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95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

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Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#321

Post by chasd00 »

herval wrote: post #300
belter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prepare for the crash: "Spending on AI data centers is so massive that it’s taken a bigger chunk of GDP growth than shopping" - https://fortune.com/2025/08/06/data-center-artificial-intell...

This is such a huge repeat of the early 2000s. All the bust startups spent billions in infrastructure. Everyone built their own datacenters, no matter what your business is. We'll either see a new class of "AWS of AI" companies that'll survive and be used by everyone (that's part of the play Anthropic & OpenAI are making, despite API generating a fraction of their current revenue), or Amazon + Google + Microsoft will…

I remember the first dot com bust, you could find Herman Miller Aerons (the stereotypical inet-startup-guy chair) super cheap as well as fairly large Cisco 6509 routers and ...i think it was Sun Fire 15ks lol. I look forward to getting some nice GPUs at a discount.

idk what a person would do with a 6509 or a Sun Fire hah but they were all over craigslist iirc.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#322

Post by trueismywork »

Imanari wrote: post #229
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the thing. There’s value in AI, it’s just not worth half a trillion dollars to train a new model that’s 0.4% better on benchmarks. Meta is never going to get a worthwhile return on spending $100M on individual engineers. But that doesn’t mean AI is without its uses. We’re just in that painful phase where the hype needs to die down and we treat LLMs as what they really are; an interesting new tool in the toolki…

Could you broadly describe the AI projects you have built?

Pinn for simulations

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#323

Post by [deleted] »

dsr_ wrote: post #221
andix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a follow-up call of a customer. They are referring to earlier calls and the call center agents needs to check what it was about. So they can skim/read the transcripts while talking to the customer. I guess it's really hard to listen to transcripts while you're on the phone.

That would be awesome! But in fact, customer call centers tend not to be able to even know that you called in yesterday, three days ago and last week. This is why email-ticketing call centers are vastly superior.

[deleted]

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#324

Post by turnsout »

llmllmkom wrote: post #266
turnsout wrote: post #182

The AI wave is so reminiscent of the early days of the internet. Right now we're in about 1999, a time of tremendous hype. Business that weren't even in tech were wondering how much they need to know about the HTTP spec. People from the marketing team were being pulled off their print ad campaigns, given a copy of Dreamweaver, and told to make the company website. We hadn't even figured out the roles. It 100% turned…

The internet is about sharing actual information. LLMs can't share real information, just a flimsy derivative. It's in their DNA. How so many supposedly smart people who understand machine learning and its fundamental entropy failed to acknowledge this reality from day zero, is beyond me.

Not every revolution is about sharing information. I have plenty of healthy skepticism of companies adding "AI sauce" to everything, but if you can't see the genuine utility of LLMs, it might just be a failure of imagination.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#325

Post by Workaccount2 »

chriskanan wrote: post #306

Where is the actual paper that makes these claims? I'm seeing this story repeated all over today, but the link doesn't actually seem to go to the study. I am not going to trust it without actually going over the paper. Even then, if it isn't peer-reviewed and properly vetted, I still wouldn't necessarily trust it. The MIT study on AI's impact on scientific discovery that made a big splash a year ago was fraudulent ev…

An alternative headline is "90% of employees report using LLMs regularly"

The story is a "Pick your narrative" one.

https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#326

Post by neom »

JCM9 wrote: post #16

We are entering the “Trough of disillusionment.” These hype cycles are very predictable. GPT-5 being panned as a disappointment after endless hype may go down as GenAI’s “jump the shark” moment. It’s all fun and games until the bean counters start asking for evidence of return on investment. GenAI folks better buckle up. Bumps ahead. The smart folks are already quietly preparing for a shift to ride the next hype wave…

hahaaa! I lead a growth team for a genAI company and on Monday I said to the team "we need to start to put content together that proves our customers are having return and finding value, because we're entering the trough of disillusionment"

...I'll try not to sound desperate tho.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#327

Post by czhu12 »

As much as I also want to jump on the ai bubble bandwagon (who doesn’t love a good bit of pessimism), I’m still mind blown daily by how these models operate.

I recently ported over a fastapi app to Django with Claude code and it was at least twice as fast as I probably would’ve been able to do myself, and I only had to somewhat pay attention. What would’ve been a pretty intense few days turned into about 2 hours of mindless work while tens of thousands of lines were ported over, tested, and refactored

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#328

Post by mrweasel »

doubled112 wrote: post #74
jawns wrote: post #56

Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…

At work we've tried AI summaries for meetings, but we spent so much time fixing those summaries that we started writing our own again. Is there some training you applied or something specific to your use case that makes it work for you?

We tried Otter.ai, someone complained and asked: "Could you f-ing not? I don't trust them" and now Otter is accused of training their models on recorded meetings without permission. Yeah, I don't even care if it works, I don't trust any of these companies.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#329

Post by tene80i »

deadbabe wrote: post #232
alooPotato wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you want to be able to search over summaries so you need to generate them right away

Do you want to search summaries, or do you want to save millions of dollars per year?

Product teams analyse call summaries at scale to guide the roadmap to reduce future calls. It’s not just about case management.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#330

Post by potatolicious »

lenerdenator wrote: post #55
highwaylights wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 95% of companies knew this was a money pit but felt obligated to burn a pile of money on it so as not to hurt the stock price.

I also wouldn't be surprised if bean counters were expecting a return in an unreasonable amount of time. "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down." - some MBA somewhere, probably, trying and failing yet again to rub his two brain cells together for the first time since high school. J…

> "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down."

I mean, this is basically how all R&D works, everywhere, minus the strawman bit about "single fiscal year", which isn't functionally true.

And this is a serious career tip: you need to get good at this. Being able to break down extremely ambitious, many-year projects into discrete chunks that prove progress and value is a fundamental skill to being able to do big things.

If a group of very smart people said "give us ${BILLIONS} and don't bother us for 15 years while we cook up the next world-shaking thing", the correct response to that is "no thanks". Not because we hate innovation, but because there's no way to tell the geniuses apart from the cranks, and there's not even a way to tell the geniuses-pursuing-dead-ends from the geniuses-pursuing-real-progress.

If you do want to have billions and 15 years to invent the next big thing, you need to be able to break the project up to milestones where each one represents convincing evidence that you're on the right track. It doesn't have to be on an annual basis, but it needs to be on some cadence.

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