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> I don’t think it’s a bubble. > I think we are no where close to peak bubble. That said, you're in agreement with the analysts: “Despite its expensive price

> I don’t think it’s a bubble. > I think we are no where close to peak bubble. That said, you're in agreement with the analysts: “Despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful,” Anyway, the issue (I see) is that the value added by these features is marginal and does not make up for the huge amount of investment. Please, as a thought experiment, how exactly is adding LLMs to the chat history would make up for Slack's investments in LLMs? Would it enable it to gain so much more market share that investors would get a good return? What if models become so cheap and capable that everyone has LLMs for their chat history? What then? Where will the return of investment come from?

thomashop 2y ago
The added value has not been marginal in my life. I'm paying for a few subscriptions to AI services. They make me significantly more productive in various ways. It is possible to quantify.
- maximinus_thrax 2y ago
  Your bio shows you have skin in the game, so I wouldn't be surprised to see you try propping up the hype. But we're talking about different things here. I'm referring to the business value of a company investing in AI features and their return on investment. The end-user is a different story, but anecdotally, I also pay for a few subscriptions to AI services and so far I'm not seeing significant productivity gains after the novelty wore off. For me it's at the point of being just a better search that I need to cross-reference to make sure it didn't go off the rails. I will stop paying soon.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > They make me significantly more productive in various ways. It is possible to quantify. So quantify it, how many dollars richer did you get thanks to AI? Did you get a massive raise? Did you create a new product that made you tons of money? Since you say it is possible to quantify please tell us! Edit: Ah, you are selling AI products, that doesn't count. That is saying a shovel is great value since you can sell it.
  - thomashop 2y ago
    You're making assumptions. I'm not working with the shovel I use to increase my productivity. Why would someone selling fridges be motivated to exaggerate the value of stoves? I'm not selling anything as Pollinations.AI is open source and makes no profit. Just because I'm working with open-source AI means I cannot have an opinion on how other AI tools have improved my productivity?
rkuodys 2y ago
Ideally, good working model can be used as tech support - meaning the revenue per license might increase 10x as the value increases. The problem I would say is not that current models are incapable of delivering value as a feature. But that they change not necessarily for better. I liked clickup AI when it was beta. Now it's shit. I have no control over it and the fact that initially I could almost copy paste replies based on docs was really promising to reuse in support
zifpanachr23 2y ago
There's no moat given that open source models are almost as good already. And it's yet to be proven that LLMs in particular can be reliable enough to actually provide significant return on investment. Then there's the legal issue. People are not going to accept the idea of "you can't sue me, the AI decided", and so a not perfect model is not going to be deployed in any field of consequence, because the idea that you can offload liability on models is not going to fly, and is ethically reprehensible in my view and in the view of most serious people working in regulated industries. It actually introduces new legal issues, a jury is far less likely to side with an AI than it is with a person who simply made a mistake. There are numerous social reasons why the liability concerns here are legitimate and concerning and actually different for companies than if a human had been making the decisions. Therefore, the models have to be perfect, or they have to be checked by hand by experts at every step (in which case, there is no return on investment, you haven't really automated anything). That's the classic conundrum of "I may as well have done it myself given I had to check that code line by line anyway" I see in my own work, and the same is going to apply for non-perfect models in any field of sufficient consequence that there is a hope for profitability (and usually, these fields being consequential enough for potential profitability also implies a potential for liability). Anybody that works as a programmer in finance/energy/healthcare/government or other parts of the "real economy" could tell you this years ago. The perception that AI could be used to automate significant work was dead pretty shortly after arrival. The only industry that continues on with the charade is the industry with a vested interest in selling and making dubious promises about AI products. That doesn't mean I don't think LLMs are cool or that they are totally useless. For endeavours that were limited in their profitability anyway, it may very well have some use cases. I just don't see a viable business model for any large companies except Nvidia or AMD or Broadcom and others making money selling data center equipment. Maybe ads and agitprop, but that seems to be a sort of parasitic relationship going on with social media and the internet and one wonders how long it can continue before canabalizing itself.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  There used to be a ton of search engines, there still are. Eventually, one rises to the top. That was Google. I don’t see why the LLM race won’t repeat.

thomashop 2y ago

The added value has not been marginal in my life. I'm paying for a few subscriptions to AI services. They make me significantly more productive in various ways. It is possible to quantify.

maximinus_thrax 2y ago
Your bio shows you have skin in the game, so I wouldn't be surprised to see you try propping up the hype. But we're talking about different things here. I'm referring to the business value of a company investing in AI features and their return on investment. The end-user is a different story, but anecdotally, I also pay for a few subscriptions to AI services and so far I'm not seeing significant productivity gains after the novelty wore off. For me it's at the point of being just a better search that I need to cross-reference to make sure it didn't go off the rails. I will stop paying soon.
Jensson 2y ago
> They make me significantly more productive in various ways. It is possible to quantify. So quantify it, how many dollars richer did you get thanks to AI? Did you get a massive raise? Did you create a new product that made you tons of money? Since you say it is possible to quantify please tell us! Edit: Ah, you are selling AI products, that doesn't count. That is saying a shovel is great value since you can sell it.
- thomashop 2y ago
  You're making assumptions. I'm not working with the shovel I use to increase my productivity. Why would someone selling fridges be motivated to exaggerate the value of stoves? I'm not selling anything as Pollinations.AI is open source and makes no profit. Just because I'm working with open-source AI means I cannot have an opinion on how other AI tools have improved my productivity?

rkuodys 2y ago

Ideally, good working model can be used as tech support - meaning the revenue per license might increase 10x as the value increases. The problem I would say is not that current models are incapable of delivering value as a feature. But that they change not necessarily for better. I liked clickup AI when it was beta. Now it's shit. I have no control over it and the fact that initially I could almost copy paste replies based on docs was really promising to reuse in support

zifpanachr23 2y ago

There's no moat given that open source models are almost as good already. And it's yet to be proven that LLMs in particular can be reliable enough to actually provide significant return on investment. Then there's the legal issue. People are not going to accept the idea of "you can't sue me, the AI decided", and so a not perfect model is not going to be deployed in any field of consequence, because the idea that you can offload liability on models is not going to fly, and is ethically reprehensible in my view and in the view of most serious people working in regulated industries. It actually introduces new legal issues, a jury is far less likely to side with an AI than it is with a person who simply made a mistake. There are numerous social reasons why the liability concerns here are legitimate and concerning and actually different for companies than if a human had been making the decisions. Therefore, the models have to be perfect, or they have to be checked by hand by experts at every step (in which case, there is no return on investment, you haven't really automated anything). That's the classic conundrum of "I may as well have done it myself given I had to check that code line by line anyway" I see in my own work, and the same is going to apply for non-perfect models in any field of sufficient consequence that there is a hope for profitability (and usually, these fields being consequential enough for potential profitability also implies a potential for liability). Anybody that works as a programmer in finance/energy/healthcare/government or other parts of the "real economy" could tell you this years ago. The perception that AI could be used to automate significant work was dead pretty shortly after arrival. The only industry that continues on with the charade is the industry with a vested interest in selling and making dubious promises about AI products. That doesn't mean I don't think LLMs are cool or that they are totally useless. For endeavours that were limited in their profitability anyway, it may very well have some use cases. I just don't see a viable business model for any large companies except Nvidia or AMD or Broadcom and others making money selling data center equipment. Maybe ads and agitprop, but that seems to be a sort of parasitic relationship going on with social media and the internet and one wonders how long it can continue before canabalizing itself.

aurareturn 2y ago
There used to be a ton of search engines, there still are. Eventually, one rises to the top. That was Google. I don’t see why the LLM race won’t repeat.