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Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

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Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#221

Post by xracy »

expedition32 wrote: post #211
xracy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already know many useful things to do; there are already 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are coding-related) doing various ostensibly useful things. And there a ton more use-cases discussed in the comments here and elsewhere. But because of the headline the discussion is missing the much more important point! There has to be gold in the West! Look at all of the prospectors moving there to ge…

Nvidia is the hardware store selling shovels in this analogy...

They're also trying to advertise and reinvest in the gold rush in an attempt to convince people there's gold here.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#223

Post by drzaiusx11 »

gloosx wrote: post #215
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only search engine AI output didn't constantly haluciate nonexistent APIs, it might be a net productivity gain for me...but it's not. I've been bit enough times by their false "example" output for it to be a significant net time loss vs using traditional search results.

It's even worse when LLM eats documentation for multiple versions of the same library and starts hallucimixing methods from all versions at the same time. Certainly unusable for some libraries which had a big API transition between versions recently.

The library that this happened to me repeatedly on was AWS' CDK, which did have a large delta between v1 to v2, so that may help explain it.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#224

Post by xracy »

keeda wrote: post #168
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of AI startups are already making a lot of money and growing at a record pace. Some of the numbers out there are bonkers. Do you have examples of this? I'm aware of raises, but not aware of any profitable ai companies yet

I'm not sure about "profitable" because these are very young (2 - 3 years old) private companies, but there have been a few reports showing their growth indicating very strong PMF i.e. utility: https://a16z.com/revenue-benchmarks-ai-apps/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/15/y-combinator-startups-are-fa... https://medium.com/@gjarrosson/ycs-revenue-explosion-497ea17... https://stripe.com/blog/inside-the-growth-of-the-top-…

> "I'm not sure about "profitable" because these are very young (2 - 3 years old) private companies"

In any other industry, this is the death knell for your company. It's only in tech where the investors drop so much money on early investments, that companies can get away with losing money for "2-3 years".

>The revenue growth -- assuming these investors are not all colluding to fudge these numbers on a grand scale -- is way higher than what most have seen before.

As a matter of strict numbers? The revenue growth could be higher just because of inflation.

You really seem to be doing a Gish Gallup here of links, which don't really prove any of your points. If there are specific metrics you can point to in these links that prove your point, then please call that out, but every one of these that I have clicked on has felt like a nothing burger.

> Menlovc link: is just talking about investment in AI, which proves my point

> FT: Paywall

> Stripe: You've got correlation, but not causation. An alternative thing you're proving could be that more investment in the space makes it easier to bring a product to market and earn revenue (How does this compare to SaaS Startups 5-10 years ago)

> Medium Link: is more of "proving my original point"

> CNBC: It's not clear what the metric is here that's making your case

> a16z: It looks to me like, this is actually proving the point that every one of these is considering "investments" as "revenue" which is wild.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#225

Post by keeda »

xracy wrote: post #224
keeda wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about "profitable" because these are very young (2 - 3 years old) private companies, but there have been a few reports showing their growth indicating very strong PMF i.e. utility: https://a16z.com/revenue-benchmarks-ai-apps/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/15/y-combinator-startups-are-fa... https://medium.com/@gjarrosson/ycs-revenue-explosion-497ea17... https://stripe.com/blog/inside-the-growth-of-the-top-…

> "I'm not sure about "profitable" because these are very young (2 - 3 years old) private companies" In any other industry, this is the death knell for your company. It's only in tech where the investors drop so much money on early investments, that companies can get away with losing money for "2-3 years". >The revenue growth -- assuming these investors are not all colluding to fudge these numbers on a grand scale --…

> In any other industry...

Why bring up any other industry when we all know this is the VC playbook for tech companies, and has been working for them for decades? Reminder that Amazon, Uber, DoorDash etc were burning VC cash for upto a ~decade before becoming the giants they are now.

> As a matter of strict numbers? The revenue growth could be higher just because of inflation.

I have no idea how inflation, at > You really seem to be doing a Gish Gallup here of links, which don't really prove any of your points.

Yes, they do actually. I'm not sure why you think those links are talking about investments when they very clearly are about revenue. Open any of them up and cmd-F "revenue". Here's basically the gist of these links:

Investors: "Our startups are growing revenue at record pace" (10% growth week over week (!!) for YC startups as per the CNBC link)

MenloVC: "Enterprise decision makers tell us they're spending on AI at record pace" (E.g. "companies spent $37 billion on generative AI in 2025,3 up from $11.5 billion in 2024, a 3.2x year-over-year increase.")

Stripe: "Our AI startup customers are hitting revenue milestones at record pace."

It's not a "Gish Gallup" if it provides multiple, valid, different data-backed perspectives from different players in the ecosystem that all support the underlying thesis, which is that these AI startups are growing revenue at a unprecedented rates.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#226

Post by xracy »

keeda wrote: post #225
xracy wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm not sure about "profitable" because these are very young (2 - 3 years old) private companies" In any other industry, this is the death knell for your company. It's only in tech where the investors drop so much money on early investments, that companies can get away with losing money for "2-3 years". >The revenue growth -- assuming these investors are not all colluding to fudge these numbers on a grand scale --…

> In any other industry... Why bring up any other industry when we all know this is the VC playbook for tech companies, and has been working for them for decades? Reminder that Amazon, Uber, DoorDash etc were burning VC cash for upto a ~decade before becoming the giants they are now. > As a matter of strict numbers? The revenue growth could be higher just because of inflation. I have no idea how inflation, at > You r…

> why bring up any other industry when this is the vc playbook

Because my point is how messed up the VC incentive structure for tech is. This is proved by comparing it to every other industry.

> Yes, they do actually. I'm not sure why you think those links are talking about investments when they very clearly are about revenue.

They are using the word "revenue", but can you be certain that the word means "revenue from product sales"? Or does it just mean "revenue from investment".

A couple of the articles specifically mentioned the series A rounds as part of "revenue generation". And my whole point was that investors celebrating how much faster they're investing in AI startups is a classic "begging the question" type fallacy. They are measuring themselves on how much money they are investing in startups, and then saying that is proof that the startups are valuable.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#227

Post by keeda »

xracy wrote: post #226
keeda wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any other industry... Why bring up any other industry when we all know this is the VC playbook for tech companies, and has been working for them for decades? Reminder that Amazon, Uber, DoorDash etc were burning VC cash for upto a ~decade before becoming the giants they are now. > As a matter of strict numbers? The revenue growth could be higher just because of inflation. I have no idea how inflation, at > You r…

> why bring up any other industry when this is the vc playbook Because my point is how messed up the VC incentive structure for tech is. This is proved by comparing it to every other industry. > Yes, they do actually. I'm not sure why you think those links are talking about investments when they very clearly are about revenue. They are using the word "revenue", but can you be certain that the word means "revenue from…

True, the tech VC incentive structure is weird from a typical perspective -- it is very hit-driven... throw money at a thousand startups burning cash to capture a market, and hope one of them becomes a unicorn. However, it has been working very well for them, so at this point nobody questions it.

> They are using the word "revenue", but can you be certain that the word means "revenue from product sales"? Or does it just mean "revenue from investment".

Investment and revenue are accounted for very differently, and if there's any mingling between them that would be highly problematic, probably fraudulent. For instance, there are tax implications, investments are not taxed but income from revenue can be. There can be all kinds of shenanigans that happen with finances in startups for sure, but those are typically unethical and illegal.

In this case they all are talking about revenue. Some articles do mention that funding rounds are also being affected because these companies have been hitting revenue milestones so much faster yet with much fewer people, but that is a separate aspect from the revenue.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#228

Post by podgorniy »

cmxch wrote: post #208
podgorniy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're plaing game of "control" the wrong way. The whole idea of all these investments and movement was that they do have the control over the AI, not users

Why not take that away from the firms and let people have local first AI usage? Might not work well with those relying on structured finance to break computer component markets, but does well for the majority that are buying their equipment with regular cash.

> Why not take that away from the firms and let people have local first AI usage?

Capital strives for monopoly. Are there money in "local llms" for the capital? Docker had this issue: they gave local stuff, and failed to monetize. It's just how game is shaped. Capital will go there where user's will have to be dependent on what capital invested in. There are too much money which are searching for places to make more money. Increase in competition or locality does not help making more money.

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