Microsoft, Amazon are all building forward deployment engineering teams - to increase AI adoption. It will take time, but it will happen.
AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a) the labs are releasing very fast and b) why would they implement the long tail of app features when they can effectively sell tokens to every user to write their own version of the app, which is what is currently happening?
Because, as the gp pointed out, if the cost is least to the labs, then why not reap the benefits too? Hypothetical. Assume you can in fact point agents at a tool and say "replicate it. Make no mistakes". You then have software being instantly copy-able. Assume these agents can then be pointed to a customer feedback board in perpetuity and they autonomously upgrade the software over time. They analyze usage patterns a…
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#53Microsoft, Amazon are all building forward deployment engineering teams - to increase AI adoption. It will take time, but it will happen.
Also, adoption isn’t lacking because of lack of awareness. Adoption isn’t happening because the math doesn’t add up and the ROI isn’t there. Consulting pixie dust can’t fix that.
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#54> If token costs converge toward zero for most AI use cases... In the real world, token costs seem to be going up, as early stage pricing at a loss gives way to pricing that generates revenue. Compute costs might go down a little over the next five years, but there's nothing coming along in hardware that leads to huge reductions in price. NVidia says don't expect better price/performance before 2030. The models keep…
I've switched to non-SOTA models, which deliver comparable value at a fraction of the cost. A full day of coding with Deepseek is approx $1 in tokens, and at least for my use cases the quality is equivalent to Claude.
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#55Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#56One thing I can't square: if the cost to build an application goes to zero, we should see a proliferation of apps, especially from the AI labs. The fact that we aren't seeing an app explosion (I think) is evidence that building applications people will pay for is significantly more complex than just prompting claude/codex/etc
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've switched to non-SOTA models, which deliver comparable value at a fraction of the cost. A full day of coding with Deepseek is approx $1 in tokens, and at least for my use cases the quality is equivalent to Claude.
Hm. I must be holding it wrong. I hit $20 easily in 5 hours with deepseek in opencode.
I suspect it might be a question of conversational loop vs agentic dev - the former uses much less tokens than letting an autonomous agent churn away on your codebase.
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#58One thing I can't square: if the cost to build an application goes to zero, we should see a proliferation of apps, especially from the AI labs. The fact that we aren't seeing an app explosion (I think) is evidence that building applications people will pay for is significantly more complex than just prompting claude/codex/etc
There's a crapload of new repos and Github and similar things. And a lot of it is "hobby utility" stuff like you'd find everywhere pre-mobile/pre-app-store but kinda dried up a bit with the browserfication+phone-ificiation of everything. Everything had to turn into an app + an online service.
Now, like OSS, freeware, and even most shareware in the 90s, most of these new projects have no path to VC-level interest.
The whole "basic business or business-process BUT ON THE INTERNET with a dash of social/web-2.0/personalization/crypto/fad-of-the-year" that recent VC firms have been pushing for the last 15+ years may be numbered.
But it's also unlikely that growing companies with big ambitions will want to base their business on vibe-coded free software for too long. It opens up too many unknowns/risks ("oh no, the disgruntled employee leveraged a misconfiguration in our in-house accounts payable system!") There will be a new middle ground model to be found.
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#59Microsoft, Amazon are all building forward deployment engineering teams - to increase AI adoption. It will take time, but it will happen.
This is more marketing hype than substance. Amazon isn’t “building” a team, it’s broadly just taking existing people and now calling them “forward deployment engineering teams.” Also, adoption isn’t lacking because of lack of awareness. Adoption isn’t happening because the math doesn’t add up and the ROI isn’t there. Consulting pixie dust can’t fix that.
Re: AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've switched to non-SOTA models, which deliver comparable value at a fraction of the cost. A full day of coding with Deepseek is approx $1 in tokens, and at least for my use cases the quality is equivalent to Claude.
Hm. I must be holding it wrong. I hit $20 easily in 5 hours with deepseek in opencode.