Outside Nvidia. The shovel users are not making money.

The AI revolution has achieved something truly unprecedented: billions in spending, endless executive keynotes, and no measurable payoff for most businesses. Apparently the killer app was convincing CEOs to transfer their budgets to seven tech companies: »Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493.«

AI only feels like it boosts productivity because it kicks the can down the road and makes it somebody else's job to clean it up.

You saved time generating your work email? Now I spend time translating what it's actually supposed to say because half of it is irrelevant garbage.

You saved time generating your event poster? Now I spend time recreating it (because you've anchored on that version), or painstakingly editing out all the incorrect notation.

You saved time generating your logo? No there's no way to 'clean it up', the anatomy and structure makes no physical sense. So I have to recreate it from scratch anyway.

You saved time automating this spreadsheet? It's not arranged in an importable format and now i have to spend time breaking down all the arbitrarily merged cells so I can even use it. My computer freezes twice under the load of processing excess garbage data.

You only think AI saves time because it's wasting somebody else's.

In other news,

SHOCKING! Economically critical demographic of CEOs FAIL reverse turing test! You'll never guess who...

Professional grifter finds new grift not sufficiently contributing to grift counter.

record numbers of “how do i connect to localhost from my friend’s laptop” and useless dashboards your devs were too busy to make, tho

I'd argue that most tech companies aren't actually seeing benefit matching what they've wasted ineffectively

Let’s not forget the endgame of decimating home computing.

Big tech isn't exactly winning either. Over $194 billion spent with mere millions in ROI thus far.

To be fair, it did pay off in boats and vacation homes for a whole generation of salesmen.

They were so happy to throw hardworking people onto the street in favour of AI because they were hoping for quick easy money and unless they start to grovel in front of pedo in the WH to save them with a bailout most of them will be declaring bankruptcy soon, but that might have been the plan all along so they can be bought cheap.

Inside the tech industry, the company with the biggest payoff in this is NVIDIA. With another smaller payoff for AMD. That's about it.

It's like a gold rush for fool's gold. The only ones making money are the guys selling shovels.

I don’t know.

I know Dev teams right now that have gone full AI slop programming and their PMs and Customers see it as insane productivity to the point that they have so much work coming in they can’t stop using AI now.

Do they agree the codebase is in utter shambles? Yes. Do they think it’s fixable? Yes. Do they think they have the time to fix it? Nope.

They’re all just buying time waiting for it to break. The sad part is some of them are sipping the AI koolaid so hard they say they’ll just let the AI fix it when it breaks.

I mean literally just yesterday one of the senior devs was bragging in the cube next to me that he just did 3 months of work in 5 minutes with AI.

Most of these AI sippers are old dudes who are one foot into retirement and instead of coding they want to yap about their golf club set all day.

As a younger dev and a person who loves to code it makes my heart hurt listening to the AI slop bragging.

Yea no shit. How could anyone have foreseen this!?

AI feels at home in Bash. Corporate office work is mouse shoveling and email back and forth. Its a long way to get there.

Productivity is a collective achievement. AI in its current form increases individual output (not necessarily good output) without any way to support consensus, alignment, understanding, etc. Without AI supported collaboration, AI supported individual productivity makes everything go very fast in every direction. Like an explosion.

It's a good thing those invasive advertisers are currently covering everybody's losses. Fuck invasive ads, especially Tide!

It's even funnier when consumers adopt AI agents to get refunds, move money around to high yield accounts, find deals and coupons and companies panic when it works.

With the recent reverse engineering achievements, rather than zero financial payoff, it might be even be negative for the gaming sector in particular.

It would require further development of AI before it can automate physical factories. There are assorted species of critters that cannot be mass-slaughtered, because they require surgical cuts to remove bones or work around tough parts. An sufficiently advanced AI can X-ray and measure the carcass, then carve up the beast with minimal waste.

Of course, this would be very expensive, requiring entirely new infrastructure and procedures to implement. I suspect that the transition to industrial-application of AI would be slow - then sudden, after testbed factories prove the viability of AI automated workflows.

Why don't we eat alligators?

Productivity isn't where most businesses are going to strike pay dirt. They're going to get their value in processing information and in prototyping ideas/products/solutions before actually physically making them.

So the article may be absolutely true and completely missing the point.

I don't believe this at all, the way it works is not completely direct, but through productivity gains that are harder to measure.