT today.”

Israel said that not only are new generative AI applications being developed at a rate never seen before, and people are quickly adapting to how to use them, but humans are producing data themselves at unprecedented rates.

“By the time you finish reading this sentence, approximately 231 million emails, 6 billion Google searches and 69 million WhatsApp messages have already been sent, and approximately 500 hours of video have been uploaded to YouTube,” he quipped in an email.

"Data is knowledge"

The report said that every person generates about 1.7 megabytes of data per second, which Israel said equates to approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced by humans daily.

“Data is knowledge,” Israel stressed. He added that today people use only around 1% of the data produced. The economic value is immense if that percentage could be increased to 2% or 3%.

However, some challenges will come with this revolution. One of them is that training a single AI model could emit about 284 tons of carbon dioxide – five times the average car’s emissions in its lifetime.

“The environmental, social and governance angle can be quite alarming,” Israel admitted. “The amount of electricity we need to manage all this will increase exponentially.

“But the world will not stop using technology because of its negative environmental impact,” he added. “The holy grail will be what kind of electricity we use and where it comes from.”