We also don't know the true cost of these tools since most AI service providers are still operating at a loss.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Not simply operating at a loss, absolutely dumping their prices giving away their products for almost nothing to gain market share. They are burning money at an impressive rate, just for some imaginary payoff in the future.
A future where we don't have jobs so the rich can make more money by selling us stuff? But I won't have money to pay for stuff! Hmmm!
All MBAs and CEOs are like puppies chasing their own tails.
They want the growth because number go up good. They’ll do anything for number go up. And when number go up, they get the good and then they need to focus on next number go up.
They have no long term plan other than number go up. For the next few quarters, they can slap AI on anything and number go up. What happens if AI takes all the non manual labor jobs? Or if it turns out AI is useless and they wasted billions on snake oil? They don’t know, cause they were thinking about number go up right now, not number go up later.
Our economy is a farce.
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The real reason is they want enough money pumped into AI so someone can automate fascism.
That's seriously the plan
Fucking clown world
And, in doing so, they've set the market price at that value for the service they advertise, which is more than they deliver already.
When Ai enters the Valley of Discontent, the price it can set for what it actually offers will be even less than it is now.
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They are sucking up our power supply at a furious pace though.
This is happening at my company. They gave us 6 months to build an AI-tool to replace a non-AI tool that has been very well built and tested for 6 years, and works perfectly well. The AI tool has some very amazing features, but it could never replace the good old tool.
The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.
The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.
AI in a nutshell.
A shame, because the underlying technology - with time and patience and less of an eye towards short term profits - could be very useful in sifting large amounts of disorganized information. But what we got was so far removed from what anyone asked for.
A narrow purpose AI trained to recognize tumor growths early is the kind of AI that makes sense to me.
As an enhancement to an existing suite of diagnostic tools, certainly.
Not as a stand in for an oncology department, though.
As an assist to an actual oncologist, only.
I can see AI as a tool in some contexts, doing some specific tasks better than an unassisted person.
But as a replacement for people, AI is a dud. I would rather be alone than have a gf AI. And yes I am taking trauma and personal+cultural baggage into account. LLM is also a product of our culture for the most part, so will have our baggage anyway. But at least in principle it could be trained to not have certain kinds of baggage, and still, I would rather deal with a person save for the simplest and lowest stake interactions.
If we want better people, we need to enfranchise them and remove most paywalls from the world. Right now the world instead of being inviting is bristling with physical, cultural, and virtual fences, saying to us, "you don't belong and aren't welcome in 99.99% of the space, and the other 0.01% will cost you." Housing for now is only a privelege. In a world like that it's a miracle the people are as decent as they are. If we want better people we have to delibarately, on purpose, choose broadbased human flourishing as a policy objective, and be ruthless to any enemies of said objective. No amnesty for the billionaires and wannabe billionaires. Instead they are trying to shove down our throats AI/LLMs and virtual worlds as replacements for an actually decent and inviting world.
Capitalism strikes again! All the good generative AI could and does sometimes do but some capitalist made an email sound less like a soulless, corporate turd and it was to the moon with whatever state the tech was at! Rich people have no creativity, imagination, or understanding of the tech. They're always looking for ways to remove labor costs and make those phat stacks! We could have used generative AI to handle a lot of the shitty, mundane stuff at a faster rate, but no they chose to replace the artists' creations so they didn't have to pay for the cost of labor.
Management was planning implementing Google Vertex (AI search platform), but since we already have all our data in ElasticSearch and it supports vectors, I said why not try to implement it myself. With integrated GPU and a very small model, I could create a working POC and it is gonna be - not overexaggerating - 50 times cheaper.
Don't tell management. Start a new company then sell them what you made.
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As a non native English speaker, I found the "pilot" thing a bit confusing. But:
pilot = pilot program
And then it made sense.
Anyways I think it's not so much the 95% that fail that matter, it's the 5% that succeed.
Anyways I think it’s not so much the 95% that fail that matter, it’s the 5% that succeed.
Succeeding in what is also a critical point.
Succeeding in dramatically improving the library sciences? In rapidly sequencing and modeling data in chemistry or biology? In language translation? Cool. Cool. Cool.
Succeeding in slop-ifying mass media? In convincingly fabricating data to dupe industry professionals and regulatory officials? In jamming up my phone with automated sales calls? Less cool.
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I hate when they make these "holographic screen" images and the screen isn't mirrored. If the guy that's working on it is looking at it normally, then it should be mirrored for the camera.
This is so mildy pedantic it's adorable lol
It's actually a really good representation of how execs are viewing AI. It's a bunch of meaningless graphs and pictures of robots with the word 'AI' sprinkled over the place, the whole thing is backwards for the worker, and it's imaginary.
this article is itself a synecdoche of shitty management? oh, the irony!
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Well now I can’t unsee that. Thanks for ruining my day 🤣
for example, “have seen revenues jump from zero to $20 million in a year,” he said. “It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” he added.
Sounds like they were able to sell their AI services. That doesn't really measure AI success, only product market success.
Celebrating a revenue jump from zero, presumably because they did not exist before, is… quite surprising. It's not like they became more efficient thanks to AI.
Makes a planet burning bullshit machine.
Does not have any monetization plans.
"I'm telling you guys, it's only a matter of time before investor money starts rolling in"
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It depends on the objectives. They were successful at selling useless crap to fools.
Frankly, I don't believe that even 5% werre successful by any objective criteria.
That's on par with all start-ups
Good.
Perish.
All work with AI has to be double checked. It only works on the first try in the simplest of cases. Even then I need it to run through a few iterations to get the code features I want. You still have to be able to run through the code and understand it regardless of the source.
I can't help but laugh at the note about small start ups lead by 19-20 YOs succeeding with millions of dollars by 'partnering well' and so on.
The success or failure of these AI companies seems almost entirely driven by the amount of Venture Capital thrown at them. A company like Perplexity, with practically zero product, having been formed less than 5 years ago, but being able to put up $35 billion in an offer to buy google chrome... I can't help but suspect that a big part of it is google handing perplexity a pile of money via "Venture Capitalist" screens, to help offload Chrome to mitigate their regulatory monopoly problems. But whatever the details, them having that pile of money is sure as shit not a matter of having a good product / partnering with other industries well.
I hope you're all keeping some money set aside for when the LLM bubble pops. It could end up being the best time to invest at a discount since March 2020.
When Trump got elected I sold some of my stocks. My investments are also my retirement funds, so I don't need them for a while. I'm waiting until the next crash starts, or something else that's pretty bad (war, rogue AI, whatever). If the market crashes I can immediately step in.
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I have trouble just connecting to copilot many days.
Good
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