9 ms·

The industries AI is disrupting are not lucrative

74 points by snewman 3y ago

somewhereoutth 3y ago
The next AI winter is going to be savage, especially with the backdrop of normal (i.e. non-ZIRP) interest rates. Possibly AI might be seen as the 'hubris most high' of the current tech bubble, with a correspondingly deep societal 'come down'. The painstaking, boring, and lucrative work of 'wiring the world' will continue of course, but perhaps with less fanfare.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  it's going to be used for all the wrong industries it's already been tried. hiring process, referral to criminal sentencing, spam... and it'll be global. the bias will be baked in
- freetonik 3y ago
  I always wondered if those software-based technological bubbles (and I’m not necessarily agreeing that LLM-based AI is one of them) are doing so much harm to the overall progress of software, that we need at some point to explicitly identify it as a risk to the whole industry and the professional community. Imagining the possible negative effects of any sort of bubble burst in the area of AI while also understanding the true potential of the underlying technology is a painful realisation. “We could’ve done so much”-kinda feeling. Maybe I’m just too pessimistic.
  - wddkcs 3y ago
    Preventing these bubbles assumes a level of foresight that doesn't seem feasible- besides a general limitor on any and all potential advancements, there is no possible way to know which technologies wil substantively deliver against their promises.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      The software doesn't cause bubbles, the "eat the world" model causes bubbles. When everyone is trying to capture the entire pie, it creates this constant, industry-wide FOMO. Like when Spotify decided that podcasts were going to be big, Amazon felt like they couldn't miss out on it. So Spotify signed Rogan, Amazon signed My Favorite Murder, etc. And they bid up the price on each other and now Spotify is in hot water because the economics don't make sense at the ridiculous valuations they FOMO'd themselves into. I don't pretend to know what a solution would be, but it's not like we have to choose between bubbles and innovative companies; bubbles are about how things are financed, and not about the things themselves. The horticulture industry is doing fine and controlled environment agriculture continues to innovate, without bidding up the price of tulips to something insane. I know it's hard to imagine (and I don't mean to be patronizing, I have trouble imagining it), but we could have a software industry that wasn't predicated on selling dollars for dimes until you've developed a monopoly and can charge high rents.
      - wddkcs 3y ago
        Can we really? Where's an exostant model for it?
        maxbond 3y ago
        Virtually any other business model. You make something people want to pay for, and then you charge a price that compensates you for your costs plus a margin determined by your negotiating power. This doesn't produce eye popping returns, but it does produce financially sustainable companies. Operating at a huge loss for a very long time in the hopes of capturing the entirety of a market is not the norm overall. I know it can feel that way from inside our industry, but that's our cultural biases showing. I'd like to stress that that's an observation and not a criticism, and that I don't mean bias in the pejorative sense.
    - zcw100 3y ago
      That reminds me to go back and watch some old episodes of Connections by James Burke. He does a great job of showing the unpredictable and non-linear path of progress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Slomotonoto 3y ago
  Why? Ai already makes money. My company is paying for GitHub copilot. I'm paying for chatgpt. I'm seeing more and more news article with images generated from ai. The demos for integration I have seen, work. Every company which is right now learning how to leverage ai will be able to pivot and already have necessary things in place like a company, people, base infrastructure. And the research is still super hot.
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    I think the issue is that, per the article, even if it works it might only provide marginal value. So copilot may indeed be useful to you/your company, but perhaps, once all the bean counting has been worked out, not useful enough to justify the stratospheric valuations.
    - chii 3y ago
      > not useful enough to justify the stratospheric valuations. but why is that a concern for anyone else but the shareholders?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - meheleventyone 3y ago
        Enshittification as a result, cost increases and so on.
  - krater23 3y ago
    The question is, how much do you pay and how much do you spare with it? Your company pays for GitHub Copilot, ok, but how many programmers are fired after they pay for it? Or does it have a meassurable effect at all? If not, this is a nice toy that will be removed soon. The news articles have generated images because they are cheaper than buying some stock photos. But stock fotos are still cheap.
    - 3y ago
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  You really think there's gonna be an AI winter? Is that based on the assumption that LLM's will plateau? Do you believe AGI is never coming, at least in the next 10-20 years? I think your view represents something I see a lot on this site. A bearish cynicism at AI progess, an assumption that it's all just a hype cycle, comparing it to crypto and NFT's and a confident assurance of the momentum of the status quo which will return when the "hype" dissipates. What specific capabilities of LLM's and AI models would convince you that this is a sea change beyond the normal hype and boom bust cycles of the tech world?
  - paganel 3y ago
    The exact same discourse was being said by blockchain (so, no NFTs) people around 8-10 years ago. We were also just 5 years away from getting autonomous vehicles around 2016-2017, we haven’t.
    - atleastoptimal 3y ago
      We have autonomous vehicles right now in San Francisco. I understand the blockchain-AI comparisons, but there are a few significant differences: 1. AI has proven to be much more useful in the real world 2. There are more highly respected experts anticipating transformative impacts of AI in comparison to blockchain 3. AI has a much lower scam/real product ratio than blockchain
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      2012. We were sold the 5 year story in 2012 first.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        In 2009, I thought (and told my friends that I thought) they were 10 years away.
    - two_in_one 3y ago
      The difference is LLMs are here to stay. They are already very useful and efficient. There is no turn around. Even if current state is the dead end of their evolution. Which it isn't, of course. The future.. there are so many ideas in the air right now that we can expect significant progress in next months and years. There will be fluctuations with bubbles and bursts, but that's how economics works. I expect slow approximation to AGI with increasing capabilities different products will claim to be it. First generations will be just very capable lifeless calculators. Subhuman in general with some superhuman abilities, like LLMs are today. When they will be able to improve themself, so called singularity? We are getting closer. Likely those will be still calculators which can be turned on/off at any moment.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  AI is here, now, and OpenAI is so saturated they had to cancel new customers. While the hype is real, so are the benefits. This feels more like the Internet in 1998 - there is a bubble forming and it may burst, but it is not like we got back to the Way Things Were after. Some sectors like (physical) mail continued their decline and others (like Google) continued to grow. The reason the previous AI winters were winters were that the AI didn't bring any benefits.
bcon 3y ago
> What limits AI creation is not base creation but creating things that satisfy people. And determining what will satisfy people is much more the domain of influencers than AI, and this sounds like jobs that filter AI outputs for market success. https://benconrad.net/posts/230610_influencingScarcity/ https://benconrad.net/posts/230610_influencingScarcity/
gp 3y ago
I believe it was Clayton Christenson who pointed out that disruptors took the lowest value activities first.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  I don’t believe that’s a law of nature - honestly it doesn’t even make sense. Disrupters disrupt what they can, what yields them the most profit.
  - jdlshore 3y ago
    Christenson is the one who coined the term “disruptive innovation,” and he gave it a precise definition. That definition includes taking on low-value markets and gradually expanding into more lucrative, higher-value markets. The established players flee upmarket, ironically making some of their best profits as they do, and are eventually squeezed out entirely.
gpsx 3y ago
One of the biggest impacts of LLMs right now is probably in programming. The article says that the only thing LLMs are doing is replacing stack overflow (and hence the value is the value of stack overflow). While it's true it does replace the need for stack overflow in many cases, what it is doing is making programmers much more productive. How much? I don't know. But the value is not that we don't need stack overflow, it is that we don't need as many programmers.
- dark_star 3y ago
  > But the value is not that we don't need stack overflow, it is that we don't need as many programmers. I'll believe that when I see it. I lead a team of AI-boosted developers, I'm hiring as fast as I can, and all my company wants out of them is more and more. If they have 2x, 3x, or 10x output, the company can and will use it all.
  - gpsx 3y ago
    Yes, I should have said we don't need as many programmers to do the same thing. As you say, companies will take advantage of being able to do more, and then there will hopefully be more software needed to leverage the capabiliies of the new AI agents.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    So, "output" is the only metric your company uses? And it has an unlimited appetite for "output?" I work with an "AI-boosted" developer. He would be a 10x better developer if he stopped querying the chatbot and started reading basic documentation. We'd have a lot less spaghetti in "his?" codebase. Where do you work? Maybe we can solve each others problem?
    - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
      This is my experience with a colleague of mine as well. He is talking to chatgpt and trying to get working solution from it instead of sitting down and putting puzzle pieces together from documentation. He would have been already done with the work if he would stop sieving through AI generated garbage.
wmf 3y ago
This tangentially reminds me of the classic "Content is Not King": https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/833/742 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/833/74... It has a lot of cultural value, but art in its many forms is worth less than tech.
- golergka 3y ago
  > the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access Oof.
- zemvpferreira 3y ago
  Seems to me like that article was spectacularly wrong, no? Or would we classify aggregators like Google/Facebook/TikTok as communication? They sit in the middle, really, and capture the whole pie. Kudos to the author for arguing his thesis so well anyway.
  - wmf 3y ago
    I would mostly classify social media as communication. The lines have been blurred somewhat by the rise of professional influencers.
golergka 3y ago
> what is the market for personal assistants? What’s the market for butlers? Most people have neither of those things Most people didn’t have cars, telephones or televisions when they were introduced either.
midnitewarrior 3y ago
Those markets are the current low-hanging fruit. That is the proving ground for gaining the experience necessary to refine the technology to move up market into more lucrative industries.
petra 3y ago
1. What about customer service ? It's a large industry globally. LLMs are a good fit. 2. He measures the impact of chatGpt on writing and editing freelance jobs 5 months after chatGpt's release.it was relatively small. That is probably just impatience.
- jpc0 3y ago
  > What about customer service ? It's a large industry globally. LLMs are a good fit. LLMs are probably an ok fit for first line customer service that deals with menial queries from users who just don't know how to use the product at all. For actually important customer service issues LLMs won't be useful. Effectively if a FAQ couldn't answer it for you an LLM wouldn't either. I know for sure if you give me LLM based customer service I'm going to stop being a customer pretty quickly since I have 0 appetite for hallucinations when I have an actual problem with your product I need resolved.
  - petra 3y ago
    When building a customer service chatbot, retrieval augmented generation is most often used. It doesn't write sentences on their own but mostly find/combine paragraphs from given content, and offer links. That means they have low hallucination rate, maybe even approaching zero(but I'm not sure about that).
    - jpc0 3y ago
      And this is why I prefaced it's absolutely great for the first line. My issue is will the chatbot know that the thing I asked it cannot answer or is it going to keep spewing whatever it deems appropriate. Is it better than most humans, maybe, maybe not. I rarely contact customer support, asin once or twice in my life. The one time I got caught in autogenerated nonsense instead of getting to an actual human I started making plans to remove that company from my life. I'm yet to be convinced there is a way for an LLM to read what I complained about and being able to determine that request is above it's knowledge and needs to be escalated
- drewcoo 3y ago
fnordpiglet 3y ago
It’s fascinating how little people really understand how LLMs are impacting businesses. Almost any task that couldn’t be done because it was too expensive to hire thousands of humans to sift through things is being outsourced to LLMs. I find it remarkable that people don’t realize how amazing these things are at classification and structuring of complex stuff with some alacrity, often far superior to human agents. They scale arbitrarily, work 24x7, and have very low failure rates compared to poorly trained high turnover humans. They generally do a good job identifying when they can’t classify something and delegate to human review. Are they perfect? No, but they’re considerably less error prone than a staff of hundreds of humans. Is it lucrative? Absolutely. I’ve seen this now at five major megacorps and I have to believe it’s going on at most.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Like what
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Just imagining some random ideas here and the use case come instantly. Imagine you have a user feedback system that has thousands of submisisons and you want to know how many are talking about a particular feature. How many are speaking positively about the product, how many seem to be asking for support rather than asking for feedback. Being able to sort through thousands of items for basically free which would have been so laborious previously that you would not have done it. And its a use where a small amount of error does not matter.
  - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
    Construction business
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Lots of government contractors have junior analysts-type jobs whose work entails responding to government RFPs. I know of one specifically who found ChatGPT was great at these responses - it still took further human review and editing, but so did the initial human drafts. Just one example.
xivzgrev 3y ago
Author makes some fair points but not thinking about indirect monetization Suppose you have a marketplace app, making $1 billion per year. You integrate a shopping AI bot that improves customer LTV 10%, so now your sales are $1.1 billion, a $100m growth! (Numbers hypothetical) That’s just one app. Imagine that across many companies, use cases etc. So while AI didn’t capture the full thing, if it captures a piece of many things by expanding the pie it could be extremely lucrative The same argument was used for crypto actually - the difference is not so many people (in developed countries anyway) have need for microtransactions. Whereas lots of people have need for “microtasks” - things they want but are too expensive. Example: consider therapy appointments, could be $100s per appointment. How many more people would go to therapy if it were 10x cheaper? Or personal assistant - I would hire one right now if service were cheap & reliable Each market may not be huge on its own but across a lot of markets - it adds up
- berkes 3y ago
  But the point of the article is that there aren't "a lot of markets" to disrupt. Or, at least, that most of these are markets that have very small margins or profits.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I think that point is kinda wrong. Maybe there aren't a lot of markets for GPT-4 to disrupt, but that's not to say there aren't a lot of markets (and lucrative ones) for GPT-10 to disrupt. If we could jump straight to GPT-10, sure, that'd be great, but obviously getting there is an iterative process. Whether or not we'll get to a hypothetical GPT-10 (and beyond) is another question.
    - berkes 3y ago
      Why do you think that the GPT-10 solves the supply paradox of AI? And if it does, what markets are (combined) worth $80 billion (the valuation of just OpenAI) that can be taken over fully? Or with a multiple and taken over partially? And will that worth then get onto the bottom line of an AI company? The way I see it, e.g. copilot makes me worth more. Might even make me worth 10 developers. 100 by the time we have copilot 13.37. The net results, however is not that 99 developmers are without a job, nor that 99% of my income goes to copilot. But that the demand in software development increases 100x and I make even more (The Lump of labour fallacy). Yet the Copilots out there competing in a market that's running at a loss hoping for future profits.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Any evaluation of how AI is impacting business at this stage is too premature. ChatGPT is just a year old. Lots of people didn’t even get API access for months. Organizational structures and even tech teams simply haven’t caught up.
desert_rue 3y ago
The author isn’t thinking this through. Take the lawyer example. Yes, a lawyer will have to review all AI generated work. Even so, the AI generated content and work to revise would quickly be cheaper than any associate. With enough feedback and some specialization, AI will generate better work than associates out of law school. I can see a day where law schools don’t teach how to write briefs and other legal documents but instead teach how to review AI generated documentation instead. Law schools could have more emphasis on trial work or the like. That’s very disruptive.
kelnos 3y ago
I generally agree with this, but I think there are some issues with the reasoning: > What about AI personal assistants? Robot butlers? All those things! Even assuming all that comes true sometime over the next decades: what is the market for personal assistants? What’s the market for butlers? Most people have neither of those things. Sometimes making things dirt cheap means that people who couldn't afford them (or just didn't think the price was worth it) can now afford them. I don't have a personal assistant, and wouldn't think the cost of (a human) one would be justified, but if I could have a good AI personal assistant for a couple bucks a month, I might pay for that. Overall, though, the goal isn't GPT-4. The goal is AGI. If anyone can actually crack that, assuming it doesn't murder us all, perhaps it could cheaply replace jobs in roles and markets where it could be quite lucrative. Even if they can't crack AGI, maybe some future GPT-10 could be a suitable replacement for a lawyer in some contexts, for example. OP talks about how the legal profession has a bunch of structures and legalities that might make it hard to offer a robo-lawyer, but these things can change. Consider that Uber essentially broke all the laws around taxi (er, ahem, "rideshare") licensing, and they're all over the world now. Regardless, I'm still skeptical of AI's future. Not just in the realm of whether or not AGI is possible with current or near-future technology, but also in the realm of financing (will VCs get tired of waiting after a while and stop investing in it) or politics (will AI get legislated to the point of uselessness).
Havoc 3y ago
The point about low value activities rings true in isolation but I find it hard to reconcile this with the experience of using OpenAI chat. It does help with problems far more than just being a novelty That scaled to many people has economic value
James2233 3y ago
[dead]
oglop 3y ago
Publishing models is unreal. What is this person talking about? Take 2 hours and feed some pdf’s and take some time to build one and it’s amazing. You can abstract most of college away with these things. It’ll take years for the cultural force to die down, but I would have paid for this over college easily if given a choice.

74 points by snewman 3y ago

The next AI winter is going to be savage, especially with the backdrop of normal (i.e. non-ZIRP) interest rates. Possibly AI might be seen as the 'hubris most high' of the current tech bubble, with a correspondingly deep societal 'come down'. The painstaking, boring, and lucrative work of 'wiring the world' will continue of course, but perhaps with less fanfare.

cyanydeez 3y ago
it's going to be used for all the wrong industries it's already been tried. hiring process, referral to criminal sentencing, spam... and it'll be global. the bias will be baked in
freetonik 3y ago
I always wondered if those software-based technological bubbles (and I’m not necessarily agreeing that LLM-based AI is one of them) are doing so much harm to the overall progress of software, that we need at some point to explicitly identify it as a risk to the whole industry and the professional community. Imagining the possible negative effects of any sort of bubble burst in the area of AI while also understanding the true potential of the underlying technology is a painful realisation. “We could’ve done so much”-kinda feeling. Maybe I’m just too pessimistic.
- wddkcs 3y ago
  Preventing these bubbles assumes a level of foresight that doesn't seem feasible- besides a general limitor on any and all potential advancements, there is no possible way to know which technologies wil substantively deliver against their promises.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    The software doesn't cause bubbles, the "eat the world" model causes bubbles. When everyone is trying to capture the entire pie, it creates this constant, industry-wide FOMO. Like when Spotify decided that podcasts were going to be big, Amazon felt like they couldn't miss out on it. So Spotify signed Rogan, Amazon signed My Favorite Murder, etc. And they bid up the price on each other and now Spotify is in hot water because the economics don't make sense at the ridiculous valuations they FOMO'd themselves into. I don't pretend to know what a solution would be, but it's not like we have to choose between bubbles and innovative companies; bubbles are about how things are financed, and not about the things themselves. The horticulture industry is doing fine and controlled environment agriculture continues to innovate, without bidding up the price of tulips to something insane. I know it's hard to imagine (and I don't mean to be patronizing, I have trouble imagining it), but we could have a software industry that wasn't predicated on selling dollars for dimes until you've developed a monopoly and can charge high rents.
    - wddkcs 3y ago
      Can we really? Where's an exostant model for it?
      - maxbond 3y ago
        Virtually any other business model. You make something people want to pay for, and then you charge a price that compensates you for your costs plus a margin determined by your negotiating power. This doesn't produce eye popping returns, but it does produce financially sustainable companies. Operating at a huge loss for a very long time in the hopes of capturing the entirety of a market is not the norm overall. I know it can feel that way from inside our industry, but that's our cultural biases showing. I'd like to stress that that's an observation and not a criticism, and that I don't mean bias in the pejorative sense.
  - zcw100 3y ago
    That reminds me to go back and watch some old episodes of Connections by James Burke. He does a great job of showing the unpredictable and non-linear path of progress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Slomotonoto 3y ago
Why? Ai already makes money. My company is paying for GitHub copilot. I'm paying for chatgpt. I'm seeing more and more news article with images generated from ai. The demos for integration I have seen, work. Every company which is right now learning how to leverage ai will be able to pivot and already have necessary things in place like a company, people, base infrastructure. And the research is still super hot.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  I think the issue is that, per the article, even if it works it might only provide marginal value. So copilot may indeed be useful to you/your company, but perhaps, once all the bean counting has been worked out, not useful enough to justify the stratospheric valuations.
  - chii 3y ago
    > not useful enough to justify the stratospheric valuations. but why is that a concern for anyone else but the shareholders?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - meheleventyone 3y ago
      Enshittification as a result, cost increases and so on.
- krater23 3y ago
  The question is, how much do you pay and how much do you spare with it? Your company pays for GitHub Copilot, ok, but how many programmers are fired after they pay for it? Or does it have a meassurable effect at all? If not, this is a nice toy that will be removed soon. The news articles have generated images because they are cheaper than buying some stock photos. But stock fotos are still cheap.
  - 3y ago
atleastoptimal 3y ago
You really think there's gonna be an AI winter? Is that based on the assumption that LLM's will plateau? Do you believe AGI is never coming, at least in the next 10-20 years? I think your view represents something I see a lot on this site. A bearish cynicism at AI progess, an assumption that it's all just a hype cycle, comparing it to crypto and NFT's and a confident assurance of the momentum of the status quo which will return when the "hype" dissipates. What specific capabilities of LLM's and AI models would convince you that this is a sea change beyond the normal hype and boom bust cycles of the tech world?
- paganel 3y ago
  The exact same discourse was being said by blockchain (so, no NFTs) people around 8-10 years ago. We were also just 5 years away from getting autonomous vehicles around 2016-2017, we haven’t.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    We have autonomous vehicles right now in San Francisco. I understand the blockchain-AI comparisons, but there are a few significant differences: 1. AI has proven to be much more useful in the real world 2. There are more highly respected experts anticipating transformative impacts of AI in comparison to blockchain 3. AI has a much lower scam/real product ratio than blockchain
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    2012. We were sold the 5 year story in 2012 first.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      In 2009, I thought (and told my friends that I thought) they were 10 years away.
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    The difference is LLMs are here to stay. They are already very useful and efficient. There is no turn around. Even if current state is the dead end of their evolution. Which it isn't, of course. The future.. there are so many ideas in the air right now that we can expect significant progress in next months and years. There will be fluctuations with bubbles and bursts, but that's how economics works. I expect slow approximation to AGI with increasing capabilities different products will claim to be it. First generations will be just very capable lifeless calculators. Subhuman in general with some superhuman abilities, like LLMs are today. When they will be able to improve themself, so called singularity? We are getting closer. Likely those will be still calculators which can be turned on/off at any moment.
tomjen3 3y ago
AI is here, now, and OpenAI is so saturated they had to cancel new customers. While the hype is real, so are the benefits. This feels more like the Internet in 1998 - there is a bubble forming and it may burst, but it is not like we got back to the Way Things Were after. Some sectors like (physical) mail continued their decline and others (like Google) continued to grow. The reason the previous AI winters were winters were that the AI didn't bring any benefits.

bcon 3y ago

> What limits AI creation is not base creation but creating things that satisfy people. And determining what will satisfy people is much more the domain of influencers than AI, and this sounds like jobs that filter AI outputs for market success. https://benconrad.net/posts/230610_influencingScarcity/ https://benconrad.net/posts/230610_influencingScarcity/

gp 3y ago

I believe it was Clayton Christenson who pointed out that disruptors took the lowest value activities first.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
I don’t believe that’s a law of nature - honestly it doesn’t even make sense. Disrupters disrupt what they can, what yields them the most profit.
- jdlshore 3y ago
  Christenson is the one who coined the term “disruptive innovation,” and he gave it a precise definition. That definition includes taking on low-value markets and gradually expanding into more lucrative, higher-value markets. The established players flee upmarket, ironically making some of their best profits as they do, and are eventually squeezed out entirely.

gpsx 3y ago

One of the biggest impacts of LLMs right now is probably in programming. The article says that the only thing LLMs are doing is replacing stack overflow (and hence the value is the value of stack overflow). While it's true it does replace the need for stack overflow in many cases, what it is doing is making programmers much more productive. How much? I don't know. But the value is not that we don't need stack overflow, it is that we don't need as many programmers.

dark_star 3y ago
> But the value is not that we don't need stack overflow, it is that we don't need as many programmers. I'll believe that when I see it. I lead a team of AI-boosted developers, I'm hiring as fast as I can, and all my company wants out of them is more and more. If they have 2x, 3x, or 10x output, the company can and will use it all.
- gpsx 3y ago
  Yes, I should have said we don't need as many programmers to do the same thing. As you say, companies will take advantage of being able to do more, and then there will hopefully be more software needed to leverage the capabiliies of the new AI agents.
- akira2501 3y ago
  So, "output" is the only metric your company uses? And it has an unlimited appetite for "output?" I work with an "AI-boosted" developer. He would be a 10x better developer if he stopped querying the chatbot and started reading basic documentation. We'd have a lot less spaghetti in "his?" codebase. Where do you work? Maybe we can solve each others problem?
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    This is my experience with a colleague of mine as well. He is talking to chatgpt and trying to get working solution from it instead of sitting down and putting puzzle pieces together from documentation. He would have been already done with the work if he would stop sieving through AI generated garbage.

wmf 3y ago

This tangentially reminds me of the classic "Content is Not King": https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/833/742 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/833/74... It has a lot of cultural value, but art in its many forms is worth less than tech.

golergka 3y ago
> the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access Oof.
zemvpferreira 3y ago
Seems to me like that article was spectacularly wrong, no? Or would we classify aggregators like Google/Facebook/TikTok as communication? They sit in the middle, really, and capture the whole pie. Kudos to the author for arguing his thesis so well anyway.
- wmf 3y ago
  I would mostly classify social media as communication. The lines have been blurred somewhat by the rise of professional influencers.

golergka 3y ago

> what is the market for personal assistants? What’s the market for butlers? Most people have neither of those things Most people didn’t have cars, telephones or televisions when they were introduced either.

midnitewarrior 3y ago

Those markets are the current low-hanging fruit. That is the proving ground for gaining the experience necessary to refine the technology to move up market into more lucrative industries.

petra 3y ago

1. What about customer service ? It's a large industry globally. LLMs are a good fit. 2. He measures the impact of chatGpt on writing and editing freelance jobs 5 months after chatGpt's release.it was relatively small. That is probably just impatience.

jpc0 3y ago
> What about customer service ? It's a large industry globally. LLMs are a good fit. LLMs are probably an ok fit for first line customer service that deals with menial queries from users who just don't know how to use the product at all. For actually important customer service issues LLMs won't be useful. Effectively if a FAQ couldn't answer it for you an LLM wouldn't either. I know for sure if you give me LLM based customer service I'm going to stop being a customer pretty quickly since I have 0 appetite for hallucinations when I have an actual problem with your product I need resolved.
- petra 3y ago
  When building a customer service chatbot, retrieval augmented generation is most often used. It doesn't write sentences on their own but mostly find/combine paragraphs from given content, and offer links. That means they have low hallucination rate, maybe even approaching zero(but I'm not sure about that).
  - jpc0 3y ago
    And this is why I prefaced it's absolutely great for the first line. My issue is will the chatbot know that the thing I asked it cannot answer or is it going to keep spewing whatever it deems appropriate. Is it better than most humans, maybe, maybe not. I rarely contact customer support, asin once or twice in my life. The one time I got caught in autogenerated nonsense instead of getting to an actual human I started making plans to remove that company from my life. I'm yet to be convinced there is a way for an LLM to read what I complained about and being able to determine that request is above it's knowledge and needs to be escalated
drewcoo 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago

It’s fascinating how little people really understand how LLMs are impacting businesses. Almost any task that couldn’t be done because it was too expensive to hire thousands of humans to sift through things is being outsourced to LLMs. I find it remarkable that people don’t realize how amazing these things are at classification and structuring of complex stuff with some alacrity, often far superior to human agents. They scale arbitrarily, work 24x7, and have very low failure rates compared to poorly trained high turnover humans. They generally do a good job identifying when they can’t classify something and delegate to human review. Are they perfect? No, but they’re considerably less error prone than a staff of hundreds of humans. Is it lucrative? Absolutely. I’ve seen this now at five major megacorps and I have to believe it’s going on at most.

jncfhnb 3y ago
Like what
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Just imagining some random ideas here and the use case come instantly. Imagine you have a user feedback system that has thousands of submisisons and you want to know how many are talking about a particular feature. How many are speaking positively about the product, how many seem to be asking for support rather than asking for feedback. Being able to sort through thousands of items for basically free which would have been so laborious previously that you would not have done it. And its a use where a small amount of error does not matter.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  Construction business
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Lots of government contractors have junior analysts-type jobs whose work entails responding to government RFPs. I know of one specifically who found ChatGPT was great at these responses - it still took further human review and editing, but so did the initial human drafts. Just one example.

xivzgrev 3y ago

Author makes some fair points but not thinking about indirect monetization Suppose you have a marketplace app, making $1 billion per year. You integrate a shopping AI bot that improves customer LTV 10%, so now your sales are $1.1 billion, a $100m growth! (Numbers hypothetical) That’s just one app. Imagine that across many companies, use cases etc. So while AI didn’t capture the full thing, if it captures a piece of many things by expanding the pie it could be extremely lucrative The same argument was used for crypto actually - the difference is not so many people (in developed countries anyway) have need for microtransactions. Whereas lots of people have need for “microtasks” - things they want but are too expensive. Example: consider therapy appointments, could be $100s per appointment. How many more people would go to therapy if it were 10x cheaper? Or personal assistant - I would hire one right now if service were cheap & reliable Each market may not be huge on its own but across a lot of markets - it adds up

berkes 3y ago
But the point of the article is that there aren't "a lot of markets" to disrupt. Or, at least, that most of these are markets that have very small margins or profits.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I think that point is kinda wrong. Maybe there aren't a lot of markets for GPT-4 to disrupt, but that's not to say there aren't a lot of markets (and lucrative ones) for GPT-10 to disrupt. If we could jump straight to GPT-10, sure, that'd be great, but obviously getting there is an iterative process. Whether or not we'll get to a hypothetical GPT-10 (and beyond) is another question.
  - berkes 3y ago
    Why do you think that the GPT-10 solves the supply paradox of AI? And if it does, what markets are (combined) worth $80 billion (the valuation of just OpenAI) that can be taken over fully? Or with a multiple and taken over partially? And will that worth then get onto the bottom line of an AI company? The way I see it, e.g. copilot makes me worth more. Might even make me worth 10 developers. 100 by the time we have copilot 13.37. The net results, however is not that 99 developmers are without a job, nor that 99% of my income goes to copilot. But that the demand in software development increases 100x and I make even more (The Lump of labour fallacy). Yet the Copilots out there competing in a market that's running at a loss hoping for future profits.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Any evaluation of how AI is impacting business at this stage is too premature. ChatGPT is just a year old. Lots of people didn’t even get API access for months. Organizational structures and even tech teams simply haven’t caught up.

desert_rue 3y ago

The author isn’t thinking this through. Take the lawyer example. Yes, a lawyer will have to review all AI generated work. Even so, the AI generated content and work to revise would quickly be cheaper than any associate. With enough feedback and some specialization, AI will generate better work than associates out of law school. I can see a day where law schools don’t teach how to write briefs and other legal documents but instead teach how to review AI generated documentation instead. Law schools could have more emphasis on trial work or the like. That’s very disruptive.

kelnos 3y ago

I generally agree with this, but I think there are some issues with the reasoning: > What about AI personal assistants? Robot butlers? All those things! Even assuming all that comes true sometime over the next decades: what is the market for personal assistants? What’s the market for butlers? Most people have neither of those things. Sometimes making things dirt cheap means that people who couldn't afford them (or just didn't think the price was worth it) can now afford them. I don't have a personal assistant, and wouldn't think the cost of (a human) one would be justified, but if I could have a good AI personal assistant for a couple bucks a month, I might pay for that. Overall, though, the goal isn't GPT-4. The goal is AGI. If anyone can actually crack that, assuming it doesn't murder us all, perhaps it could cheaply replace jobs in roles and markets where it could be quite lucrative. Even if they can't crack AGI, maybe some future GPT-10 could be a suitable replacement for a lawyer in some contexts, for example. OP talks about how the legal profession has a bunch of structures and legalities that might make it hard to offer a robo-lawyer, but these things can change. Consider that Uber essentially broke all the laws around taxi (er, ahem, "rideshare") licensing, and they're all over the world now. Regardless, I'm still skeptical of AI's future. Not just in the realm of whether or not AGI is possible with current or near-future technology, but also in the realm of financing (will VCs get tired of waiting after a while and stop investing in it) or politics (will AI get legislated to the point of uselessness).

Havoc 3y ago

The point about low value activities rings true in isolation but I find it hard to reconcile this with the experience of using OpenAI chat. It does help with problems far more than just being a novelty That scaled to many people has economic value

James2233 3y ago

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oglop 3y ago

Publishing models is unreal. What is this person talking about? Take 2 hours and feed some pdf’s and take some time to build one and it’s amazing. You can abstract most of college away with these things. It’ll take years for the cultural force to die down, but I would have paid for this over college easily if given a choice.