Comment by ip26

The people selling models are actually just selling compute

Yes, fully agreed. Anything AI is discovering in your dataset could have been found by humans, and it could have been done by a more efficient program. But that would require humans to carefully study it and write the program. AI lets you skip the novel analysis of the data and writing custom programs by using a generalizable program that solves those steps for you by expending far more compute.

I see it as, AI could remove the most basic obstacle preventing us from applying compute to vast swathes of problems- and that’s the need to write a unique program for the problem at hand.