Comment by criddell
5 days ago
> I have yet to see an end user product that in itself isnt a wrapper around LLMs that is impressive created by LLM assistance.
I don’t disagree that AI is overhyped. But I think you are probably looking in the wrong place.
I think most software that is written isn’t really a product, at least not a public product. It’s an in-house tool or a one-off project needed to complete some larger task. People everywhere are always writing small programs that make their life or job just a bit easier (and explains why so many corporate projects are little more than an excel spreadsheet).
And there are a lot of people who have made custom software just for themselves with AI. Not a product, just a tool or project that finally made sense to build.
But where's the revenue from those? It has to add up to a couple trillion dollars to break even on the capital spending.
Would you say the same about any other tool, like where is the revenue caused by Susan in accounting having a computer, shouldn't we take away her computer if she can't prove a benefit?
The benefit of a computer would be trivial to demonstrate.
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not sure one would expect huge revenue increases from these internal tools, but maybe dramatic cost savings? Surely a lot of corporate processes could be automated?
That's been the dream for the 40 years I've been paying attention. And in that time, I've seen plenty of incremental changes but never the kind of sudden sea change that the hype machine anticipates.
The perennial reality is that automation is inherently inflexible, so there's only so much of it that you can do before you've committed a huge strategic blunder by making your business resistant to change and severely curtailing its ability to cope with situations that don't cleanly fit the mold. So then we need to hack in ways to deal with the exceptions, but, since they're hacked in, they're often painful and time consuming. Sometimes so much so that after the new process stabilizes it turns out to be even more cumbersome and require more manual effort than the system it replaced.
When anyone other than a technologist suggests doing that kind of thing, we call it "bureaucracy", and we hate it. I think maybe what we have trouble seeing is that there's actually a pretty fundamental difference between automating purely technical processes like server deployment, and automating processes that are fundamentally about mediating human interactions.
> It has to add up to a couple trillion dollars to break even
It doesn't have to and I'm pretty sure it won't.