Scaling trillions of dollars of compute: will it turn out to be the worst bet in history? "Scaling compute" is AI industry jargon for spending more and more money on data centres and the chips (typically GPUs made by NVIDIA) inside those data centres. So called hyperscalers like OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, xAI and Anthropic aim to spend nearly a trillion dollars on compute this year, more than a dozen times the cost of the Manhattan project. Professor Gary Marcus will argue that this is a bad bet, unlikely to pay off, filled with numerous downsides for society, and that it may well lead to a recession.He will be joined in discussion by Dr Edoardo Ponti, University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, and Professor Shannon Vallor FRSE, Co-Director, Centre for Technomoral Futures, Edinburgh Futures Institute. The discussion will be chaired by Dr Antonio Vergari, University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. Biography - Gary Marcus Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of six books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His 2019 book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI. His most recent book, Taming Silicon Valley, was on The New Yorker’s list of recommended books in 2024. His newsletter, Marcus on AI, has over 100,000 subscribers. Biography - Shannon Vallor Professor Shannon Vallor FRSE serves as Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and is Programme Director for EFI’s MSc in Data and AI Ethics. She holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy.Professor Vallor joined the Futures Institute in 2020 following a career in the United States as a leader in the ethics of emerging technologies, including a post as a visiting AI Ethicist at Google from 2018-2020. She is the author of The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016).She serves as advisor to government and industry bodies on responsible AI and data ethics. She is also Principal Investigator and Co-Director (with Professor Ewa Luger) of the UKRI research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Biography - Edoardo Ponti Edoardo Ponti is an assistant professor in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses primarily on efficient and modular architectures for foundation models, especially with respect to adaptive memory and end-to-end tokenization. Over the past year, I was a visiting professor at NVIDIA. Previously, he was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and a postdoctoral fellow at Mila Montreal. In 2021, I obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research has been featured the Economist and Scientific American, among others. He received a Google Research Faculty Award and several best/highlight paper awards at ACL and EMNLP. He is a recipient of an ERC Starting Grant and an ARIA Scaling Compute grant. He is a Scholar of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and part of the TACL journal editorial team. May 18 2026 11.00 - 12.30 Scaling trillions of dollars of compute: will it turn out to be the worst bet in history? Join us for a panel discussion with Gary Marcus, scientist, best-selling author and entrepreneur, where we will explore the implications of the AI industry's reliance on scaling compute. Room G07, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB Register This article was published on Friday 8 May 2026
Scaling trillions of dollars of compute: will it turn out to be the worst bet in history? "Scaling compute" is AI industry jargon for spending more and more money on data centres and the chips (typically GPUs made by NVIDIA) inside those data centres. So called hyperscalers like OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, xAI and Anthropic aim to spend nearly a trillion dollars on compute this year, more than a dozen times the cost of the Manhattan project. Professor Gary Marcus will argue that this is a bad bet, unlikely to pay off, filled with numerous downsides for society, and that it may well lead to a recession.He will be joined in discussion by Dr Edoardo Ponti, University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, and Professor Shannon Vallor FRSE, Co-Director, Centre for Technomoral Futures, Edinburgh Futures Institute. The discussion will be chaired by Dr Antonio Vergari, University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. Biography - Gary Marcus Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of six books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His 2019 book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI. His most recent book, Taming Silicon Valley, was on The New Yorker’s list of recommended books in 2024. His newsletter, Marcus on AI, has over 100,000 subscribers. Biography - Shannon Vallor Professor Shannon Vallor FRSE serves as Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and is Programme Director for EFI’s MSc in Data and AI Ethics. She holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy.Professor Vallor joined the Futures Institute in 2020 following a career in the United States as a leader in the ethics of emerging technologies, including a post as a visiting AI Ethicist at Google from 2018-2020. She is the author of The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016).She serves as advisor to government and industry bodies on responsible AI and data ethics. She is also Principal Investigator and Co-Director (with Professor Ewa Luger) of the UKRI research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Biography - Edoardo Ponti Edoardo Ponti is an assistant professor in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses primarily on efficient and modular architectures for foundation models, especially with respect to adaptive memory and end-to-end tokenization. Over the past year, I was a visiting professor at NVIDIA. Previously, he was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and a postdoctoral fellow at Mila Montreal. In 2021, I obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research has been featured the Economist and Scientific American, among others. He received a Google Research Faculty Award and several best/highlight paper awards at ACL and EMNLP. He is a recipient of an ERC Starting Grant and an ARIA Scaling Compute grant. He is a Scholar of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and part of the TACL journal editorial team. May 18 2026 11.00 - 12.30 Scaling trillions of dollars of compute: will it turn out to be the worst bet in history? Join us for a panel discussion with Gary Marcus, scientist, best-selling author and entrepreneur, where we will explore the implications of the AI industry's reliance on scaling compute. Room G07, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB Register This article was published on Friday 8 May 2026
May 18 2026 11.00 - 12.30 Scaling trillions of dollars of compute: will it turn out to be the worst bet in history? Join us for a panel discussion with Gary Marcus, scientist, best-selling author and entrepreneur, where we will explore the implications of the AI industry's reliance on scaling compute.
