AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough • Hacker News Board

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#21

Post by trollbridge » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #5

iammjm wrote: post #3

“ According to Mr Yotzov’s study, nine in ten executives report no impact of ai on their firm’s productivity over the past three years.” Brutal stuff.

If programmers play it right that'll be us working less and delivering the same results. Who said everything has to benefit the capital class?

Speaking as a programmer, the net effect so far is that we work more and deliver far more results and get paid the same or less.

And I run my own firm... but I have to compete against a global market of other programmers using similar tools who are also trying to compete on price, and then there are hordes of new entrants who can vibe-code things that superficially look like they'll meet a customer's needs and are better at marketing than I am, so my area of business gets constrained to just customers who need help after the problems with the vibe-coded solution appear, the vendor who made it is long gone, and they already spent an inordinate amount of money on the vibe-coded solution since they thought it was complete and it looked pretty good.

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#22

Post by VCFundedGenYer » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

I mean, all one has to do is review https://isaiprofitable.com/ to see just how bad it is. None of this is a profitable venture. It's just a money pit for all players involved, all the while draining our ability to buy electronics and drink water. This has to end at some point.

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#23

Post by richiebful1 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #13

an0malous wrote: post #6

> A back-of-the-envelope calculation finds that covering aicapex through identifiable ai income requires revenue on the order of $2.5trn per year, more than tech’s entire combined revenue today. … > All these complex calculations roughly tally with a much simpler one: adding up the ai revenue of the firms selling most of the ai. Anthropic pulls in perhaps $75bn, annualised; Openai makes tens of billions; Google, via…

Why would capex need to be covered by income during a time of investment and infrastructure buildup? Did income from the Apollo program cover its expenses?

Public investment was responsible for Apollo, so there was no expectation of profitability. Private investment is largely responsible for the AI buildout, and private investment isn't doing that for charity

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#24

Post by polytely » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #11

an0malous wrote: post #6

> A back-of-the-envelope calculation finds that covering aicapex through identifiable ai income requires revenue on the order of $2.5trn per year, more than tech’s entire combined revenue today. … > All these complex calculations roughly tally with a much simpler one: adding up the ai revenue of the firms selling most of the ai. Anthropic pulls in perhaps $75bn, annualised; Openai makes tens of billions; Google, via…

$2.5tn is about 8% of U.S. GDP. So a handful of AI firms really expect that they will become larger than the entire U.S. sectors of manufacturing, government, or healthcare?

I guess the bet is that they will become embedded in basically 8% of the tasks in every sector. which I guess could happen long term? thinking about the whole ass economy in this way always make my mind boggle so I don't really feel equipped to talk intelligently about this.

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#25

Post by hahahaa » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

Attributing to per-worker might be the wrong thing. I.e. how many kWh power does a person buy direct vs. use indirectly through other trade.

In other words usage per regular worker doesn't matter. Revenue overall does.

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#26

Post by nemomarx » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #13

an0malous wrote: post #6

> A back-of-the-envelope calculation finds that covering aicapex through identifiable ai income requires revenue on the order of $2.5trn per year, more than tech’s entire combined revenue today. … > All these complex calculations roughly tally with a much simpler one: adding up the ai revenue of the firms selling most of the ai. Anthropic pulls in perhaps $75bn, annualised; Openai makes tens of billions; Google, via…

Why would capex need to be covered by income during a time of investment and infrastructure buildup? Did income from the Apollo program cover its expenses?

If I give you 5 trillion dollars I want to get that back plus a percentage increase on top for my troubles, right? Government programs might run without the expectation of paying back taxpayers but investors are less generous.

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#27

Post by jgalt212 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #10

You really see the first mover disadvantages in US AI labs. And how second movers (open Chinese labs) can disrupt them. First movers tend to get overcapitalized and way ahead of their skis. You saw a smaller version of this in the vector database market (remember that?) where companies like Pinecone were getting billion+ valuations for capabilities which now seem like a commodity. There's vector DB companies now with…

> And how second movers (open Chinese labs) can disrupt them

Yes, I will concede this point. But how are the Chinese labs going to thrive with giving the weights away for free? Will they suffer the same fate open source database companies did at the hands of AWS?

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#28

Post by misterderpie » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

nemomarx wrote: post #18

trollbridge wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2.5tn is about 8% of U.S. GDP. So a handful of AI firms really expect that they will become larger than the entire U.S. sectors of manufacturing, government, or healthcare?

Investors expect that they will, I guess. If you really believe the strong ai use cases (like exponential improvements, or it replacing hundreds of knowledge workers at every company" then maybe this isn't unreasonable.

If many people lose their jobs, thus consumers having less and less money, where would that money come from?

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#29

Post by pdhborges » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

andy99 wrote: post #17

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will probably end up reducing lots of firms productivity because costs to defend against cyber attack is gonna skyrocket. Even for tech firms writing more code (the only thing AI is really good at so far) doesn't scale linearly with profits

Why would it obviously give attackers the upper hand? If we accept the premise that AI helps find vulns more efficiently, shouldn’t this be at least equally helpful in securing against attacks and make that increasingly efficient?

Maybe people believe that the process complexity is not symetric. I don't blame them. Building an house is more complex than destroying it.

Re: AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough

#30

Post by throwaway27448 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

andy99 wrote: post #17

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will probably end up reducing lots of firms productivity because costs to defend against cyber attack is gonna skyrocket. Even for tech firms writing more code (the only thing AI is really good at so far) doesn't scale linearly with profits

Why would it obviously give attackers the upper hand? If we accept the premise that AI helps find vulns more efficiently, shouldn’t this be at least equally helpful in securing against attacks and make that increasingly efficient?

It's still an additional cost that doesn't drive revenue.