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America's top companies keep talking about AI – but can't explain the upsides

132 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

sydbarrett74 1y ago
AI provides cover to lay people off, or else commit constructive dismissal.
- zippyman55 1y ago
  Agreed! The people who did not work hard but were kept employed ala “bullshit work” are being removed.
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    Eh, I have plenty of "bullshit work". Only that, actually, for the foreseeable future. Building clusters six servers at a time... that last the order of weeks, appeasing "stakeholders" that are closer to steaks. Whole lot of empty movement and minds behind these 'investments'. FTE that amounts to contracted, disposed, labor to support The Hype.
    - zippyman55 1y ago
      But that is still highly skilled BS work, and I would not call it BS work. What i was referring to was the class of work individuals do that someone off the street can be trained in thirty minutes. Building a cluster is more challenging. Not sure why I picked up three down votes. Must have touched a nerve!
      - bravetraveler 1y ago
        It's pretty BS, trust me! The work is automated to the point that it takes more time to hand off/hand in. Very performative. We could get this to the point of taking people off the street/putting them to task... but instead, we've collectively found it more valuable to push the spreadsheet along a few cells at a time, together. Perhaps it's mistaken to localize the BS; it's shared. Soft and tends to spread.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Constructive dismissal and layoffs are mutually exclusive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal >In employment law, constructive dismissal occurs when an employee resigns due to the employer creating a hostile work environment. No employee is resigning when an employer tells the employee they are terminated due to AI replacing them.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    AI is what you tell the board/investors is the reason for layoffs and attrition. Layoffs and attrition happen for reasons that are not positive, AI provides a positive spin.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > No employee is resigning when an employer tells the employee they are terminated due to AI replacing them. No, but some are resigning when they're told their bonus is being cut because they didn't use enough AI.
  - TheDong 1y ago
    Using AI makes me want to resign from life, it removes all the fun and joy from coding. I absolutely will resign if my job becomes 100% generating and reviewing AI generated slop, having to review my coworker's AI slop has already made my job way less fun.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Yeah, I'm feeling this. I'm almost 40 and I'm really not interested in continuing the AI slop treadmill that I'm seeing stretching before me I am my own agent in the world. I don't get any satisfaction from using AI to do my work and offloading my responsibility and my skills to a computer. Computers are tools for me to use, not partners or subordinates Strongly thinking about going back to school to retrain into something else aside from software. The only thing stopping me at the moment is that I think AI is making every industry and job similarly stupid and fruitless right now so changing lanes will still land me in the "AI pilot" career path What a shitty time to be alive. I used to love technology. Now I'm coming to loathe it. It is diminishing what it means to be human
discordance 1y ago
This comes to mind: "MIT Media Lab/Project NANDA released a new report that found that 95% of investments in gen AI have produced zero returns" [0] Enterprise is way too cozy with the big cloud providers, who bought into it and sold it on so heavily. 0: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...
- bawolff 1y ago
  If the theory is that 1% will be a unicorns that will make you a trillionaire, i think investors would be ok with that. The real question is do those unicorns exist or is it all worthless.
  - orionblastar 1y ago
    Have to pay the power bill for the data centers for GAI. Might not be profitable.
- thenaturalist 1y ago
  Fun fact, the report was/ is so controversial, that the link to the NANDA paper linked in fortune has been put behind a Google Form you now need to complete prior to being able to access it.
  - losteric 1y ago
    Doubt the form has anything to do with how "controversial" it is. NANDA is using the paper's popularity to collect marketing data.
  - gamblor956 1y ago
    Fun fact, it was always behind a form if you wanted to access it through the original/primary link.
- matwood 1y ago
  I wonder people ever read what they link. > The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations. While executives often blame regulation or model performance, MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows, Challapally explained. The 95% isn't a knock on the AI tools, but that enterprises are bad at integration. Large enterprises being bad at integration is a story as old as time. IMO, reading beyond the headline, the report highlights the value of today's AI tools because they are leading to enterprises trying to integrate faster than they normally would. "AI tools found to be useful, but integration is hard like always" is a headline that would have gotten zero press.
CyberMacGyver 1y ago
Our new CTO was remarking that our engineering teams AI spend is too low. I believe we have already committed a lot of money but only using 5% of the subscription. This is likely why there is a lot of push from the top. They have already committed the money now having to justify it.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  > They have already committed the money now having to justify it. As someone who has been in senior engineering management, it's helpful to understand the real reason, and this is definitely not it. First, these AI subscriptions are usually month-to-month, and these days with the AI landscape changing so quickly, most companies would be reluctant to lock in a longer term even if there were a discount. So it's probably not hard to quickly cancel AI spend for SaaS products. Second, the vast majority of companies understand sunk cost fallacy. If they truly believed AI wouldn't be a net benefit, they wouldn't force people to use it just because they already paid for it. Salaries for engineers are a hell of a lot more than their AI costs. The main reason for the push from the top is probably because they believe companies that don't adopt AI strategies now and ensure their programmers are familiar with AI toolsets will be at a competitive disadvantage. Note they may even believe that today's AI systems may not be much of a net benefit, but they probably see the state of the art advancing quickly so that companies who take a wait-and-see approach will be late to the game when AI is a substantial productivity enhancer. I'm not at all saying you have to buy into this "FOMO rationale", but just saying "they already paid the money so that's why they want us to use it" feels like a bad excuse and just broadcasts a lack of understanding of how the vast majority of businesses work.
  - sschnei8 1y ago
    Do you have any data to backup the claim: “vast majority of companies understand suck cost fallacy.” I’m assuming you meant “sunk” not “suck”. Not familiar with the suck fallacy.
    - viccis 1y ago
      >I’m assuming you meant “sunk” not “suck”. Not familiar with the suck fallacy. There was no need to post this.
mgh2 1y ago
https://archive.is/133z6 https://archive.is/133z6
- Lauris100 1y ago
  Thank you
groby_b 1y ago
Simple fact: AI is extremely powerful, in the hands of experts who invested time in deeply understanding it, and in understanding how to actually use it well. Who are then willing to commit more time to build an actually sustainable solution. Alas, many members of the C suite do not exactly fit that description. They just have typed in a prompt or three, marveled that a computer can reply, and fantasize that it's basically a human replacement. There are going to be a lot of (figurative, incorporated) dead bodies on the floor. But there will also be a few winners who actually understood what they were doing, and the wins will be massive. Same as it was post dot-com.
- stretchwithme 1y ago
  AI is useful to people who read and understand the answers and who would have eventually come up with a similar result on their own. They have judgement. They can improve what was generated. They can fix a result when it falls short of the objective. And they know when to give up on trying to get AI to understand. When rephrasing won't improve next word prediction. Which happens when the situation is complex.
  - pempem 1y ago
    It also happens when you ask it to do simple things like create comments. At least 400 words and still it will regurgitate/synthesize, often with a "!", the content you're asking it to comment on.
    - insane_dreamer 1y ago
      2 years ago: https://marketoonist.com/2023/02/ai-generated-sameness.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/02/ai-generated-sameness.html
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    > AI is useful to people who read and understand the answers and who would have eventually come up with a similar result on their own. I am such a one, and AI isn't useful to me. The answers it gives me are routinely so bad, I can just answer my own questions with a search engine or product documentation faster than I can get the AI to give me something. Often enough I can never get the AI to give me something useful. The current products are shockingly bad relative to the level of hype being thrown about.
01100011 1y ago
AI isn't about what you are able to do with it. AI is about the fear of what your competitors can do with it. I said a couple years ago that the big companies would have trouble monetizing it, but they'd still be forced to spend for fear of becoming obsolete.
ksec 1y ago
If we ignore coding or tech industry for a min. Other companies Keep demanding new Report on certain things, and AI is doing that. Is it productive? probably not. But do execs loves it? Yes. In a non-start up, bureaucratic companies, these report are there to make cover ups, or basically to cover everyone's ass so no one is doing anything wrong because the report said so.
jandrewrogers 1y ago
For the type of work I typically do, AI is hopelessly terrible. Not too surprising because there is zero training data.
- paulddraper 1y ago
  So how do you learn?
  - oblio 1y ago
    Trial and error?
    - paulddraper 1y ago
      Reinforcement learning, then?
  - gambiting 1y ago
    I mean I'm in a similar situation in that I'm a games developer and no AI system has been trained on the details of PS5/Xbox/Switch development since those are heavily NDA'd and not available to the public. So I learn by reading docs which are available to me as a registered developer, but AI doesn't have that ability and it hasn't been trained on this.
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    The old fashioned way: studying the problem domain at length.
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
This reminds me of the internet in 2000. Lots of companies doing .COM stuff but many didn’t understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. But in the end the internet was a huge game changer. I see the same with AI. There will be a lot of money wasted but in the end AI will be huge transformation.
- kilroy123 1y ago
  I completely agree. I think the financial bubble will also burst soon. Doesn't mean it won't keep on slowly eating the world.
- marklubi 1y ago
  > This reminds me of the internet in 2000 The thing that changed it was smartphones (~7 years later). Suddenly, the internet was available everywhere and not just a thing for nerds. Not sure that AI is quite there yet, currently trying to identify what will be the catalyst that makes it seamless.
nelox 1y ago
The claim that big US companies “cannot explain the upsides” of AI is misleading. Large firms are cautious in regulatory filings because they must disclose risks, not hype. SEC rules force them to emphasise legal and security issues, so those filings naturally look defensive. Earnings calls, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly positive about AI. The suggestion that companies only adopt AI out of fear of missing out ignores the concrete examples already in place. Huntington Ingalls is using AI in battlefield decision tools, Zoetis in veterinary diagnostics, Caterpillar in energy systems, and Freeport-McMoran in mineral extraction. These are significant operational changes. It is also wrong to frame limited stock outperformance as proof that AI has no benefit. Stock prices reflect broader market conditions, not just adoption of a single technology. Early deployments rarely transform earnings instantly. The internet looked commercially underwhelming in the mid-1990s too, before business models matured. The article confuses the immaturity of current generative AI pilots with the broader potential of applied AI. Failures of workplace pilots usually result from integration challenges, not because the technology lacks value. The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest.
- julkali 1y ago
  The issue is that the examples you listed mostly rely on very specific machine learning tools (which are very much relevant and good use of this tech), while the term "AI" in layman terms is usually synonymous for LLMs. Mentioning the mid-1990s' internet boom is somewhat ironic imo, given what happened next. The question is whether "business models mature" with or without a market crash, given that the vast majority of ML money is provided for LLM efforts.
  - comp_throw7 1y ago
    (You're responding to an LLM-generated comment, btw.)
    - nelox 1y ago
      The comment was definitely not LLM generated. However, I certainly did use search for help in sourcing information for it. Some of those searches offered AI generated results, which I cross-referenced, before using to write the comment myself. That in no way is the same as “an LLM-generated comment”.
gethly 1y ago
Because AI is a financial bubble and it is the only thing holding up the entire US stock market. But the day of reckoning of near.
- joebob42 1y ago
  Are you using it? I genuinely don't understand how people who are experimenting with the tool can feel this way
  - stevedonovan 1y ago
    It's not inconsistent to say there's a financial bubble and also genuinely think it's a new era for software development. There aren't enough programmers to justify the valuations and capex
  - Ianjit 1y ago
    Dot com was a financial bubble, but the internet was still very usefull. Financial markets can become (often are) dislocated from reality.
  - gethly 1y ago
    I sometimes use grok. But not much. Your confusion is strange. I never said the tech is a bubble(it can be used today, although in very limited manner, compared to how it is being sold to the public), just the financial aspect of it. If you'd be more educated in investing, economics or geopolitics you'd understand what is going on. I am not being hyperbolic here. Even Altman admitted AI is a bubble. It's really no secret to anyone. But bubbles will be ridden no matter what, all the way up, until they pop. So knowing it is a bubble does not change much. We just know what we can expect once it pops. tl;dr I was merely answering the question the article proposes.
andyst 1y ago
the AI umbrella has been helpful to my BigCorp to justify more machine learning work, or discrete optimisation and scheduling problems agentic ai which is a huge buzz in enterprise feels more like workflow and rpa (again) and people misunderstanding that getting the happy flow working is only 20% of the job.
firefoxd 1y ago
For most companies AI is a subscription service you sign up for. Because of great marketing campaigns, it has become a necessary tax. If you don't pay, the penalty is you lose value because it doesn't look like you are embracing the future. If you pay, well it's just a tax that you hope your employees will somehow benefit from.
jraby3 1y ago
As a small business owner in a non tech business (60 employees, $40M revenue), AI is definitely worth $20/month but not as I anticipated. I thought we'd use it to reduce our graphics department but instead we've begun outsourcing designers to Colombia. What I actually use it for is to save time and legal costs. For example a client in bankruptcy owes us $20k. Not worth hiring an attorney to walk us through bankruptcy filings. But can easily ask ChatGPT to summarize legal notices and advise us what to do next as a creditor.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  Which summarizes the one useful property of LLMs: a slightly better search engine which on top doesn't populate the first 5 result pages with advertisements - yet anyway ;)
  - jordanb 1y ago
    No doubt in ten years chatgpt will mostly be telling you things it was paid to say.
  - Gud 1y ago
    The saddest part is we used to have highly functional search engines two decades ago, where you would results from subject matter experts. Today it’s only the same SEO formatted crap without answer. I am working on a solution.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > Not worth hiring an attorney to walk us through bankruptcy filings The AI doesn't carry professional liability insurance, so this is about as good as asking one of the legal subreddits. It's probably fine in this case since the worst case is not getting the money that you were at risk of not getting anyway.
rebeccaskinner 1y ago
Looking at my own use of AI, and at how I see other engineers use it, it often feels like two steps forward and two steps back, and overall not a lot of real progress yet. I see people using agents to develop features, but the amount of time they spend to actually make the agent do the work usually outweighs the time they’d have spent just building the feature themselves. I see people vibe coding their way to working features, but when the LLM gets stuck it takes long enough for even a good developer to realize it and re-engage their critical thinking that it can wipe out the time savings. Having an LLM do code and documentation review seems to usually be a net positive to quality, but that’s hard to sell as a benefit and most people seem to feel like just using the LLM to review things means they aren’t using it enough. Even for engineers there are a lot of non-engineering benefits in companies that use LLMs heavily for things like searching email, ticketing systems, documentation sources, corporate policies, etc. A lot of that could have been done with traditional search methods if different systems had provided better standardized methods of indexing and searching data, but they never did and now LLMs are the best way to plug an interoperability gap that had been a huge problem for a long time. My guess is that, like a lot of other technology driven transformations in how work gets done, AI is going to be a big win in the long term, but the win is going to come on gradually, take ongoing investment, and ultimately be the cumulative result of a lot of small improvements in efficiency across a huge number of processes rather than a single big win.
- ernst_klim 1y ago
  > the amount of time they spend to actually make the agent do the work usually outweighs the time they’d have spent just building the feature themselves Exactly my experience. I feel like LLMs have potential as Expert Systems/Smart websearch, but not as a generative tool, neither for code nor for text. You spend more time understanding stuff than writing code, and you need to understand what you commit with or without LLM. But writing code is easier that reviewing, and understanding by doing is easier than understanding by reviewing (bc you get one particular thing at the time and don't have to understand the whole picture at once). So I have a feeling that agents do even have negative impact.
  - spwa4 1y ago
apexalpha 1y ago
Computers being able to digest vision, audio and other input into text and back has tremendous value. You can’t convince me otherwise, we just haven’t found a ‘killer app’ yet.
- ozgung 1y ago
  I believe this is the correct way of seeing things. We may not need a killer app though, since AI is not a platform but a core technology. It’s more about the evolution of IT infrastructure and SW systems. Non-tech companies/people don’t need to do anything really. AI will just come to them.
wg0 1y ago
Sounds like blockchain all over. Reminds me of an essay from two product managers in AWS that talked to clients all over US and couldn't get any business to clearly articulate why they need blockchain. Note: AWS has a hosted blockchain that you can use. [1] PS: If anyone has read that essay, please do share the link. I can't really locate it but that's a wonderful read. [1]. https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/
- cmckn 1y ago
  Tim Bray wrote about it: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Blockchain https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Block...
  - wg0 1y ago
    That's exactly it is! Thank you!
cjs_ac 1y ago
Large language models are a deeply impressive technology, but they're not artificial general intelligences, because you need to supervise them. Like everything else that has been called 'artificial intelligence' since the 1950s, I think we'll find some niches that they're good for, and that'll be the end of the hype bubble. The hype does serve a purpose, though: it motivates people to try to find more possible uses for LLMs. However, as with all experiments, we should expect most of these attempts to fail.
fifteen1506 1y ago
Big benefit from coding Agents: for things to work it better have documentation. Which humans usually aren't given, so anything which forces documentation is good.
outlore 1y ago
one of the great benefits of AI so far has been the push for more plain text documentation and opening up API access via MCP. Let's enjoy it while it lasts until we are forced back into walled gardens and micro transactions
kapone 1y ago
Well, as anecdotal data, have you folks noticed ads lately pushing Gemini/Claude/xx on both legacy media and online? If AI (and these products) is sooo great, why do these companies have to advertise to sell their wares? And Google and Microsoft are hellbent on pushing AI into everything. Even if users don't want it. Nope, we're gonna throw the kitchen sink at you and see if it sticks. In the non-tech world, nobody gives a shit about AI. People and businesses go about their daily lives without thinking about things like "Hmmm...maybe I could have prompted that LLM a different way..."
nasmorn 1y ago
The problem with AI is how confidently wrong it is. In Lisbon I uploaded a picture of myself on some church steps and asked ChatGPT where that is. I came up with a place I was sure I’d never been. Then I asked if it could be part of some other place and it said sure it’s inside the main church. The pic was clearly outside. Next it gave me a random famous stair that is so clearly different a human could never be fooled. Each of these lies were extremely elaborate citing sources and describing all the things that matched. The only matching experience was with a taxi in Delhi some 20 years ago where the driver pretended to know where he was going and when I further questioned him he said the 40 story hotel I am looking for has been demolished 5 years after opening. At least he has monetary interest in lying to me so I enter his cab.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Whether it works or it doesn't, keep talking about "AI", keep speculating. Maintain the hype

132 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

sydbarrett74 1y ago

AI provides cover to lay people off, or else commit constructive dismissal.

zippyman55 1y ago
Agreed! The people who did not work hard but were kept employed ala “bullshit work” are being removed.
- bravetraveler 1y ago
  Eh, I have plenty of "bullshit work". Only that, actually, for the foreseeable future. Building clusters six servers at a time... that last the order of weeks, appeasing "stakeholders" that are closer to steaks. Whole lot of empty movement and minds behind these 'investments'. FTE that amounts to contracted, disposed, labor to support The Hype.
  - zippyman55 1y ago
    But that is still highly skilled BS work, and I would not call it BS work. What i was referring to was the class of work individuals do that someone off the street can be trained in thirty minutes. Building a cluster is more challenging. Not sure why I picked up three down votes. Must have touched a nerve!
    - bravetraveler 1y ago
      It's pretty BS, trust me! The work is automated to the point that it takes more time to hand off/hand in. Very performative. We could get this to the point of taking people off the street/putting them to task... but instead, we've collectively found it more valuable to push the spreadsheet along a few cells at a time, together. Perhaps it's mistaken to localize the BS; it's shared. Soft and tends to spread.
lotsofpulp 1y ago
Constructive dismissal and layoffs are mutually exclusive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal >In employment law, constructive dismissal occurs when an employee resigns due to the employer creating a hostile work environment. No employee is resigning when an employer tells the employee they are terminated due to AI replacing them.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  AI is what you tell the board/investors is the reason for layoffs and attrition. Layoffs and attrition happen for reasons that are not positive, AI provides a positive spin.
- lmm 1y ago
  > No employee is resigning when an employer tells the employee they are terminated due to AI replacing them. No, but some are resigning when they're told their bonus is being cut because they didn't use enough AI.
- TheDong 1y ago
  Using AI makes me want to resign from life, it removes all the fun and joy from coding. I absolutely will resign if my job becomes 100% generating and reviewing AI generated slop, having to review my coworker's AI slop has already made my job way less fun.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Yeah, I'm feeling this. I'm almost 40 and I'm really not interested in continuing the AI slop treadmill that I'm seeing stretching before me I am my own agent in the world. I don't get any satisfaction from using AI to do my work and offloading my responsibility and my skills to a computer. Computers are tools for me to use, not partners or subordinates Strongly thinking about going back to school to retrain into something else aside from software. The only thing stopping me at the moment is that I think AI is making every industry and job similarly stupid and fruitless right now so changing lanes will still land me in the "AI pilot" career path What a shitty time to be alive. I used to love technology. Now I'm coming to loathe it. It is diminishing what it means to be human

discordance 1y ago

This comes to mind: "MIT Media Lab/Project NANDA released a new report that found that 95% of investments in gen AI have produced zero returns" [0] Enterprise is way too cozy with the big cloud providers, who bought into it and sold it on so heavily. 0: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

bawolff 1y ago
If the theory is that 1% will be a unicorns that will make you a trillionaire, i think investors would be ok with that. The real question is do those unicorns exist or is it all worthless.
- orionblastar 1y ago
  Have to pay the power bill for the data centers for GAI. Might not be profitable.
thenaturalist 1y ago
Fun fact, the report was/ is so controversial, that the link to the NANDA paper linked in fortune has been put behind a Google Form you now need to complete prior to being able to access it.
- losteric 1y ago
  Doubt the form has anything to do with how "controversial" it is. NANDA is using the paper's popularity to collect marketing data.
- gamblor956 1y ago
  Fun fact, it was always behind a form if you wanted to access it through the original/primary link.
matwood 1y ago
I wonder people ever read what they link. > The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations. While executives often blame regulation or model performance, MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows, Challapally explained. The 95% isn't a knock on the AI tools, but that enterprises are bad at integration. Large enterprises being bad at integration is a story as old as time. IMO, reading beyond the headline, the report highlights the value of today's AI tools because they are leading to enterprises trying to integrate faster than they normally would. "AI tools found to be useful, but integration is hard like always" is a headline that would have gotten zero press.

CyberMacGyver 1y ago

Our new CTO was remarking that our engineering teams AI spend is too low. I believe we have already committed a lot of money but only using 5% of the subscription. This is likely why there is a lot of push from the top. They have already committed the money now having to justify it.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
> They have already committed the money now having to justify it. As someone who has been in senior engineering management, it's helpful to understand the real reason, and this is definitely not it. First, these AI subscriptions are usually month-to-month, and these days with the AI landscape changing so quickly, most companies would be reluctant to lock in a longer term even if there were a discount. So it's probably not hard to quickly cancel AI spend for SaaS products. Second, the vast majority of companies understand sunk cost fallacy. If they truly believed AI wouldn't be a net benefit, they wouldn't force people to use it just because they already paid for it. Salaries for engineers are a hell of a lot more than their AI costs. The main reason for the push from the top is probably because they believe companies that don't adopt AI strategies now and ensure their programmers are familiar with AI toolsets will be at a competitive disadvantage. Note they may even believe that today's AI systems may not be much of a net benefit, but they probably see the state of the art advancing quickly so that companies who take a wait-and-see approach will be late to the game when AI is a substantial productivity enhancer. I'm not at all saying you have to buy into this "FOMO rationale", but just saying "they already paid the money so that's why they want us to use it" feels like a bad excuse and just broadcasts a lack of understanding of how the vast majority of businesses work.
- sschnei8 1y ago
  Do you have any data to backup the claim: “vast majority of companies understand suck cost fallacy.” I’m assuming you meant “sunk” not “suck”. Not familiar with the suck fallacy.
  - viccis 1y ago
    >I’m assuming you meant “sunk” not “suck”. Not familiar with the suck fallacy. There was no need to post this.

mgh2 1y ago

https://archive.is/133z6 https://archive.is/133z6

Lauris100 1y ago
Thank you

groby_b 1y ago

Simple fact: AI is extremely powerful, in the hands of experts who invested time in deeply understanding it, and in understanding how to actually use it well. Who are then willing to commit more time to build an actually sustainable solution. Alas, many members of the C suite do not exactly fit that description. They just have typed in a prompt or three, marveled that a computer can reply, and fantasize that it's basically a human replacement. There are going to be a lot of (figurative, incorporated) dead bodies on the floor. But there will also be a few winners who actually understood what they were doing, and the wins will be massive. Same as it was post dot-com.

stretchwithme 1y ago
AI is useful to people who read and understand the answers and who would have eventually come up with a similar result on their own. They have judgement. They can improve what was generated. They can fix a result when it falls short of the objective. And they know when to give up on trying to get AI to understand. When rephrasing won't improve next word prediction. Which happens when the situation is complex.
- pempem 1y ago
  It also happens when you ask it to do simple things like create comments. At least 400 words and still it will regurgitate/synthesize, often with a "!", the content you're asking it to comment on.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    2 years ago: https://marketoonist.com/2023/02/ai-generated-sameness.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/02/ai-generated-sameness.html
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > AI is useful to people who read and understand the answers and who would have eventually come up with a similar result on their own. I am such a one, and AI isn't useful to me. The answers it gives me are routinely so bad, I can just answer my own questions with a search engine or product documentation faster than I can get the AI to give me something. Often enough I can never get the AI to give me something useful. The current products are shockingly bad relative to the level of hype being thrown about.

01100011 1y ago

AI isn't about what you are able to do with it. AI is about the fear of what your competitors can do with it. I said a couple years ago that the big companies would have trouble monetizing it, but they'd still be forced to spend for fear of becoming obsolete.

ksec 1y ago

If we ignore coding or tech industry for a min. Other companies Keep demanding new Report on certain things, and AI is doing that. Is it productive? probably not. But do execs loves it? Yes. In a non-start up, bureaucratic companies, these report are there to make cover ups, or basically to cover everyone's ass so no one is doing anything wrong because the report said so.

jandrewrogers 1y ago

For the type of work I typically do, AI is hopelessly terrible. Not too surprising because there is zero training data.

paulddraper 1y ago
So how do you learn?
- oblio 1y ago
  Trial and error?
  - paulddraper 1y ago
    Reinforcement learning, then?
- gambiting 1y ago
  I mean I'm in a similar situation in that I'm a games developer and no AI system has been trained on the details of PS5/Xbox/Switch development since those are heavily NDA'd and not available to the public. So I learn by reading docs which are available to me as a registered developer, but AI doesn't have that ability and it hasn't been trained on this.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  The old fashioned way: studying the problem domain at length.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

This reminds me of the internet in 2000. Lots of companies doing .COM stuff but many didn’t understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. But in the end the internet was a huge game changer. I see the same with AI. There will be a lot of money wasted but in the end AI will be huge transformation.

kilroy123 1y ago
I completely agree. I think the financial bubble will also burst soon. Doesn't mean it won't keep on slowly eating the world.
marklubi 1y ago
> This reminds me of the internet in 2000 The thing that changed it was smartphones (~7 years later). Suddenly, the internet was available everywhere and not just a thing for nerds. Not sure that AI is quite there yet, currently trying to identify what will be the catalyst that makes it seamless.

nelox 1y ago

The claim that big US companies “cannot explain the upsides” of AI is misleading. Large firms are cautious in regulatory filings because they must disclose risks, not hype. SEC rules force them to emphasise legal and security issues, so those filings naturally look defensive. Earnings calls, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly positive about AI. The suggestion that companies only adopt AI out of fear of missing out ignores the concrete examples already in place. Huntington Ingalls is using AI in battlefield decision tools, Zoetis in veterinary diagnostics, Caterpillar in energy systems, and Freeport-McMoran in mineral extraction. These are significant operational changes. It is also wrong to frame limited stock outperformance as proof that AI has no benefit. Stock prices reflect broader market conditions, not just adoption of a single technology. Early deployments rarely transform earnings instantly. The internet looked commercially underwhelming in the mid-1990s too, before business models matured. The article confuses the immaturity of current generative AI pilots with the broader potential of applied AI. Failures of workplace pilots usually result from integration challenges, not because the technology lacks value. The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest.

julkali 1y ago
The issue is that the examples you listed mostly rely on very specific machine learning tools (which are very much relevant and good use of this tech), while the term "AI" in layman terms is usually synonymous for LLMs. Mentioning the mid-1990s' internet boom is somewhat ironic imo, given what happened next. The question is whether "business models mature" with or without a market crash, given that the vast majority of ML money is provided for LLM efforts.
- comp_throw7 1y ago
  (You're responding to an LLM-generated comment, btw.)
  - nelox 1y ago
    The comment was definitely not LLM generated. However, I certainly did use search for help in sourcing information for it. Some of those searches offered AI generated results, which I cross-referenced, before using to write the comment myself. That in no way is the same as “an LLM-generated comment”.

gethly 1y ago

Because AI is a financial bubble and it is the only thing holding up the entire US stock market. But the day of reckoning of near.

joebob42 1y ago
Are you using it? I genuinely don't understand how people who are experimenting with the tool can feel this way
- stevedonovan 1y ago
  It's not inconsistent to say there's a financial bubble and also genuinely think it's a new era for software development. There aren't enough programmers to justify the valuations and capex
- Ianjit 1y ago
  Dot com was a financial bubble, but the internet was still very usefull. Financial markets can become (often are) dislocated from reality.
- gethly 1y ago
  I sometimes use grok. But not much. Your confusion is strange. I never said the tech is a bubble(it can be used today, although in very limited manner, compared to how it is being sold to the public), just the financial aspect of it. If you'd be more educated in investing, economics or geopolitics you'd understand what is going on. I am not being hyperbolic here. Even Altman admitted AI is a bubble. It's really no secret to anyone. But bubbles will be ridden no matter what, all the way up, until they pop. So knowing it is a bubble does not change much. We just know what we can expect once it pops. tl;dr I was merely answering the question the article proposes.

andyst 1y ago

the AI umbrella has been helpful to my BigCorp to justify more machine learning work, or discrete optimisation and scheduling problems agentic ai which is a huge buzz in enterprise feels more like workflow and rpa (again) and people misunderstanding that getting the happy flow working is only 20% of the job.

firefoxd 1y ago

For most companies AI is a subscription service you sign up for. Because of great marketing campaigns, it has become a necessary tax. If you don't pay, the penalty is you lose value because it doesn't look like you are embracing the future. If you pay, well it's just a tax that you hope your employees will somehow benefit from.

jraby3 1y ago

As a small business owner in a non tech business (60 employees, $40M revenue), AI is definitely worth $20/month but not as I anticipated. I thought we'd use it to reduce our graphics department but instead we've begun outsourcing designers to Colombia. What I actually use it for is to save time and legal costs. For example a client in bankruptcy owes us $20k. Not worth hiring an attorney to walk us through bankruptcy filings. But can easily ask ChatGPT to summarize legal notices and advise us what to do next as a creditor.

flohofwoe 1y ago
Which summarizes the one useful property of LLMs: a slightly better search engine which on top doesn't populate the first 5 result pages with advertisements - yet anyway ;)
- jordanb 1y ago
  No doubt in ten years chatgpt will mostly be telling you things it was paid to say.
- Gud 1y ago
  The saddest part is we used to have highly functional search engines two decades ago, where you would results from subject matter experts. Today it’s only the same SEO formatted crap without answer. I am working on a solution.
pjc50 1y ago
> Not worth hiring an attorney to walk us through bankruptcy filings The AI doesn't carry professional liability insurance, so this is about as good as asking one of the legal subreddits. It's probably fine in this case since the worst case is not getting the money that you were at risk of not getting anyway.

rebeccaskinner 1y ago

Looking at my own use of AI, and at how I see other engineers use it, it often feels like two steps forward and two steps back, and overall not a lot of real progress yet. I see people using agents to develop features, but the amount of time they spend to actually make the agent do the work usually outweighs the time they’d have spent just building the feature themselves. I see people vibe coding their way to working features, but when the LLM gets stuck it takes long enough for even a good developer to realize it and re-engage their critical thinking that it can wipe out the time savings. Having an LLM do code and documentation review seems to usually be a net positive to quality, but that’s hard to sell as a benefit and most people seem to feel like just using the LLM to review things means they aren’t using it enough. Even for engineers there are a lot of non-engineering benefits in companies that use LLMs heavily for things like searching email, ticketing systems, documentation sources, corporate policies, etc. A lot of that could have been done with traditional search methods if different systems had provided better standardized methods of indexing and searching data, but they never did and now LLMs are the best way to plug an interoperability gap that had been a huge problem for a long time. My guess is that, like a lot of other technology driven transformations in how work gets done, AI is going to be a big win in the long term, but the win is going to come on gradually, take ongoing investment, and ultimately be the cumulative result of a lot of small improvements in efficiency across a huge number of processes rather than a single big win.

ernst_klim 1y ago
> the amount of time they spend to actually make the agent do the work usually outweighs the time they’d have spent just building the feature themselves Exactly my experience. I feel like LLMs have potential as Expert Systems/Smart websearch, but not as a generative tool, neither for code nor for text. You spend more time understanding stuff than writing code, and you need to understand what you commit with or without LLM. But writing code is easier that reviewing, and understanding by doing is easier than understanding by reviewing (bc you get one particular thing at the time and don't have to understand the whole picture at once). So I have a feeling that agents do even have negative impact.
- spwa4 1y ago

apexalpha 1y ago

Computers being able to digest vision, audio and other input into text and back has tremendous value. You can’t convince me otherwise, we just haven’t found a ‘killer app’ yet.

ozgung 1y ago
I believe this is the correct way of seeing things. We may not need a killer app though, since AI is not a platform but a core technology. It’s more about the evolution of IT infrastructure and SW systems. Non-tech companies/people don’t need to do anything really. AI will just come to them.

wg0 1y ago

Sounds like blockchain all over. Reminds me of an essay from two product managers in AWS that talked to clients all over US and couldn't get any business to clearly articulate why they need blockchain. Note: AWS has a hosted blockchain that you can use. [1] PS: If anyone has read that essay, please do share the link. I can't really locate it but that's a wonderful read. [1]. https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/

cmckn 1y ago
Tim Bray wrote about it: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Blockchain https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Block...
- wg0 1y ago
  That's exactly it is! Thank you!

cjs_ac 1y ago

Large language models are a deeply impressive technology, but they're not artificial general intelligences, because you need to supervise them. Like everything else that has been called 'artificial intelligence' since the 1950s, I think we'll find some niches that they're good for, and that'll be the end of the hype bubble. The hype does serve a purpose, though: it motivates people to try to find more possible uses for LLMs. However, as with all experiments, we should expect most of these attempts to fail.

fifteen1506 1y ago

Big benefit from coding Agents: for things to work it better have documentation. Which humans usually aren't given, so anything which forces documentation is good.

outlore 1y ago

one of the great benefits of AI so far has been the push for more plain text documentation and opening up API access via MCP. Let's enjoy it while it lasts until we are forced back into walled gardens and micro transactions

kapone 1y ago

Well, as anecdotal data, have you folks noticed ads lately pushing Gemini/Claude/xx on both legacy media and online? If AI (and these products) is sooo great, why do these companies have to advertise to sell their wares? And Google and Microsoft are hellbent on pushing AI into everything. Even if users don't want it. Nope, we're gonna throw the kitchen sink at you and see if it sticks. In the non-tech world, nobody gives a shit about AI. People and businesses go about their daily lives without thinking about things like "Hmmm...maybe I could have prompted that LLM a different way..."

nasmorn 1y ago

The problem with AI is how confidently wrong it is. In Lisbon I uploaded a picture of myself on some church steps and asked ChatGPT where that is. I came up with a place I was sure I’d never been. Then I asked if it could be part of some other place and it said sure it’s inside the main church. The pic was clearly outside. Next it gave me a random famous stair that is so clearly different a human could never be fooled. Each of these lies were extremely elaborate citing sources and describing all the things that matched. The only matching experience was with a taxi in Delhi some 20 years ago where the driver pretended to know where he was going and when I further questioned him he said the 40 story hotel I am looking for has been demolished 5 years after opening. At least he has monetary interest in lying to me so I enter his cab.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

Whether it works or it doesn't, keep talking about "AI", keep speculating. Maintain the hype