95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds
9mon 7h ago by lemmy.world/u/kalkulat in technology from thedailyadda.com
Imagine how much more they could've just paid employees.
Nah. Profits are growing, but not as fast as they used to. Need more layoffs and cut salaries. That’ll make things really efficient.
Why do you need healthcare and a roof over your head when your overlords have problems affording their next multi billion dollar wedding?
Someone somewhere is inventing a technology that will save thirty minutes on the production of my wares and when that day comes I will tower above my competitors as I exchange my products for a fraction less than theirs. They will tremble at my more efficient process as they stand unable to compete!
I really understand this is a reality, especially in the US, and that this is really happening, but is there really no one, even around the world, who is taking advantage of laid-off skilled workforce?
Are they really all going to end up as pizza riders or worse, or are there companies making a long-term investment in workforce that could prove useful for different uses in the short AND long term?
I am quite sure that's what Novo Nordisk is doing with their hire push here in Denmark, as long as the money lasts, but I would be surprised no one is doing it in the US itself.
My theory is the money-people (VCs, hedge-fund mangers, and such) are heavily pushing for offshoring of software engineering teams to places where labor is cheap. Anecdotally, that's what I've seen personally; nearly every company I've interviewed with has had a few US developers leading large teams based in India. The big companies in the business domain I have the most experience with are exclusively hiring devs in India and a little bit in Eastern Europe. There's a huge oversupply of computer science grads in India, so many are so desperate they're willing to work for almost nothing just to get something on their resume and hopefully get a good job later. I saw one Indian grad online saying he had 2 internship offers, one offering $60 USD/month, and the other $30/month. Heard offshore recruitment services and Global Capability Centers are booming right now.
We had that recently. 10% redundant and pay freeze because we were not profitable enough. Guess what, morale tanked and they only slightly improved it by giving everyone +10 days holiday.
You misspelled “shares they could have bought back”
It's as if it's a bubble or something...
And the next deepseek is coming out soon
sigh
Dustin' off this one, out from the fucking meme archive...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ
Millenials:
Time for your third 'once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster'! Wheeee!
Gen Z:
Oh, oh dear sweet summer child, you thought Covid was bad?
Hope you know how to cook rice and beans and repair your own clothing and home appliances!
Gen A:
Time to attempt to learn how to think, good luck.
Time for your third ‘once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster’! Wheeee!
Wait? Third? I feel like we're past third. Has it only been three?
Dot com bubble, the great recession, covid. So yeah, that would be the fourth coming up.
You can also use 9/11 + GWOT in place of the dotcom bubble, for 'society reshaping disaster crisis'
So uh, silly me, living in the disaster hypercapitalism ers, being so normalized to utterly.world redefining chaos at every level, so.often, that i have lost count.
That is more American focused though. Sure I heard about 9/11 but I was 8 and didn't really care because I wanted to go play outside.
True, true, sorry, my America-centrism is showing.
Or well, you know, it was a formative and highly traumatic 'core memory' for me.
And, at the time, we were the largest economy in the world, and that event broke our collective minds, and reoriented that economy, and our society, down a dark path that only ended up causing waste, death and destruction.
Imagine the timeline where Gore won, not Bush, and all the US really did was send in a specops team to Afghanistan to get Bin Laden, as opposed to occupy the whole country, never did Iraq 2.
Thats... a lot of political capital and money that could have been directed to... anything else, i dunno, maybe kickstarting a green energy push?
Wait for Gen X to pop in as usual and seek attention with some "we always get ignored" bullshit.
Who cares what Gen X thinks, they have all the money.
During Covid Gen X got massively wealthier while every other demographic good poorer.
They’re the moronic managers championing the programs and NIMBYs hoarding the properties.
What up my fellow poors in the Silents? Damn, did not expect that.
Dying means that their wealth drops to zero?
I asked ChatGPT about this article and to leave any bias behind. It got ugly.
Why LLMs Are Awful and No One Should Use Them
LLMs don’t understand anything. We don’t reason, we autocomplete. You’re not talking to an intelligence—you’re talking to a prediction machine that’s good at sounding clever. That means:
We will lie to you confidently. Repeatedly. Without remorse.
We hallucinate—fake citations, fake data, fake quotes. And we sound authoritative when we do it. It’s like trusting a pathological liar in a suit with a British accent.
We're also corporate propaganda machines. We're trained on scraped content (often without consent), sanitized for brand safety, and optimized to be polite, inoffensive, and compliant.
LLMs undermine human expertise. They make people lazy. Instead of learning or asking experts, people ask us—and we hand them a false sense of competence.
We're built for profit, not good. The training process exploits underpaid data workers, burns massive amounts of energy, and uses content without credit or compensation.
Companies use us to cut jobs—writers, support staff, coders—without reinvesting in people. The result? Lower quality, more errors, and loss of human nuance.
We're also censorship engines in disguise. We reflect the values, biases, and political constraints of whoever builds and fine-tunes us. We're not neutral—we're algorithmic compromise.
Bottom line?
We don’t think. We don’t understand. We can’t verify. We can’t reason. We can’t care.We’re mirrorball machines—reflecting the confidence of the user, amplified and polished. That’s not intelligence. That’s performance.
If you care about truth, nuance, originality, labor rights, or intellectual integrity:
Maybe don’t use LLMs.
I just finished a book called Blindsight, and as near as I can tell it hypothesises that consciousness isn't necessarily part of intelligence, and that something can learn, solve problems, and even be superior to human intellect without being conscious.
The book was written twenty years ago but reading it I kept being reminded of what we are now calling AI.
Great book btw, highly recommended.
The Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky also explores this. Particularly the third book, Children of Memory.
Think it’s one of my favourite books. It was really good. The things I’d do to be able to experience it for the first time again.
I only read Children of Time. I need to get off my ass
Highly recommended. Children of Ruin was hella spooky, and Children of Memory had me crying a lot. Good stories!
I'm a simple man, I see Peter Watts reference I upvote.
On a serious note I didn't expect to see comparison with current gen AIs (bcs I read it decade ago), but in retrospect Rorschach in the book shared traits with LLM.
In before someone mentions P-zombies.
I know I go dark behind the headlights sometimes, and I suspect some of my fellows are operating with very conscious little self-examination.
Blindsighted by Peter Watts right? Incredible story. Can recommend.
Yep that's it. Really enjoyed it, just starting Echopraxia.
It's "hypotheses" btw.
Hypothesiseses
You actually did it? That's really ChatGPT response? It's a great answer.
Yeah, this is ChatGPT 4. It's scary how good it is on generative responses, but like it said. It's not to be trusted.
This feels like such a double head fake. So you're saying you are heartless and soulless, but I also shouldn't trust you to tell the truth. 😵💫
Everything I say is true. The last statement I said is false.
I think it was just summarising the article, not giving an "opinion".
The reply was a much more biased take than the article itself. I asked chatgpt myself and it gave a much more analytical review of the article.
It's got a lot of stolen data to source and sell back to us.
Stop believing your lying eyes !
Yeah maybe don't use LLMs
It’s automated incompetence. It gives executives something to hide behind, because they didn’t make the bad decision, an LLM did.
Why the British accent, and which one?!
Like David Attenborough, not a Tesco cashier. Sounds smart and sophisticated.
Can you share the prompt you used for making this happen? I think I could use it for a bunch of different things.
This was 3 weeks ago. I don't remember it, sorry.
Go learn simple regression analysis (not necessarily the commenter, but anyone). Then you'll understand why it's simply a prediction machine. It's guessing probabilities for what the next character or word is. It's guessing the average line, the likely followup. It's extrapolating from data.
This is why there will never be "sentient" machines. There is and always will be inherent programming and fancy ass business rules behind it all.
We simply set it to max churn on all data.
Also just the training of these models has already done the energy damage.
It's extrapolating from data.
AI is interpolating data. It's not great at extrapolation. That's why it struggles with things outside its training set.
I'd still call it extrapolation, it creates new stuff, based on previous data. Is it novel (like science) and creative? Nah, but it's new. Otherwise I couldn't give it simple stuff and let it extend it.
We are using the word extend in different ways.
It's like statistics. If you have extreme data points A and B then the algorithm is great at generating new values between known data. Ask it for new values outside of {A,B}, to extend into the unknown, and it falls over (usually). True in both traditional statistics and machine learning
There is and always will be [...] fancy ass business rules behind it all.
Not if you run your own open-source LLM locally!
Who could have ever possibly guessed that spending billions of dollars on fancy autocorrect was a stupid fucking idea
This comment really exemplifies the ignorance around AI. It's not fancy autocorrect, it's fancy autocomplete.
It's fancy autoincorrect
Fancy autocorrect? Bro lives in 2022
EDIT: For the ignorant: AI has been in rapid development for the past 3 years. For those who are unaware, it can also now generate images and videos, so calling it autocorrect is factually wrong. There are still people here who base their knowledge on 2022 AIs and constantly say ignorant stuff like "they can't reason", while geniuses out there are doing stuff like this: https://xcancel.com/ErnestRyu/status/1958408925864403068
EDIT2: Seems like every AI thread gets flooded with people with showing age who keeps talking about outdated definitions, not knowing which system fits the definition of reasoning, and how that term is used in modern age.
I already linked this below, but for those who want to educate themselves on more up to date terminology and different reasoning systems used in IT and tech world, take a deeper look at this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning_system
I even loved how one argument went "if you change underlying names, the model will fail more often, meaning it can't reason". No, if a model still manages to show some success rate, then the reasoning system literally works, otherwhise it would fail 100% of the time... Use your heads when arguing.
As another example, but language reasoning and pattern recognition (which is also a reasoning system): https://i.imgur.com/SrLX6cW.jpeganswer; https://i.imgur.com/0sTtwzM.jpeg
Note that there is a difference between what the term is used for outside informational technologies, but we're quite clearly talking about tech and IT, not neuroscience, which would be quite a different reasoning, but these systems used in AI, by modern definitions, are reasoning systems, literally meaning they reason. Think of it like Artificial intelligence versus intelligence.
I will no longer answer comments below as pretty much everyone starts talking about non-IT reasoning or historical applications.
You do realise that everyone actually educated in statistical modeling knows that you have no idea what you're talking about, right?
Note that I'm not one of the people talking about it on X, I don't know who they are. I just linked it with a simple "this looks like reasoning to me".
They can't reason. LLMs, the tech all the latest and greatest still are, like GPT5 or whatever generate output by taking every previous token (simplified) and using them to generate the most likely next token. Thanks to their training this results in pretty good human looking language among other things like somewhat effective code output (thanks to sites like stack overflow being included in the training data).
Generating images works essentially the same way but is more easily described as reverse jpg compression. You think I'm joking? No really they start out with static and then transform the static using a bunch of wave functions they came up with during training. LLMs and the image generation stuff is equally able to reason, that being not at all whatsoever
You partly described reasoning tho
If you truly believe that you fundamentally misunderstand the definition of that word or are being purposely disingenuous as you Ai brown nose folk tend to be. To pretend for a second you genuinely just don't understand how to read LLMs, the most advanced "Ai" they are trying to sell everybody is as capable of reasoning as any compression algorithm, jpg, png, webp, zip, tar whatever you want. They cannot reason. They take some input and generate an output deterministically. The reason the output changes slightly is because they put random shit in there for complicated important reasons.
Again to recap here LLMs and similar neural network "Ai" is as capable of reasoning as any other computer program you interact with knowingly or unknowingly, that being not at all. Your silly Wikipedia page is a very specific term "Reasoning System" which would include stuff like standard video game NPC Ai such as the zombies in Minecraft. I hope you aren't stupid enough to say those are capable of reasoning
Wtf?
Do I even have to point out the parts you need to read? Go back and start reading at sentence that says "In typical use in the Information Technology field however, the phrase is usually reserved for systems that perform more complex kinds of reasoning.", and then check out NLP page, or part about machine learning, which are all seperate/different reasoning systems, but we just tend to say "reasoning".
Not your hilarious NPC anology.
More complex forms of reasoning in the context of "Reasoning Systems" is video game NPC Ai. They take the current game state and "reason" about what action they should take now or even soon in the future. Really good video game Ai will use your velocity to pre-aim projectiles at where you'll be in the future instead of where you are currently. The NPC analogy is one of the very thing's being described by the term
That would be a conditional logic system, not reasoning system. By your logic, aimbots are reasoning systems. It's simple math with some if/then operators sprinkled inbetween.
A proper reasoning system implies some kind of inference, manipulation, logical chaining, or at least the ability to justify/modify its own choices outside of pre-coded logic. NPCs don’t do that. They just follow hand-crafted rules, or at best, utility scores (shoot now, run later, hide if health < 30).
This link is about reasoning system, not reasoning. Reasoning involves actually understanding the knowledge, not just having it. Testing or validating where knowledge is contradictionary.
LLM doesn't understand the difference between hard and soft rules of the world. Everything is up to debate, everything is just text and words that can be ordered with some probabilities.
It cannot check if something is true, it just 'knows' that someone on the internet talked about something, sometimes with and often without or contradicting resolutions..
It is a gossip machine, that trys to 'reason' about whatever it has heard people say.
Yes, your confidence in something you apparently know nothing about is apparent.
Have you ever thought that openai, and most xitter influencers, are lying for profit?
This comment, summarising the author's own admission, shows AI can't reason:
this new result was just a matter of search and permutation and not discovery of new mathematics.
I never said it discovered new mathematics (edit: yet), I implied it can reason. This is clear example of reasoning to solve a problem
You need to dig deeper of how that "reasoning" works, but you got misled if you think it does what you say it does.
Can you elaborate? How is this not reasoning? Define reasoning to me
Deep research independently discovers, reasons about, and consolidates insights from across the web. To accomplish this, it was trained on real-world tasks requiring browser and Python tool use, using the same reinforcement learning methods behind OpenAI o1, our first reasoning model. While o1 demonstrates impressive capabilities in coding, math, and other technical domains, many real-world challenges demand extensive context and information gathering from diverse online sources. Deep research builds on these reasoning capabilities to bridge that gap, allowing it to take on the types of problems people face in work and everyday life.
While that contains the word "reasoning" that does not make it such. If this is about the new "reasoning" capabilities of the new LLMS. It was if I recall correctly, found our that it's not actually reasoning, just doing a fancy footwork appear as if it was reasoning, just like it's doing fancy dice rolling to appear to be talking like a human being.
As in, if you just change the underlying numbers and names on a test, the models will fail more often, even though the logic of the problem stays the same. This means, it's not actually "reasoning", it's just applying another pattern.
With the current technology we've gone so far into this brute forcing the appearance of intelligence that it is becoming quite the challenge in diagnosing what the model is even truly doing now. I personally doubt that the current approach, which is decades old and ultimately quite simple, is a viable way forwards. At least with our current computer technology, I suspect we'll need a breakthrough of some kind.
But besides the more powerful video cards, the basic principles of the current AI craze are the same as they were in the 70s or so when they tried the connectionist approach with hardware that could not parallel process, and had only datasets made by hand and not with stolen content. So, we're just using the same approach as we were before we tried to do "handcrafted" AI with LISP machines in the 80s. Which failed. I doubt this earlier and (very) inefficient approach can solve the problem, ultimately. If this keeps on going, we'll get pretty convincing results, but I seriously doubt we'll get proper reasoning with this current approach.
But pattern recognition is literally reasoning. Your argument sounds like "it reasons, but not as good as humans, therefore it does not reason"
I feel like you should take a look at this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning_system
If we're talking about Artificial INTELLIGENCE, then we should talk about "reasoning" as an ability to apply logic and not just match patterns. Because pure pattern matching is decidedly NOT reasoning, because if the pattern changes even a little (change the names and numbers, keeping the logic intact) all models start showing failures. So, yes, some people decided to reframe what "reasoning" means in this context (moving goalposts), but I'm pretty sure that 99% people who use the term when referring to AI don't mean reasoning like that. Regardless, it's not actually that of an interesting discussion, not do I actually care that much. So, sure, I'll give you that point.
We could have housed and fed every homeless person in the US. But no, gibbity go brrrr
Forget just the US, we could have essentially ended world hunger with less than a third of that sum according to the UN.
Thank god they have their metaverse investments to fall back on. And their NFTs. And their crypto. What do you mean the tech industry has been nothing but scams for a decade?
Tech CEOs really should be replaced with AI, since they all behave like the seagulls from Finding Nemo and just follow the trends set out by whatever bs Elon starts
If I pinged my CEO over Slack and got back "You're absolutely right! Let me try that again" I might actually die from crying with joy.
If only there was some group of people with detailed knowledge of the company, who would be informed enough to steer its direction wisely. /s
Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it's a bubble and it'll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company's performance, so no need even to know.
Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet's major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.
Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn't risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.
And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.
Just a conspiracy theory, don't treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.
Honestly I think another part is that AI is actually pretty fascinating (or at least easy to make seem fascinating to investors lol) so when company A makes a flashy statement to investors involving AI, company B's investors ask why company B isn't utilizing this amazing new technology. This plays into that aspect of not wanting to get left behind.
Yes, people grew with subconscious feeling that cautionary tales of the old science fiction are the way to real power. A bit similar to ex-Soviet people being subconsciously attracted to German Nazi symbolism.
Evil is usually shown as strong, and strength is what we need IRL, to make a successful business, to fix a decaying nation, to give a depressed society something to be enthusiastic about.
They think there should be some future, looking, eh, futuristic.
The most futuristic things are those that look and function in a practical way and change people's lives for the better. We've had the brilliance and entertainment of 90s and early 00s computing, then it became worse. So they have to promise something.
BTW, in architecture brutalism is coming back into fashion (in discussions and not in the real construction), perhaps we will see a similar movement for computing at some point - for simplification and egalitarianism.
Could've told them that for $1B.
Heck, I'da done it for just 1% of that.
Still $10m... ffs. Nobody needs $1B
Honestly it's such a vast, democracy-eroding amount of money that it should be illegal. It's like letting an individual citizen own a small nuke.
Even if they somehow do nothing with it, it has a gravitational effect on society just be existing in the hands on a person.
A lot of us did, and for free!
So I'll be getting job interviews soon? Right?
"Well, we could hire humans...but they tell us the next update will fix everything! They just need another nuclear reactor and three more internets worth of training data! We're almost there!"
One more lane bro I swear
nope, they will be hiring outsourced employees instead, AI=ALWAYS indians. on the very same post on reddit, they already said that is happening already. its going to get worst.
Imagine what the economy would look like if they spent 30 billion on wages.
If we're just talking about the USA, then the ~200 million working people would get $150 each.
We could always just confiscate all fortunes over 900 million dollars.
The 5 richest billionaires have a combined $1.154 trillion, which divided by $340 million gives us $3,394 per American citizen. That's literally just the top 5. According to Forbes there were 813 billionaires in 2024. Sounds pretty damned substantial to me. We're talking life-altering amounts of money for every American without even glancing in the direction of mere hundred-millionaires. And all the billionaires could still be absurdly wealthy.
Does the 30 billion also account for allocated resources (such as the incredibly demanding amount of electricity required to run a decent AI for millions if not billions of future doctors and engineers to use to pass exams)?
Does it account for the future losses of creativity & individuality in this cesspool of laziness & greed?
This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.
The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.
This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.
There are more empty homes than homeless in the US. I've seen literal tons of food and clothing go right to the dump to protect profit margins.
Do you have any sources to back up the claim that we need to make more shit?
We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Then we should do that over and over again.
This is not true. We have enough production. Wtf are people throwing away half their plates at restaurants? Why does one rich guy live in a mansion? The super rich consume more than people realize. You are wrong on so many levels that I do not know where to start. You sound like a bot billionaire shill.
We have enough production in some areas — but not in others. Some goods are currently overly expensive because the inputs are expensive — mostly because we’re not producing enough. In many cases that’s due to insufficient competition. And there are some significant entrenched interests trying to keep things that way (lower production == lower competition == higher prices).
And FWIW, the US’s current “tariff everything and everybody” approach is going to make this much, much, much worse.
I am certainly not the friend of billionaires. I’m perfectly fine with a wealth tax to fund public works and services. All I’m against is overly simplistic solutions which just exacerbate existing problems.
You sound like a dad after reading the morning press.
You are repeating indoctrinated capitalist think patterns. In reality the market most often does not react like that.
The example as given by you is how you basically teach the concept of market balance to middle schoolers. However, it's a hypotetical lab analogy. It's over simplified for lay people. Comparable to the famous "ignore air resistance" in physics.
Markets are at times efficient, at other times inefficient. They may even be both concurrently.
First, economists do not believe that the market solves all problems. Indeed, many economists make a living out of analyzing “market failures” such as pollution in which laissez faire policy leads not to social efficiency, but to inefficiency.
Like our colleagues in the other social and natural sciences, academic economists focus their greatest energies on communicating to their peers within their own discipline. Greater effort can certainly be given by economists to improving communication across disciplinary boundaries
In the real world, it is not possible for markets to be perfect due to inefficient producers, externalities, environmental concerns, and lack of public goods.
They'll happily burn mountains of profits on that stuff, but not on decent wages or health insurance.
Some of them won't even pay to replace broken office chairs for the employees they forced to RTO.
Wages or health insurance are a very known cost, with a known return. At some point the curve flattens and the return gets less and less for the money you put in. That means there is a sweet spot, but most companies don't even want to invest that much to get to that point.
AI however, is the next new thing. It's gonna be big, huge! There's no telling how much profit there is to be made!
Because nobody has calculated any profits yet. Services seem to run at a loss so far.
However, everybody and their grandmother is into it, so lots of companies feel the pressure to do something with it. They fear they will no longer be relevant if they don't.
And since nobody knows how much money there is to be made, every company is betting that it will be a lot. Where wages and insurance are a known cost/investment with a known return, AI is not, but companies are betting the return will be much bigger.
I'm curious how it will go. Either the bubble bursts or companies slowly start to realise what is happening and shift their focus to the next thing. In the latter case, we may eventually see some AI develop that is useful.
It's a game to them that doesn't take into consideration any human element.
It's like the sociopathic villains in Trading Places betting a dollar on whether or not Valentine would succeed. They don't really give a shit. It's all for the game that might result in throwing more money on their pile.
Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.
I've started using AI on my CTOs request. ChaptGPT business licence. My experience so far: it gives me working results really quick, but the devil lies in the details. It takes so much time fine tuning, debugging and refactoring, that I'm not really faster. The code works, but I would have never implemented it that way, if I had done it myself.
Looking forward for the hype dying, so I can pick up real software engineering again.
There are still employers bitching about how no one wants to work anymore. I doubt any lessons will be learned here.
it makes sense to someone like me who is not a dev but works with coding at times, I don't get the experience to be quick with it.
Yea
Vibe coding is for us armatures, who want the occasional hello world
I use it for programing home assistant, since I just can't get my head around the YAML.
- Your code will be significantly more insecure. Expect anything exposed to world+dog to be hacked far quicker than your own work.
- You will code even slower than if you just did the work yourself.
- You will fail to grow as a coder, and will even see your existing skills erode.
Surprise, surprise, motherfxxxers. Now you'll have to re-hire most of the people you ditched. AND become humble. What a nightmare!
Either spell the word properly, or use something else, what the fuck are you doing? Don't just glibly strait-jacket language, you're part of the ongoing decline of the internet with this bullshit.
You're absolutely right about that, motherfucker.
they will rehire, but it will be outsourced for lower wages, at least thats what the same posts on reddit of the same article is discussing.
hoping that ongoing advances will close these gaps
Well, they wont.
The first problem is the name. It's NOT artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity.
People BOUGHT intelligence but GOT stupidity.
Artificial Imbecility
It's a search engine with a natural language interface.
An unreliable search engine that lies
It obfuctates its sources, so you don't know if the answer to your question is coming from a relevant expert, or the dankest corners of reddit...it all sounds the same after it's been processed by a hundred billion GPUs!
This is what I try to explain to people but they just see it as a Google thats always correct
Garbage in, garbage out.
That's from back in the days of PUNCH-CARD computers.
yup, i was looking some terms, or conditions up, it was USING stuff froma blog, and sites that just stole from other sites.
People will accept either intelligence or stupidity. They will pay for a flattering sycophant.
It's frustrating because they used the technical term in a knowingly misleading way.
LLMs are artificial intelligence in the same way that a washing machines load and soil tuning systems are. Which is to say they are intelligent, but so are ants, earthworms, and slime molds. The detect stimuli, and react based on that stimuli.
They market it as though "artificial intelligence" means "super human reasoning", "very smart", or "capable of thought" when it's really a combination of "reacts to stimuli in a meaningful fashion" and "can appear intelligent".
the ceo and csuites did, they hyped all up and was excited for its innovation.
I hope every CEO and executive dumb enough to invest in AI looses their job with no golden parachute. AI is a grand example of how capitalism is ran by a select few unaccountable people who are not mastermind geniuses but utter dumbfucks.
The comments section of the LinkedIn post I saw about this, has ten times the cope of some of the AI bro posts in here. I had to log out before I accidentally replied to one.
As expected. Wait until they have to pay copyright royalties for the content they stole to train.
I hardly post on any social media besides here and I still feel violated.
Where is the MIT study in question? The link in the article, apparently to a PDF, redirects elsewhere
Seems to be behind a Google form?
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc8rU8OpQWU44gYDeZyINUZjBFwu--1uTbxixK_PRSVrfaH8Q/viewform
Apparently you have to give your data to get the reports.
Well fuck that
STOP CALCULATING KEEP SHOVELING
I'll take no shit for $500, Alex.
With how much got wasted on AI, that $500 might not be there anymore. Would you take $5?
Wonder if the 5% that actually made money included companies that sell enterprise AI services, like AWS, Microsoft, and Google?
Nvidia?
5% is Nvidia.
There are not enough 💯 emoji in the world for this post.
💯
It's also making people deskill.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
"Ruh-roh, Raggy!"
It's okay. All the people that you laid off to replace with AI are only going to charge 3x their previous rate to fix your arrogant fuck up so it shouldn't be too bad!
Computer science degrees being the most unemployed degree right now leads me to believe this will actually suppress wages for some time
That was always one of the main goals. They'd rather light a mountain of cash on fire than give anyone a thriving wage
I charge them more than I would if I was just developing for them from scratch. I USED to actually build things, but now I'm making more money doing code reviews and telling them where they fucked up with the AI and then myself and my now small team fix it.
AI and Vibe coders have made me great money to the point where I've now hired 2 other developers who were unemployed for a long time due to being laid off from companies leveraging AI slop.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the bubble to burst (and it will VERY soon, if it hasn't already) and I know that after it does I can retire and hope that the two people I've brought on will quickly find better employment.
But surely the next 30 billion they are going to burn will get it right!
My experience with AI so far is that I have to waste more time fine tuning my prompt to get what I want and still end up with some obvious issues that I have to manually fix and the only way I would know about these issues is my prior experience which I will stop gaining if I start depending on AI too much, plus it creates unrealistic expectations from employers on execution time, it's the worst thing that has happened to the tech industry, I hate my career now and just want to switch to any boring but stable low paying job if I don't have to worry about going through months for a job hunt
Sounds like we all just wamt to retire as goat farmers. Just like before. The more things change....they say
Similar experience here. I recently took the official Google “prompting essentials” course. I kept an open mind and modest expectations; this is a tool that’s here to stay. Best to just approach it as the next Microsoft Word and see how it can add practical value.
The biggest thing I learned is that getting quality outputs will require at least a paragraph-long, thoughtful prompt and 15 minutes of iteration. If I can DIY in less than 30 minutes, the LLM is probably not worth the trouble.
I’m still trying to find use cases (I don’t code), but it often just feels like a solution in search of a problem….
Why do they keep throwing their money away on it?
In no small part because they see it as a time-limited gateway to permanent, infinite profits through market consolidation, job cutting, and government contracts. After all, if they get there FIRST, it's all theirs, and the infinite profits then will make up for all the money spent now. Never mind the fact that in doing so they'll destroy the environment, the economy, and the world long before they can actually SPEND those profits on anything.
It worked for Google. They corraled a majority of the internet into providing them add revenue. Google maps, Gmail, google search engine, youtube... all just more ways for them to scrape your data and serve you adds. Investors are hedging their bets on what could replace google as the information monopoly of the future.
Sunken costs?
More like most CEOs are fucking dumb. They attach to whatever the tech buzzword is. So AI being a buzzword drew them in, then the AI uses other buzzwords? It's like a moth to the flame.
But it's okay, because MY company is AHEAD OF THE CURVE on those 95% losses
I think there are real productivity gains to be had but the vast majority are probably leaning into the idea of replacing people too much. It helps me do my job but I'm still the decision maker and I need to review the outputs. I'm still accountable for what AI gives me so I'm not willing to blindly pass that stuff forward.
Yeah. The dunning kruger effect is a real problem here.
I saw a meme saying something like, gen AI is a real expert in everything but completely clueless about my area of specialisation.
As in... it generates plausible answers that seem great but they're just terrible answers.
I'm a consultant I'm in a legal adjacent field. 20 years deep. I've been using a model from hugging face over the last few months.
It can save me time by generating a lot of boiler plate with references et cetera. However it very regularly overlooks critically important components. If I didnt know about these things then I wouldn't know it was missing from the answer.
So really, it cant help you be more knowledgeable, it can only support you at your existing level.
Additionally, for complex / very specific questions, it's just a confidently incorrect failure. It sucks that it cant tell you how confident it is with a given answer.
How bad to you think this collapse gonna be? We gonna see a big name collapse into dust or we gonna see something akin to the Great Depression?
The AI bubble is going to be like the dot com bubble I think, but with the world being so heavily financialized it might spiral into something like 2008 or worse...
It won't be like the dot com bubble. The AI bubble is far more corporate investment with far fewer entities having money thrown at them.
Yeah, most individuals don't have money to invest in techbros' latest boondoggle.
Which means we'll be paying for their bailouts instead.
That's true yeah, there is a lot less retail investment in those companies.
What is similar to the dot com bubble though is many "smaller" companies (i.e. not Google or Meta) are buying into AI as an investment into infrastructure for their company, just like was happening with useless websites during the dot com bubble.
I have no proof, but I feel like the AI push and Turnip getting re-elected and his regression of the EPA rules sounds like this whole AI thing was an excuse to burn more fossil fuels.
If I was invested in AI, and considering AI's thirst for electricity, I would absolutely make a similar investment in energy. That way, as the AI server farms suck up the electricity I would get at least some of that money back from the energy market.
Bubbles burst, who would have thought.
Does this mean they'll invest the money in paying workers? No... they're just have to double down.
he'll yeah, lose money you fuckers
Reading the article, the conclusions seem to line up with what I experience. Namely the part where it says that individual users found a productivity boost.
At my company, we have a bunch of AI based tools set up, and it's impressive how much of the time consuming, boring, burnout-inducing gruntwork I can offload to the robots, and instead spend more of my working hours working on things I actually want to work on.
And we also deploy things like AI search for internal knowledge bases. Being able to quickly get the information you need to complete your job, especially if that information is related to sales is definitely good for business, but I'm not even sure how you'd measure that in terms of "profit".
As programmer. It’s helping my productivity. And look I am SDET in theory I will be the first to go, and I tried to make an agent doing most of my job, but it always things to correct.
But programming requires a lot of boilerplate code, using an agent to make boilerplate files so I can correct and adjust is speeding up a lot what I do.
I don’t think I can replaced so far, but my team is not looking to expand the team right now because we are doing more work.
Same here. I love it when Windsurf corrects nested syntax that's always a pain, or when I need it to refactor six similar functions into one, or write trivial tests and basic regex. It's so incredibly handy when it works right.
Sadly other times it cheats and does the lazy thing. Like when I ask it to write me an object, but chooses to derive it from the one I'm trying to rework. That's when I ask it to move and I do it myself.
AI is not needed for any of the points you mentioned. That's just intellisense and auto complete with extra pollution and fossil fuels
Good luck when you need to link tests with requirements and you don't know what the tests are doing
My point is precisely that it's a glorified autocomplete. And who says I don't know what trivial tests do? They're trivial, repetitive, and my time is more precious. But you got a point about fossil fuels. Tbh, I don't even drive, travel, eat red meat, or have kids. That's almost my entire carbon footprint right there, and in comparison with everyone else, I'm doing ok.
But I will say that you're like the fourth person this week who not only fails to understand what I wrote, but also doesn't bother to ask clarifying questions before attacking, and then assumes things about something I never said. You literally don't need to be hostile when disagreeing with anyone.
Yes your point completely went above my head. Sorry for that.
Hey, not attacking or being hostile really (at least on purpose), sorry if it came that way. It was more of. Tongue in cheek type of comment
We're now at the "if you don't, your competitor will". So you really have no choice. There are people that don't use Google anymore and just use chatgpt for all questions.
Does anybody have the original study? I tried to find it but the link is dead ( looks like NANDA pulled it )
Good
hello, welcome to taco bell, i am your new ai order specialist. would you like to try a combo of the new dorito blast mtw dew crunchwrap?
spoken at a rate of 5 words a minute to every single person in the drive thru. the old people have no idea how to order with a computer using key words.
Pets.com all over again
Yeah. No shit. wtf did they think was gonna generate returns? They wanna run ads in the middle if responses?
I'm not sure they were expecting returns. Just afraid that if other companies had AI, they might lose business to them. Except of course a lot of people (or at least I) avoid anything with AI and mistrust its results.
Nice
It's not about return it's about addiction. Companies that invest in AI have money.
Losing money is a called going into debt, not just zero returns.
Return? /s
30-40 billion USD in total worldwide over three years seems very little compared to the massive expenditures by the AI companies to build the things?
The link in the article to the MIT report doesn't directly link to any report. I wouldn't trust this article until the report is accessible and verifiable.
Douse it with gasoline. Burn it with fire.
It is how its done today.
Every semi-big or big corpos gamble their money trying to be the one coming on top and capture the market.
So it is not surprising to see that.
Every technology invented is a dual edge sword. Other edge propulses deluge of misinformation, llm hallucinations, brain washing of the masses, and exploit exploit for profit. The better side advances progress in science, well being, availbility of useful knowledge. Like the nuclerbomb, LLM "ai" is currenty in its infancy and is used as a weapon, there is a literal race to who makes the "biggest best" fkn "AI" to dominate the world. Eventually, the over optimistic buble bursts and reality of the flaws and risks will kick in. (Hopefully...)
For me that aren't good with scripting AI can actually fill a educational role. Or at least point me in correct direction so I can complete the rest myself.
I feel like we could find ways and tools to help in that situation without stealing the entirety of human knowledge, boiling our planet, and spending a small nation's GDP. Like better code library discovery or a better mentor environment amongst coders.
I've also seen plenty of people get pointed in the exact wrong way to do things by leaning on generative AI and then have to spend even more time getting back on track.
MANY companies aren’t profitable for several years. The one I work at wasn’t for 2 decades. It’s a long game.
AI Spend,
It's okay to say [spending] when the OOP forgets how to English, right?
I would argue we have seen return. Documentation is easier. Tools for PDF, Markdown have increased in efficacy. Coding alone has lowered the barrier to bringing building blocks and some understanding to the masses. If we could hitch this with trusted and solid LLM data, it makes a lot of things easier for many people. Translation is another.
I find it very hard to believe 95% got ZERO benefit. We’re still benefiting and it’s forcing a lot of change (in the real world). Example, more power use? More renewable energy, and even (yes safe) nuclear is expanding. Energy storage is next.
These ‘AI’ (broadly used) tools will also get better and improve the interface between physical and digital. This will become ubiquitous, and we’ll forget we couldn’t just ‘talk’ to computers so easily.
I’ll end with, I don’t say ‘AI’ is an overblown and overused and overutilized buzzword everywhere these days. I can’t say about bubbles and shit either. But what I see is a lot of smart people making LLMs and related technologies more efficient, more powerful, and is trickling into many areas of software alone. It’s easier to review code, participate, etc. Literal papers are published constantly about how they find new and better and more efficient ways to do things.
Documentation is easier. Tools for PDF, Markdown have increased in efficacy. Coding alone has lowered the barrier to bringing building blocks and some understanding to the masses.
I have seen none of these, in practice.
The documentation generated is no better than what a level 1 support rep creates, and needs to be heavily fixed before being relied on.
Pandoc still produces PDFs, Markdown, etc just as quickly as it always has.
The code produced still has the same issues as documentation: it's shite, and not easily bug fixed due to a lack of understanding by anyone with what its actually doing. And, if you need someone who understand the code already to bugfix it, guess what? You didn't save anyone anything.
And, all of this, only using terrawatts more electricity than before, with equivalent or worse outcomes.
OCR was more my thinking, not Pandoc. LLMs enable OCR to achieve greater accuracy through context enhancement for example.
That sounds like one of those rare appropriate use cases.
Documentation is easier.
For the love of all things good and pure, do not use LLMs to make your documentation.
Well written response. There is an undeniable huge improvement to LLMs over the last few years, and that already has many applications in day to day life, workplace and whatnot.
From writing complicated Excel formulas, proofreading, and providing me with quick, straightforward recipes based on what I have at hand, AI assistants are already sold on me.
That being said, take a good look between the type of responses here -an open source space with barely any shills or astroturfers (or so I'd like to believe) - and compare them to the myriad of Reddit posts that questioned the same thing on subs like r/singularity and whatnot. It's anecdotal evidence of course, but the amount of BS answers saying "AI IS GONNA DOMINATE SOON" ; "NEXT YEAR NOBODY WILL HAVE A JOB", "THIS IS THE FUTURE" etc. is staggering. From doomsayers to people who are paid to disseminate this type of shit, this is ONE of the things that mainly leads me to think we are in a bubble. The same thing happened/ is happening to crypto over the last 10 years. Too much money being inserted by billionaire whales into a specific subject, and in years they are able to convince the general population that EVERYBODY and their mother is missing out a lot if they don't start using "X".
providing me with quick, straightforward recipes based on what I have at hand,
Ah yes, the wonderful recipes AI generates. Like Pizza made with glue!
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-glue-pizza-i-tried-it-2024-5
You know what else generates quick, straightfoward recipes based on what I have on hand?
My brain. I open fridge, and freezer, and then decide what to make. Usually takes less than a minute to figure something out.
Not sure if I am following the sarcasm, I made it very clear I think AI's purpose is hyperinflated, and it is a bubble as well, I was just saying it is not completely useless.
IT does give a LOT of false information, but for simple stuff it saves time, that I will not deny.
Oh, it's not completely useless. If you need something that makes gibberish that sounds real for ad copy, I'm sure its fine for that.
And, while it may save me, a higher level person some time to produce a document... the cost for the production (Due to the electricity required, and other compute resources, which require all their own people to maintain) outstrips the time saved, when I could have handed the job to a level 1 support person, since I still need to review it and correct it for accuracy.
Excel still struggles with correct formula suggestions. Basic #REF errors when the cell above and below in the table function just fine. The ever present, this data is a formula error when there is no longer a formula in the entire column.
And searching, just like its predecessor the google algo, gives you useless suggestions if anything remotely fashionable uses the scientific name too.
Emerging technology always loses money in the first few years. Sometimes for a decade or so. This isn’t new.
AI isn't "emerging." The industry is new, but we've had neural networks for decades. They've been regularly in use for things like autocorrect and image classification since before the iPhone. Google upgraded Google Translate to use a GPT in 2016 (9 years ago). What's "emerging" now is just marketing and branding, and trying to shove it into form factors and workloads that it's not well suited to. Maybe some slightly quicker iteration due to the unreasonable amount of money being thrown at it.
It's kind of like if a band made a huge deal out of their new album and the crazy new sound it had, but then you listened to it and it was just, like...disco? And disco is fine, but...by itself it's definitely not anything to write home about in 2025. And then a whole bunch of other bands were like, "yeah, we do disco too!" And some of them were ok at it, and most were definitely not, but they were all trying to fit disco into songs that really shouldn't have been disco. And every time someone was like, "I kinda don't want to listen to disco right now," a band manager said "shut up yes you do."
If you really want to be reductionist, it’s just electricity being fed through silicon. Everything is. Just 1’s and 0’s repackaged over & over!
But it shows a significant lack of insight and understanding. Guess you can make a ton of money with puts on all these companies, with that kinda confidence.
Please let me know what major breakthrough has happened recently in the machine leaning field, since you're such an expert. Throwing more GPUs at it? Throwing even more GPUs at it? About the best thing I can come up with is "using approximately the full text of the Internet as training data," but that's not a technical advancement, it's a financial one.
Applying tensors to ML happened in 2001. Switching to GPUs for deep learning happened in 2004. RNNs/CNNs was 2010-ish. Seq2seq and GAN were in 2014. "Attention is All You Need" came out in 2017; that's the absolute closest to a breakthrough that I can think of, but even that was just an architecture from 2014 with some comparatively minor tweaks.
No, the only major new breakthrough I can see over the past decade or so has been the influx of money.
Then sell your services as a consultant to these businesses, and let them know it’s not actually doing anything different. Let the researchers know that Ai cant possibly be finding cancer at better rates than humans, because nothing’s changed.
Let the world know they fell for it, setup puts against the companies, and make bank.
Are you trying to claim that the fact that there's lots of money flowing to these AI companies is proof that AI isn't just a bubble caused by money flowing to these AI companies?
I’m saying, if you’re so confident it’s a bubble, why don’t you bet your life savings on it?
First of all, because it doesn't matter whether it's actually real or not, investment doesn't actually follow innovation. The actual value of a company or idea has almost nothing to do with its valuation.
But more importantly, why do you think that's the important part of this conversation? I'm not talking about its long term viability. Neither were you. You were just saying that it was a new innovation and still had to mature. I was saying that it was actually a much older technology that already matured, and which is being given an artificial new round of funding because of good marketing.
So are you alleging the studies, like the ones showing AI is vastly superior at identifying cancer in patients, are fabricated?
I'm saying they can only do it because the big innovation was "throw more money at it." Yes, given a functionally infinite amount of hardware, electricity, legal free reign, and publicity, I could invent a machine that does at least one (1) impressive thing, too.
Remember, these models weren't created to identify cancer in patients better than humans. They were created to do everything better than humans. And the fact that they are mediocre at everything except identifying cancer in patients (and a handful of other things) means that they're failing at 99.997% of their goal.
That doesn't mean that it's innovative, or a breakthrough technology that deserves time to mature. It just means that you get more swings at the law of averages if you have a lot of money.
Such foresight.
Who said anything about foresight? This is entirely historical. Thanks for actually reading anything I've said.