Zoho Founder Vembu Has This Warning About Overhyping AI: What He Said

The growth of AI in the last 12 months has been explosive which has brought obvious concerns about the safety and guard rails adopted by the technology. But the hype is definitely big and Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu is not a big fan of letting the emotions get the best of the practical world and its AI reality.

He even feels that the hype is not translating on the ground as the businesses and analysts are still figuring out the reason for the hype around AI and whether overhyping the technology could prove to be detrimental in the long run.

“I am in the camp that overhyping anything is a bad idea. I am personally enthusiastic about some technologies but I will not overhype them," Vembu mentioned in a post on X citing multiple reasons for his concerns and warned by overhyping AI prematurely.

Growing Too Fast

The Zoho founder particularly highlighted the recent updates on AI related to Microsoft, where one of them talks about the company cancelling its US Data centre lease amid oversupply concerns.

Hyping AI works both ways but the biggest winner out of its growth are the businesses that heavily adopt and invest in the technology. OpenAI could be seen as the prime example of this hype, which has enabled the Sam Altman-run startup to get funding worth $500 billion with assistance from SoftBank. He even mentions that Microsoft’s slow moves in this space suggest that the AI bubble could deflate sooner rather than later.

Vembu feels that AI has its place in the industry but not at the expense of major shifting in how the business operates, more importantly, the higher cost involved in developing and setting up the AI models for companies. The post from Vembu has understandably raised a few eyebrows, with some users even replying to his observations and talking about the impact of AI in their workflow.

Google and Meta are some of the big companies that have invested big in AI and some of these changes are now affecting its business as workforce churn seems inevitable in the next few years. Analysts and experts have warned about the pace of AI evolution and it needs to quickly become a big part of any plans for the technology to become widely accessible.