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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#461

Post by johnnyanmac »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #329
Etheryte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent MIT report on the state of AI in business feels relevant here [0]: > Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. There's no doubt that you'll find anecdotal evidence both for and against in all variations, what's much more interesting than anecdotes is the aggregate. [0] https://mlq.ai/media/quart…

Ah yes, the study that everyone posts but nobody reads >Behind the disappointing enterprise deployment numbers lies a surprising reality: AI is already transforming work, just not through official channels. Our research uncovered a thriving "shadow AI economy" where employees use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude subscriptions, and other consumer tools to automate significant portions of their jobs, often without IT…

IT nightmares aside, this only makes the issue worse, if +it is so widespread to the point where some are sneaking to use it personally, and they still can't make a business more productive/profitable: well, that bubble is awfully wobbly

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#462

Post by johnnyanmac »

crazygringo wrote: post #82
Etheryte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent MIT report on the state of AI in business feels relevant here [0]: > Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. There's no doubt that you'll find anecdotal evidence both for and against in all variations, what's much more interesting than anecdotes is the aggregate. [0] https://mlq.ai/media/quart…

No. The aggregate is useless. What matters is the 5% that have positive return. In the first few years of any new technology, most people investing it lose money because the transition and experimentation costs are higher than the initial returns. But as time goes on, best practices emerge, investments get paid off, and steady profits emerge.

Can we both at least agree that 95% of comapnies investing and failing in a technology with 400b+ dollars of investment constitutes a bubble popping? I pretty much agree with you otherwise and that is what the article comes down to as well:

>I believe both sides are right. Like the 19th century railroads and the 20th century broadband Internet build-out, AI will rise first, crash second, and eventually change the world.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#463

Post by johnnyanmac »

aurareturn wrote: post #460
dsr_ wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The output of a farm is food or commodities to be turned into food. The output of PwC -- whoops, here goes any chance of me working there -- is presentations and reports. “We’re entering a bold new chapter driven by sharper thinking, deeper expertise and an unwavering focus on what’s next. We’re not here just to help clients keep pace, we’re here to bring them to the leading edge.” That's on the front page of their w…

The output of her work isn’t presentations and reports. The actual output is raising money and making successful deals. This requires convincing investors mostly which is very hard to do. Look up what M&A is.

>Look how what M&A is.

Mergers and Aquisitions? If that's the right acronym I hate it even more, thank you.

But yes, I can see how automating the BS of corporate culture then using it to impress people (who also don't care anyway) by saying "I made this with AI" can be "productive". Not really a job I can do, though.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#464

Post by johnnyanmac »

manishsharan wrote: post #300
bakugo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. This isn't a sign that ChatGPT has value as much as it is a sign that this person's work doesn't have value.

Most developers can't do much work without an IDE and Chrome + Google. Would you say that their work has no value?

This is probably the only place I can properly say "Programmers should be brought up with vim and man pages", so I'll say it here.

Anyways, IDE's don't try to offload the thinking for you, it's more like an abacus. You still need to work in it a while and learn the workflow before it's more efficient than a text editor + docs.

Chrome is a trickier aspect, because the reality is that a lot of modern docs completely suck. So you rely less on official documentation and more about how others have navigated an IDE and if those options work for you. I'd rather we make proper documentation than offload it into a black box that may or may not understand what it's spouting out to you, though.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#465

Post by johnnyanmac »

hemloc_io wrote: post #110
kumarm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.

Yeah I've used it for personal projects and it's 50/50 for me. Some of the stuff generated I can't believe is actually good to work with long term, and I wonder about the economics of it. It's fun to get something vaguely workable quickly though. Things like deepwiki are useful too for open source work. For me though the core problem I have with AI programming tools is that they're targeting a problem that doesn't re…

>Of course if you tried to solve coordination problems, then it would probably be a lot harder to sell to management because we'd have to do some collective introspection as to where they come in.

Sad but true. Better to sell to management and tagline it as "you don't need a whole team anymore.", or going so far as "you can do this all by yourself now!".

Sadly managers usually have more money to spend than the workers too, so it's more profitable.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#466

Post by senordevnyc »

9rx wrote: post #433
TimonKnigge wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. My understanding was that Waymo’s are autonomous and don’t have a remote driver?

They are so-called "human in the loop". They don't have a remote driver in the sense of someone sitting in front of a screen playing what looks like a game of Truck Simulator. But they are operated by humans. It's kind of like when cruse control was added to cars. No longer did you have to worry about directly controlling the pedal, but you still had to remain the operator. In some very narrow sense you might be able…

This is absolutely false. In rare cases Waymo needs human intervention, but they do NOT have humans in the loop for the vast majority of their operations.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#467

Post by maxglute »

y0eswddl wrote: post #357
maxglute wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See kids hooked on LLMs. I think most of them will grow up paying for a sub. Like not $15/m streaming sub, $50-100/m cellphone tier sub. Well until local kills that business model.

I think the reason ads are so prolific now is because the pay-to-play model doesn't work well at such large scales... Ads seem to be there only way to make the kind of big money LLM investors will demand. I don't think you're wrong re: their hope to hook people and get us all used to using LLMs for everything, but I suspect they'll just start selling ads like everyone else.

Big tech are bigger than ever, they've simply learned to double dip with pay to play and ads. AI is also going to do both, but I think they have stickiness to extract a lot more per month. Like once a generation grows up with AI crutch, they will shell out $$$ to not write their own emails, for the simple fact that they never really learned to write all their own shit in the first place.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#469

Post by ninetyninenine »

9rx wrote: post #373
ninetyninenine wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't always right. There was massive pushback against self driving and practically everyone was saying it would fail and is a bubble. The level of confidence people had about this opinion was through the roof. Like people who didn't know anything would say it with such utter confidence it would piss me off a bit. Like how do you know? Well they didn't and they were utterly wrong. Waymo showed it's not a bubble. A…

> Waymo showed it's not a bubble. Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. Which is still really useful, but a far cry from the promise of everyone being able to buy a personal pod on wheels that takes you to and fro, no matter where you want to go, while you sleep that the bubble was premised on. In other words, Waymo has proven the bubble. It has been 20 y…

I ride waymos on the regular. It's not tightly controlled conditions. It's some of the hardest roads in the bay area.

>While that is technically true, has there ever not been a bubble when people start dreaming about what could be? Even if AI heads towards being everything we hope it can become, it still seems highly likely that people have dreamed up uses for the potential of AI that aren't actually useful. The PetsGPT.com-types can still create a bubble even if the underlying technology is all that and more.

What I see more of on HN is everyone calling everything a bubble. This is a bubble that is a bubble. It's all a bubble. Like literally, Sam Altman is the minority. Almost everyone thinks it's a bubble.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#470

Post by ninetyninenine »

driverdan wrote: post #424
ninetyninenine wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't always right. There was massive pushback against self driving and practically everyone was saying it would fail and is a bubble. The level of confidence people had about this opinion was through the roof. Like people who didn't know anything would say it with such utter confidence it would piss me off a bit. Like how do you know? Well they didn't and they were utterly wrong. Waymo showed it's not a bubble. A…

Autonomous cars did have a bubble moment. They were hyped and didn't deliver on the promises. We still don't have level 5 and consumer vehicles are up to level 3. It doesn't mean it's not a useful or cool technology. All great tech has gone through some kind of hype/bubble stage.

Bro waymo cars are level 4. I ride them on the regular. I don't use uber anymore.
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