Comment by lsy

13 days ago

The C-suite operates in the universe of big ideas and are being presented demos and mockups that imply more capability than is actually possible. And the employees have to actually deal with the rubber hitting the road. They can see that the tech is half-baked and are dealing with the real problems users experience, and there is an intuitive sense that customers aren't going to pay subscription prices for something that fails in an embarrassing and opaque way for every N times it's invoked.

It's also difficult for engineers to understand how a sustainable industry can be built on tech where the primary method of "engineering" it is to try doing something (training a new model, changing a prompt) and hope it will work rather than knowing what will and won't. The potential to get trapped in a local maximum or burn massive resources for insufficient return is too high, and the cost of switching models is too low to build any moat based on model quality.

At the end of the day this is the only thing tech investors are excited about, so the market will dictate strategy until the bottom falls out for whatever reason. The video is not assuring on this front, saying that CEOs are just staying the course without much indication they have a reason to believe a return is around the corner.