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Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

economist.com

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Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#61

Post by AlexandrB »

thewebguyd wrote: post #24
slibhb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, just like computers and later the internet. The technology always preceeds the cultural/economic changes by decades.

And sometimes it disappears entirely for a while because either culturally, the world isn't ready for it/to adapt to it, or it wasn't delivered in the right form. Google Glass comes to mind, which died 11 years ago and XR is only just now starting to resurface. Tablets also come to mind, pre-iPad, they more or less failed to achieve any meaningful adoption, and again sort of disappeared for a while until Apple releas…

An even more recent example is the Metaverse. Something that has a similar pattern of being pushed top-down onto employees. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg decreed[1] that employees must spend part of their time in Horizon Worlds?

[1] https://futurism.com/facebook-employees-confused-metaverse

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#62

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

gaius_baltar wrote: post #5
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #3

Alternative to archive.is x="\"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr\"" y=https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/26/investors-expect-ai-use-to-soar-thats-not-happening busybox wget -U "$x" -O 1.htm $y firefox ./1.htm

Thanks, I didn't know this trick! Perhaps soon we'll need to keep lists of per-site white-listed user agents...

"Perhaps soon we'll need to keep lists of per-site white-listed user agents..."

Been doing this for many years now. It's a short list, small enough to be contained in the local fwd proxy config

   # economist.com
   http-request set-header user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr" if { hdr(host) -m end economist.com }
I don't use curl, wget, browser extensions/add-ons, etc. except in HN examples. I don't have to worry about command line arguments ilke "-A" or "-U". Proxy controls HTTP headers

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#63

Post by qdog »

hintymad wrote: post #14

What is the definition of "soaring"? The charts in the article showed that the percentage of the companies that adopt AI for automation has increase 3X. At least 40% of the companies pay for GenAI, and at least 10% of the employees use GenAI daily. Combined with the fact that the companies like OpenAI and Anthronpic frequently run out of capacity, how is the AI use not soaring?

There was a dip on the first chart in the article, it also sbows something like 9% of companies using it.

What I wonder is beyond "using" AI, is what value the companies are actually seeing. Revenue growth at both OpenAI and Anthropic are increasing rapidly at the moment, but it's not clear if individual companies are really growing their useage, or if it is everyone starting to try it out.

Personally, I have used it sparingly at work, as the lack of memory seems to make it quite difficult to use for most of my coding tasks. I see other people spending hours or even days trying to craft sub-agents and prompts, but not delivering much, if any, output above average. Any output that looks correct, but really isn't cause a number of headaches.

For the VC's, one issue is constant increase in compute. Currently it looks to me like every new release is only slightly better, but the compute and training costs increase at the same rate. The AI companies need the end users to need their product so much they can significantly increase the price to the end users. I think this is what they want to see in "adoption", such a high demand that they can see the future of increasing prices.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#64

Post by tim333 »

zkmon wrote: post #58

A lot of people who think AI is being used heavily, are coders. It's like a blacksmith making a hammer for himself and thinking that everyone is using the hammer everyday all the time. Let's check agentic AI. Which agents do people mostly talk about? Aha - coding agents!

A lot of the non coding use is large in quantity but low in usefulness like the AI summaries that Google sticks in my searches. I actually quite like them but doubt I would use them much if I had to do something like click a button to make them appear, let alone pay.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#65

Post by cjbenedikt »

All very interesting. Lean startup anyone? As a "serial" startup founder one thing that was always hammered into my brain was: customer discovery! Clearly something that was drowned out by all the money thrown at AI startups.Motto: we just buy our customers.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#66

Post by m463 »

all new technology is overestimated in the short term, and underestimated in the long term.

(soar - overestimated)

for example, years ago in the era of dragon naturallyspeaking, ALL computers would momentarily be using speech recognition.

and it didn't happen

but quietly speech recognition started working in the background - call trees on the phone, and other places where a strict vocabulary could help. it quietly grew and nowadays it is everywhere.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#67

Post by dubeye »

m463 wrote: post #66

all new technology is overestimated in the short term, and underestimated in the long term. (soar - overestimated) for example, years ago in the era of dragon naturallyspeaking, ALL computers would momentarily be using speech recognition. and it didn't happen but quietly speech recognition started working in the background - call trees on the phone, and other places where a strict vocabulary could help. it quietly gr…

It may have grown, but the world hasn’t changed that much. Most people use text still

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#68

Post by m463 »

dubeye wrote: post #67
m463 wrote: post #66

all new technology is overestimated in the short term, and underestimated in the long term. (soar - overestimated) for example, years ago in the era of dragon naturallyspeaking, ALL computers would momentarily be using speech recognition. and it didn't happen but quietly speech recognition started working in the background - call trees on the phone, and other places where a strict vocabulary could help. it quietly gr…

It may have grown, but the world hasn’t changed that much. Most people use text still

I'm just saying...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#69

Post by tapete2 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #3

Alternative to archive.is x="\"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr\"" y=https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/26/investors-expect-ai-use-to-soar-thats-not-happening busybox wget -U "$x" -O 1.htm $y firefox ./1.htm

Nice troll. I like how it yielded 403 in the end.

Re: Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening

#70

Post by tatersolid »

ckbkr10 wrote: post #34

I am using it for ansible, php, java, c, linux configuration issues or general questions. Preparing excel sheets etc.. It's sped the time I need to produce projects from a usual span of 4-20 days to 1-2 days with another 2-3 Testing. Of course I still bill the time it would have taken me but for a professional it can be a great improvement. While my country will be slow to adopt, we haven't even adopted to smartphone…

> Of course I still bill the time it would have taken me but for a professional it can be a great improvement.

Isn’t this basically the definition of fraud?

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