Comment by pjc50
14 hours ago
> Whenever someone finds out how to apply this level of agentic sophistication to a problem that actually matters to consumers
Isn't this a massive alarm bell? That the capability hasn't done much for consumers yet that isn't basically toys? Although I suppose the pitch was always B2B "you can automate away your expensive white collar workers" and it's not clear how widespread that is actually happening.
It did a lot for consumers who dare to use it. It didn't do much for consumers who wait for middleman businesses to offer AI-based services, but that is not because of AI, but existing business model of SaaS.
The businesses pay for tokens and try to deliver their usual enshittified experience, and nothing interesting gets created, because it cannot - enshittification extinguishes all power of AI. Using AI to full extent, in contrast, obviates most need for the business in the first place. So they're all struggling to design an AI powered product, in a world where those very products are already becoming subsumed by AI.
So normies wait for middleware companies to get their shit together or (much more likely) finally die, while people with software experience and eagerness to use AI just don't subscribe, because their favorite LLM handles that work just fine.
OAI is still hiring lots of humans for business and engineering roles instead of automating them with their best-in-class AI capabilities (https://openai.com/careers/search/). What does it tell you when they apparently don't "dare to use" their own models?
Obviously they use them. If you told me they're buying subscriptions to random bullshit SaaS like every other company did to date, and actually using them (instead of striking deals with them or trying to directly copy them into their offering), then you'd have a counterpoint.