Comment by crote
3 days ago
A huge chunk of the demand is already fake. It's why there are so many auto-enabled "helpers", blinking nag buttons, and popups begging you to pleasepleaseplease use their new AI feature. The vast majority of people are simply ambivalent about the vast majority of AI integrations, so companies have to take increasingly-desperate measures to artificially keep their MAU up and pretend that they haven't wasted a huge amount of money. And all of that is before we get into the heavily-subsidized LLM subscriptions for the people who do want to use it.
User base and demand are irrelevant when it comes to a bubble. People invest because Line Goes Up, which in turn makes Line Goes Up, convincing people to invest. As the saying goes: markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.
I am going to need a little more evidence for your claim that says "a huge chunk of demand is fake"
How many of the apps you use on a daily base have some form of AI integration? In my experience, outside of FLOSS software it is approaching 100%. How many of those did you intentionally enable it? In my experience, basically 0%. Even worse, after manually disabling it many of them re-enable it after an update!
If, say, Google publishes a claim that "95% of Google Search users have adopted AI", that does not mean that 95% of Google Search users think AI is a core feature of Search they would potentially pay extra for - which is what the massive valuations are based on. The AI Mode is auto-enabled, so the only thing it tells you is that 5% of users are annoyed enough by it that they take the time to disable it.
Some people of course genuinely like it and would indeed pay extra for AI-enhanced search, but a huge chunk of users simply does not care either way. They wouldn't pay a dime for AI, just like they wouldn't pay a dime for the ability to re-arrange the letters in the Google logo into "Oggoel". If AI were default-off, they would not bother enabling it. That is fake demand.
well the reason i asked is because chat gpt and others claim to have bazillions of users and you are saying most of that demand is fake, so what are these users? actual people or bots?