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GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

theregister.com

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Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#11

Post by mrbluecoat »

JCM9 wrote: post #2

There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.

It'll certainly be lonely on HN without pages of AI articles to read daily..

/s

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#12

Post by jandrese »

JCM9 wrote: post #2

There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.

CEOs are just salivating at the prospect of firing most of their staff and replacing them with AIs. And then you have hype men at these AI companies blowing a burning coal mine of smoke up their asses. And every month the products become even more expensive for even more incremental gains. The hype is unsustainable.

How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already?

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#13

Post by pixl97 »

j45 wrote: post #6
woeirua wrote: post #3

It's 1999 again.

Truly, except now everyone's online and spending time online and spending cash online.

And, the .com bomb killed some companies and slowed down spending for a bit. It did not kill the internet, and now companies like Amazon(.com) are absolutely enormous.

Some people think the GenAI bomb is going to kill GenAI, I think it's just going to weed out those with too high of expenses and no way to evolve the compute to be cheaper over time.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#14

Post by ebiester »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #4

Feels like 2000 all over again. The arms race to throw money at anything has "AI" in their business name is the same thing I saw back in 2000. No business plan, just some idea to somehow monetize the internet and VC's were doing the exact same thing. Throwing tons of good money after bad. Although you can make an argument this is different, in a lot of ways, its just feels the same thing. The same energy, the same ha…

I would say a bit more like 1997. I was young but kept thinking, "That which is good is not novel, and that which is novel isn't good." That said, we had the giant crash, but based on the dow jones the low in 2002 was the same as August 1998 but you can really look at the lost decade as to the true impact of the bubble.

The question isn't if there will be a crash - there will - but there are always crashes. And there are always recoveries. It's all about "how long." And what happens to the companies that blow the money and then find out they can't fire all their white collar workers?

(Or, what happens if they find out they can?)

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#15

Post by throwawayoldie »

j45 wrote: post #9
JCM9 wrote: post #2

There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.

It's a bubble if the tech or audience wasn't there and capabilities weren't improving weekly. There's definitely people who don't understand the tech talking about applying it increasing the failure rate of software projects.

> It's a bubble if the tech or audience wasn't there and capabilities weren't improving weekly.

But...is it and are they? Gen AI boosters tend to make assertions like this as if they're unassailable facts, but never seem interested in backing them up. I guess it's easier than thinking.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#16

Post by kayodelycaon »

Well, at least AI is going to be better than the blockchain hype. No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for.

I had a very hard time explaining once you put something in the chain, you can’t easily pull it back out. If you wanted to verify documents, all you have to do is put a hash in a database table. Which we already had.

It has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from controlling the contents. That includes governments, business executives, lawyers, judges, and hackers. The only good thing is every single piece of data can be pulled out into a different data structure once you realize your mistake.

Note, I’m greatly oversimplifying all the details and I’m not referring to cryptocurrency.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#18

Post by fancyfredbot »

Article doesn't understand that cutting "between five and 20 percent of support and admin processing" is really valuable, instead it seems to want to dismiss that as a dull failure.

Business process outsourcing companies are valued at $300bn according to the BPO Wikipedia page. So 5%-20% of that is 15-60bn. So even if we're valuing all the other GenAI impact at zero the impact on admin and support alone could plausibly justify this investment.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#20

Post by kgwgk »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #7

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around. I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literal…

> I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful.

Yes, but https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence...

Nine years ago, scientist Geoffrey Hinton famously said, “People should stop training radiologists now,” believing it was “completely obvious” AI would outperform human rads within five years.

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