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

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

#31

Post by snerbles » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:33 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?

Most of my past roles had very simple code at the important deliverable level, on bizarre and arcane platforms that would have little context for frontier LLMs. Most the creativity and complexity was in tooling for research/development/testing.

Agentic coding could help a lot for the latter, not necessarily the former.

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

#32

Post by watwut » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:33 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…

It is not first mover disadvantage. It is "took too much initial hype and debt while ignoring reality and long term" long term disadvantage.

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

#33

Post by bandrami » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:33 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?

Because most of the capital assets depreciate over a period of 5 years or so so you have to make the expenditures back during that time or you can't book any revenue.

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

#34

Post by nemomarx » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

misterderpie wrote: post #28

nemomarx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you look at recent trends in consumer spending, a lot more of it is from the upper classes and less from the middle. Selling services to the rich can displace the loss of white collar workers. (in theory). as a bonus, ideally you create some more really wealthy people to spend on things during this shift.

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

#35

Post by pu_pe » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

> Exponential View, a consultancy, counts $175bn of generative-AI revenue, on an annualised basis, in June. In a recent paper Anton Korinek of Anthropic and Patrick McKelvey of the Bank of Canada estimate total “AI services” revenue. Adapting their methodology, we reckon this was $220bn (again annualised) in the first quarter of this year. Ramp’s data imply that 2-3% of business spending now goes on AI, pointing to $170bn a year.

So between $170bn-220bn in annualized AI revenue today. Maybe it doesn't cover trillion-dollar bets but this is a very substantial number.

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

#36

Post by axegon_ » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #22

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.

Hopefully soon. Not for personal or altruistic reasons, I just find great pleasure in seeing cults burn(which is what AI has become).

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

#37

Post by WarmWash » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

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.

Most people will pocket AI gains for themselves.

So from the top it doesn't look like much has changed, whereas workers are trying to offload as much work as they can onto their claude subscription.

People in desperation to min/max work per unit dollar, will leverage AI to free themselves from as much work as possible, while still claiming credit for the work.

So as the labs start ratcheting up the price, people will pay more and more to keep their "secret" assistant.

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

#38

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #4

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.

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

Good point. Within the next few years black hat open models will be able to do a lot of damage for very little cost.

It could easily turn into a Red Queen situation where companies that don't spend hard on security are going to face huge potential losses, and both sides will be scrambling constantly to get an advantage.

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

#39

Post by zemo » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:34 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?

everything you build potentially increases the surface area of attack. If the benefit of building it is zero or negative then all you've done is increase your risk profile.

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

#40

Post by sovietmudkipz » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 1:34 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?

Programmer work product (typically) benefits the capital class, directly via product engineering or indirectly via platform engineering.

If the aspiration of a 10x or more programmer is enabled through AI then the capital class win, in the typical case. Software eats the world.