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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

#71

Post by myhf »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #18

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 plausib…

But business process outsourcing companies actually perform the services they get paid for, so it doesn't make sense to compare them to GenAI.

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

#72

Post by rvz »

compiler-guy wrote: post #52
jstummbillig wrote: post #24

What arrogant and cynical way of looking at business operations. You don't know how anything interesting turns out in the future. You make educated guesses and those cost money. When you run a business, everything costs money. But that is not "lighting money on fire", that is how all learning happens. If anyone thinks they have figured it all out, stop blabbering around. Short the market.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain insolvent." --John Maynard Keynes Lots of people lost their shirts shorting the housing market prior to the 2008 crash. (_The Big Short_ highlights those who were successful, but plenty of people weren't.) But it was undoubtedly a bubble and there was a world-wide recession when it popped.

Maybe we will get another one soon if we don’t realize quick enough that the promise of AGI is a complete scam.

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

#73

Post by j45 »

pixl97 wrote: post #13
j45 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was barely no one using the internet then let alone doing e-commerce.

It’s worth reading up on it to see what’s actually comparable.

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

#74

Post by roskelld »

gerdesj wrote: post #61
krapp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of y'all still don't get it. https://x.com/JuiceSimpsons/status/1523551892432953345

"monkey jpegs": NFT "hodl" - I think r/WallStreetBets came up with that. Perhaps not - its too ubiquitous, similar to teh. r/WSB did originate the eating green crayons thing along with smooth brain monkeys etc I simply mixed and matched and riffed in an old school "lock up your daughter" meme. Sorry, I don't have a Spongebob illustration. I do words.

HODL came from a drunk post on bitcoin talk.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0

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

#75

Post by tokioyoyo »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #46
throwmeaway222 wrote: post #30

There is no real source for this data other than "executives" that only think in numbers and of course those are the types that collude with their CFOs to come up with great ways to get giant tax write-offs. I would imagine they are not "burning billions" they are coming up with new ways to describe how they ALREADY burned billions.

I can just speak for myself, but my F500 has been setting money on fire chasing AI. Truly terrible ideas are being pursued just for the sake of movement. Were “AI” not part of the pitch, it would have been immediately tossed in the bin as a waste of time. Ideas which are not terrible, instead have awful ROIs. Nobody has a use case beyond generating text, so lots of ideas about automating some text generation in certa…

I know first hand companies that have replaced parts of CS with Elevenlabs with measurable wins in customer acquisition and satisfaction. Generally speaking, I agree that a lot of people are chasing something that doesn't exist, but there are real use cases in the current environment.

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

#76

Post by inkyoto »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #16

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 c…

> No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for.

Not the blockchain itself, but the concept of an immutable, append only, tamper-proof ledger underpinning it is a very useful one in many contexts where the question of authenticity of datasets arises – the blockchain has given us a ledger database.

The ledger database is more than just a hash as it also provides a cryptographic proof that the data is authentic via hash chaining, no ability to delete or modify a record, and the entire change history of any record. All these properties make the ledger databases very useful in many contexts, especially the ones where official documents are involved.

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

#77

Post by kstrauser »

inkyoto wrote: post #76
kayodelycaon wrote: post #16

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 c…

> No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for. Not the blockchain itself, but the concept of an immutable, append only, tamper-proof ledger underpinning it is a very useful one in many contexts where the question of authenticity of datasets arises – the blockchain has given us a ledger database. The ledger database is more than just a hash as it also provides a cryptographic proof that…

For all that stuff, I like the blockchain implementation known as "git".

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

#78

Post by gerdesj »

roskelld wrote: post #74
gerdesj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"monkey jpegs": NFT "hodl" - I think r/WallStreetBets came up with that. Perhaps not - its too ubiquitous, similar to teh. r/WSB did originate the eating green crayons thing along with smooth brain monkeys etc I simply mixed and matched and riffed in an old school "lock up your daughter" meme. Sorry, I don't have a Spongebob illustration. I do words.

HODL came from a drunk post on bitcoin talk. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0

If they managed to find the shift key, they weren't pissed enough! ...

OK, read the post ... legendary!

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

#79

Post by johnsmith1840 »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #18

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 plausib…

BPO is a growing industry that isn't shrinking call centers have expanded as well.

If it was true these were replacing anything it would be very clear in those sectors and it isn't. The real effect of end to end automation from LLMs is small to negligible. The entire "boring" industry is still chunging along and growing as it did before.

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

#80

Post by Nevermark »

Well run large companies often waste a lot, in order to (1) hedge risks of being left behind, (2) ensure they have options in the future in possible growth or new efficiency areas, and (3) to start on long learning curves for skills and capabilities that appear likely to be a baseline necessity in the long run.

Bonfires of money.

Predictably. Because all three of those concerns require highly speculative action to properly address.

That doesn't make those reasons invalid. Failures are expected, especially in early days. And are not a sign they are making spurious bets, or starry eyed about industry upheavals. The minimal return is still experience gained and a ramped up institutional focus.

How many of us here speed up our overall development by coding early on new projects before we have complete clarity? Writing code we will often throw away?

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