Comment by owebmaster
19 days ago
> The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast
And at the same time, absurdly slow? ChatGPT is almost 3 years old and pretty much AI has still no positive economic impact.
19 days ago
> The promises are indeed large but the speed of progress has been fast
And at the same time, absurdly slow? ChatGPT is almost 3 years old and pretty much AI has still no positive economic impact.
There is the huge blind spot where tech workers think LLMs are being made primarily to either assist them or replace them.
Nobody seems to consider that LLMs are democratizing programming, and allowing regular people to build programs that make their work more efficient. I can tell you that at my old school manufacturing company, where we have no programmers and no tech workers, LLMs have been a boon for creating automation to bridge gaps and even to forgo paid software solutions.
This is where the change LLMs will bring will come from. Not from helping an expert dev write boilerplate 30% faster.
Low code/no code/visual programming has been around forever. They all had issues. LLMs will also have the same issues and cost even more.
I'm not aware of any that you speak/type plain English to.
1 reply →
Saying “AI has no economic impact” ignores reality. The financials of major players clearly show otherwise—both B2C and B2B applications are already profitable and proven. While APIs are still more experimental, and it’s unclear how much value businesses can ultimately extract from them, to claim there’s no economic impact is willful blindness. AGI may be far off, but companies are already figuring out value from both the consumer side and slowly API.
The financials are all inflated by perception of future impact. This includes the current subscriptions as businesses are attempting to use AI to some economic benefit, but it's not all going to work out to be useful.
It will take some time for whatever reality is to actually show truthfully in the financials. When VC money stops subsidising datacentre costs, and businesses have to weigh the full price against real value provided, that is when we will see the reality of the situation.
I am content to be wrong either way, but my personal prediction is if model competence slows down around now, businesses will not be replacing humans en-mass, and the value provided will be notable but not world changing like expected.
OpenAI alone is on track to generate as much revenue as Asus or US Steel this year ($10-$15 billion). I don't know how you can say AI has had no positive economic impact.
That is not even 1 month of a big tech revenue, it is a global negligible impact. 3 years talking about AI changing the world, 10bi revenue and no ecosystem around making money besides friends and VCs pumping and dumping LLM wrappers.
There's a pretty wide gulf between being one of the most important companies in the global marketplace as Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are and "having no economic impact".
I agree that most of the AI companies describe themselves and their products in hyperbolic terms. But that doesn't mean we need to counter that with equally absurd opposing hyperbole.
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Revenue, not profit.
If it costs them even just one more dollar than that revenue number to provide that service (spoiler, it does), then you could say AI has had no positive economic impact.
Considering we know they’re being subsidized by obscene amounts of investment money just like all other frontier model providers, it seems pretty clear it’s still a negative economic impact, regardless of the revenue number.
And what is their burn rate? Everyone fails to mention the amount they are spending for this return.