Surprise!

Isn't this true of like everything AI right now?

We're in the "grow a locked-in user base" part of their rollout. We'll hit the "make money" part in a year or two, and then the enshittification machine will kick into high gear.

Yeah, this has been reported on multiple analysis over time. Until something in the hardware space changes, it’s gonna be an unprofitable business.

That’s the usual business plan. However, people don’t really like ai. The results aren’t great, so, if they jack up the price, people will likely cancel. The lock in is poor as the product and convenience is poor. It doesn’t really save money as promised.

Original predictions had AI taking over 50% of jobs by mid decade. We're here, and it obviously hasn't happened.
Now, it WILL happen but not on the scale initially imagined, and probably in a much more insidious, gradual way.

The usual business plan is to reinvest all earnings into growth. So you're losing money, but gaining market share. Tesla, Amazon, etc all did this. They could stop at any point and turn a profit, but they chose to pursue a growth instead.

AI companies are currently not making enough revenue to even cover their operating costs. Even so, they are pouring all of their money into more video cards that, once installed and configured, immediately start losing money.

Are you sure that "people don't really like AI", or is it more "the people here in my self-selected online bubble don't really like AI?"

But they make it up on volume!

Well, just keep pumping in the billions until the bubble bursts and we can look for the next fad, to do it all over again, right?

However, people don’t really like ai.

Whether they like it or not, doesn't really matter. It's being used everywhere.

The results aren’t great

Depends. To get information: No. To write big software: No. To write an Excel macro or a browser bookmarklet: Yes.

Yes, but that's not taking over jobs. It's a minor convenience occasionally. That won't justify monthly.pricing they need to turn profitable, not will it have the wide range of applications for.every industry that they hoped for.

We’re in the “grow a locked-in user base” part of their rollout.

An attempt at that. It will be partially successful but with AI accelerators coming to more and more consumer hardware, the hurdles of self-hosting get lower and lower.

I have no clue how to set up an LLM server but installing https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-tools is easily done with a few mouse clicks. The Krita plugin handles all the background tasks.

When this bubble eventually bursts, and it will, the economic fallout is going to be catastrophic.

Have i done surveys, no. Have I seen the percent that subscribe, yes. I can only talk from my experience of my bubble. However, it bears up to the finances and the criticisms I've seen.

People like the idea and like that or can be a time saver for things like writing an email or resume etc. Managers like that it is purported to save money. The reality seems to be that it doesn't, or at least doesn't save much, based on studies.

I know people who love it and use it at work all the time for research with reference to internal info. I know people for whom it's banned and they need to document that ai was not used.

I know parents that use it when doing projects with their kids to save time but they worry that it circumvents the point of the project.

I don't know anyone that subscribes personally. From my perspective, most companies seem to be pushing very hard to get users. If their product was great, they wouldn't need to. There is no network effect like with recem fast spreading tech.

I should have phrases better. People don't like ai enough to pay for it and it's costly to run.

Ha, anyone DOSing them with constant compute requests? I read an article where a 200$ a month user was using tens of thousands of dollars of compute.

You're right we are in an anti ai bubble ( we all remember THE CLOUDDDDD buzzword companies wouldn't shut the hell up about, and that was an objectively far better service than Ai is) however, I can't name anyone in the company I work for thats had llms revolutionize their job. It helps summarize (badly) and help with excel formulas (does ok if you know what you're doing). Plus, our clients dont pay us to use a shitty half ass llm, they expect actual intelligent humans to do the work correctly.

I also won't buy from any company blatantly using llms in their products. They're good at hiding it. But I will notice.

I have an idea guys what about like a big cloud we can put all our data in ?? Guys CLOUD. ITS SO GENIUS. CLOUD.

This ai shit is the exact same thing (also it isn't ai. And I hate that we keep calling it that. )

Why do you think it will happen? Who were those "predictions" from? I'm guessing CEOs of "AI" companies AKA serial liars.

It's interesting that the media sites that historically steered clear of economics are starting to talk about it (this is not a new revelation)