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GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

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61–70 of 155 posts

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#61
post #56
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost track of my memes. Should I be locking up the green crayons or my daughters?

A lot of y'all still don't get it. https://x.com/JuiceSimpsons/status/1523551892432953345

"monkey jpegs": NFT

"hodl" - I think r/WallStreetBets came up with that. Perhaps not - its too ubiquitous, similar to teh. r/WSB did originate the eating green crayons thing along with smooth brain monkeys etc

I simply mixed and matched and riffed in an old school "lock up your daughter" meme.

Sorry, I don't have a Spongebob illustration. I do words.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can just speak for myself, but my F500 has been setting money on fire chasing AI. Truly terrible ideas are being pursued just for the sake of movement. Were “AI” not part of the pitch, it would have been immediately tossed in the bin as a waste of time. Ideas which are not terrible, instead have awful ROIs. Nobody has a use case beyond generating text, so lots of ideas about automating some text generation in certa…

Same here. We are apparently obsessed with chatbots that no one asked for. If I brought up the same idea minus the AI a couple years ago, management would have been very confused as to why I wanted to build things no one asked for. The funniest thing is that management has no idea how AI works so they're pretty much just Copilot Agents with a couple docs and a prompt. It's the most laughable shit I've ever seen. Mana…

> tossing a doc about company benefits into a bot is about the most worthless thing you could do with this tech.

Hahaha, my company has spent half a year pursuing the exact same thing to the letter after one of our VPs got the idea in his head at some AI conference. Rollout kept getting pushed back because of hallucinations in testing. I'm not 100% sure at this point if he forgot he made it a top internal priority and it was quietly shelved or if it's still limping along with no one in HR/upper management willing to give it the green light for release.

(using throwaway because my HN profile is linked to my real identity).

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#63
post #2

There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.

I like your phrases "a smoking crater in the ground" and "a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck" enough to steal them for use in my own critiques.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#64

There is no real source for this data other than "executives" that only think in numbers and of course those are the types that collude with their CFOs to come up with great ways to get giant tax write-offs. I would imagine they are not "burning billions" they are coming up with new ways to describe how they ALREADY burned billions.

I can just speak for myself, but my F500 has been setting money on fire chasing AI. Truly terrible ideas are being pursued just for the sake of movement. Were “AI” not part of the pitch, it would have been immediately tossed in the bin as a waste of time. Ideas which are not terrible, instead have awful ROIs. Nobody has a use case beyond generating text, so lots of ideas about automating some text generation in certa…

My F150 set itself on fire the other day

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1999 was triggered by fraud, there was far more demand on paper for high bandwidth applications than was justified for all the fiber layout and over-investment in Internet technologies. The difference today is that every piece of capitalism immediately 100% utilized once it is plugged in.

Announcing to the world "AGI has been achieved internally" when that's not true seems like fraud to me.

Who did that?

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#66

Article doesn't understand that cutting "between five and 20 percent of support and admin processing" is really valuable, instead it seems to want to dismiss that as a dull failure. Business process outsourcing companies are valued at $300bn according to the BPO Wikipedia page. So 5%-20% of that is 15-60bn. So even if we're valuing all the other GenAI impact at zero the impact on admin and support alone could plausib…

What is missing even in this article is the install and expected failure rate of the dominant GB300 servers. Numbers I heard were, "~15% annual failure and it's not worth trying to swap/repair". That means in 5 years these entire installs are down more than half. Of course they can install the NEW GX500turbo servers which are 4x the compute, but 2x more power hungry. How much will that cost? What is the hyperscaler write down ~$200B/yr? Better have some income to make that up. They've got only 3 years to get there.

That still means All New data centers. They aren't being built for for this now, and so the old ones'll have to get ripped out and rebuilt (in place?) before they get the new servers. I do think they've planned the external power delivery, but not cooling or IP infra. It's a CF.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can just speak for myself, but my F500 has been setting money on fire chasing AI. Truly terrible ideas are being pursued just for the sake of movement. Were “AI” not part of the pitch, it would have been immediately tossed in the bin as a waste of time. Ideas which are not terrible, instead have awful ROIs. Nobody has a use case beyond generating text, so lots of ideas about automating some text generation in certa…

My F150 set itself on fire the other day

Gotta treat her better

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#68
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1999 was triggered by fraud, there was far more demand on paper for high bandwidth applications than was justified for all the fiber layout and over-investment in Internet technologies. The difference today is that every piece of capitalism immediately 100% utilized once it is plugged in.

Tell me you don't understand why the dot com crash happened without telling me you don't understand why the dot com crash happened.

Calling the whole bubble fraud is wrong, but Enron, Worldcom and Microstrategy all blew up due to fraud in the 2000-2001 time frame.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#69
post #20

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around. I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literal…

> I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful. Yes, but https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence... Nine years ago, scientist Geoffrey Hinton famously said, “People should stop training radiologists now,” believing it was “completely obvious” AI would outperform human rads within five years.

One problem is considering a solution effective only if it, at launch, completely solves the problem, for example, in the case of AI and LLMs, by coding an entire application without any human intervention, retiring radiologists, or driving autonomously in the five boroughs of New York City.

If we expect a technology to completely solve a problem as soon as it is launched, only a few in history could be considered a success. Can you imagine what it would be like if the first radios were considered a failure because you couldn't listen to music?

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#70

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around. I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literal…

I've been quite happy with thinking of agentic IDE operation as being akin to a highly energetic intern. It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance. That said, I get my answers back in minutes/hours rather than days/weeks. For the cost, for things that would otherwise be delivered by an intern or college-hire SDE, it's a pretty solid value vs. paying a salary and keeping a desk available.

What it isn't, at present, is an investment in the future. I'm not making these virtual interns better coders, more thoughtful about architecture, or more autonomous in the future. Those aspects of development of new hires are vastly more valuable than the code output I'm getting in my IDE. So I'm hoping that we land in a place where we're fostering both rather than hoping that someone else is going to do the hard work of closing the agentic coding gap and growing maturity. Pulling an Indiana Jones style swap could be a really destructive move if we try to pull the human pipeline out of the system too early.

Just paying attention to near term savings runs a real risk falling into that trap.

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