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95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds

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  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    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.

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    Does this mean they'll invest the money in paying workers? No... they're just have to double down.

  • 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).

  • 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.

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    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

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    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?

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    Yeah. No shit. wtf did they think was gonna generate returns? They wanna run ads in the middle if responses?

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    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

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    MANY companies aren’t profitable for several years. The one I work at wasn’t for 2 decades. It’s a long game.