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Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

economist.com

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Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#41

Post by katmannthree »

phkahler wrote: post #11
techblueberry wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering if AI was essentially the last hype cycle, that’s what it’s sort of been billed as, the tech that can do everything, but I guess robotics could be a next big thing to replace it, basically applied AI.

>> I was wondering if AI was essentially the last hype cycle The next hype wants to be quantum computing, but its just not there yet - never mind the lack of real-world applications. I thought nVidia would start promoting GPUs (whole data centers) to run classical simulations of QC to develop the applications while real hardware gets figured out.

If you want to go off trying to predict the cycle I’d suspect ag/weather tech. Political complexity aside it appears to be the biggest thing we’ll need to work on in the coming decades if we want to sustain the planet’s carrying capacity.

Probably more likely though to be something novel that few took seriously before it demonstrates utility. And this is the issue for QC, we already know what it’s useful for: a handful of niche search algorithms. It’s a bit like fusion in that even if you work out the (very significant) engineering issues you’re left with something that while useful is far from transformative.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#42

Post by lateforwork »

> Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy.

Lets compare to the adoption of the internet. Mosaic was released in 1993. Businesses adopted the internet progressively during the 90s, starting slow but accelerating toward the decade's end with broad adoption of the internet as a business necessity by 2000.

Three years is a ridiculously small amount of time for businesses to make dramatic changes.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#43

Post by swatcoder »

hintymad wrote: post #14

What is the definition of "soaring"? The charts in the article showed that the percentage of the companies that adopt AI for automation has increase 3X. At least 40% of the companies pay for GenAI, and at least 10% of the employees use GenAI daily. Combined with the fact that the companies like OpenAI and Anthronpic frequently run out of capacity, how is the AI use not soaring?

I don't want to be all "did you read the article?" since that's against guidelines, but the text of the article (the stuff in between the graphics and ads) is kind of about exactly that.

Adoption was widespread at first but seems to have hit a ceiling and stayed there for a while now. Meanwhile, there's been little evidence of major changes to net productivity or profitability where AI has been piloted. Nobody is pulling away with radical growth/efficiency for having adopted AI, and in fact the entire market of actual goods and services is mostly still just stagnating outside of the speculative investment being poured into AI itself.

Investment isn't just about making a bet on whether an company/industry will go up or down, but about making the right bet about how much it will do so over what period of time. The scale of AI investment over the last few years was making the bet that AI adoption would keep growing very very fast and would revolutionize the productivity and profitability of the firms that integrated it. That's not happening yet, which suggests the bet may have been too big or too fast, leaving a lot of investors in an increasingly uncomfortable position.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#44

Post by rvnx »

petetnt wrote: post #33
_pdp_ wrote: post #16

Anecdotally, I use a lot more AI then ever before - at least 5x more - hard to measure.

And to support the claim in the heading you are also invested in AI through your ChatBotKit project, so…

Based on what he is building, it feels like _pdp_ is actually passionate about AI himself, and then ChatBotKit is a by-product of this passion. So pretty sure he'd use AI as much and root for it, even if not involved with that specific project.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#45

Post by DougN7 »

hintymad wrote: post #14

What is the definition of "soaring"? The charts in the article showed that the percentage of the companies that adopt AI for automation has increase 3X. At least 40% of the companies pay for GenAI, and at least 10% of the employees use GenAI daily. Combined with the fact that the companies like OpenAI and Anthronpic frequently run out of capacity, how is the AI use not soaring?

So with 10X the employees using it and double the current companies (so nearly 100%) will it finally the investment? I’m guessing not.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#46

Post by fullshark »

rvnx wrote: post #28
venturecruelty wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, investors facing reality means homelessness for the rest of us. Maybe the real treasure was the billions of dollars we made along the way. :)

My close friends got showered so much with money poured down by investors that it is indecent. Just because they happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and idling, gets paid 10M USD+ due to stock options vetting. Sounds like crypto^2; money is spread completely irrationally and unfairly (lucky folks who launched a ponzi get rewarded instead of jailed) and completely disconnected from actual efforts. In…

This is how VC and on some level professional success always worked. Gotta be in the right place, knowing the right people, at the right time. Although the scale and speed is more absurd.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#48

Post by gtowey »

hintymad wrote: post #14

What is the definition of "soaring"? The charts in the article showed that the percentage of the companies that adopt AI for automation has increase 3X. At least 40% of the companies pay for GenAI, and at least 10% of the employees use GenAI daily. Combined with the fact that the companies like OpenAI and Anthronpic frequently run out of capacity, how is the AI use not soaring?

It's the engagement fallacy all over again.

Companies are shoving AI into everything and making it intrusive into everyone's workflow. Thus they can show how "adoption" is increasing!

But adoption and engagement don't equal productive, useful results. In my experience it simply doesn't and the bottom is going to fall out on all these adoption metrics when people see the productivity gains aren't real.

The only place I've seen real utility is for coding. All other tasks, such as Gemini for document writing, produces something that's about 80% ok, and 20% errors and garbage. The work of going back through with a fine toothed comb to root out the garbage is actually more work and less productive than any simply writing the darn thing from scratch.

I fear that the future of AI driven productivity is going to push a mountain of shoddy work into the mainstream. Imagine if the loan documents for your new car had all the qualities of a spam email. It's going to be a nightmare for the administrative world to untangle what is real from the AI slop.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#49

Post by AstroBen »

"We're talking about systems that don't exist, and that we don't know how to build" - something to keep in mind from Ilya's interview yesterday

People are captivated by good stories, and AI makes for one hell of a sci fi narrative

It's hard to separate the maybe one day plausible fictional future from the on-the-ground reality

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#50

Post by hamasho »

Honestly, I sometimes use heavy thinking models only to avoid wasting tokens on my expensive pro plans. In many cases, I prefer using quicker models to discuss something, gain better ideas about the topic, do "my own research" using Google, then discuss again. ChatGPT Pro mode is helpful, but it's too slow, and I have no idea what they say is true (even with sources) or I'm familiar with the topic so I can research faster myself.

I use coding agents often, but I don't burn all the tokens out of my Claude Max plan and ChatGPT Business plan with two seats.

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