The AI revolution has achieved something truly unprecedented: billions in spending, endless executive keynotes, and no measurable payoff for most businesses. Apparently the killer app was convincing CEOs to transfer their budgets to seven tech companies: »Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493.«
ai has also made some people way more productive and automated some really valuable things
the entire industry hasn’t quite been one-guyed as yet. the numbers definitely don’t match the epic valuations however
It’s also a joke how poorly most companies are adopting AI. For many companies there have been meaningful improvements in software over the last few years that have been ignored completely and suddenly these same companies want to step over a bunch of stairs at once (insert meme) and do AI-buzzword-everything.
It doesn’t work like that
The metal fab company i work for is still using software from the 80’s. The same with our state unemployment office lol.
Big tech isn’t exactly winning either. Over $194 billion spent with mere millions in ROI thus far.
record numbers of “how do i connect to localhost from my friend’s laptop” and useless dashboards your devs were too busy to make, tho
I don’t know.
I know Dev teams right now that have gone full AI slop programming and their PMs and Customers see it as insane productivity to the point that they have so much work coming in they can’t stop using AI now.
Do they agree the codebase is in utter shambles? Yes. Do they think it’s fixable? Yes. Do they think they have the time to fix it? Nope.
They’re all just buying time waiting for it to break. The sad part is some of them are sipping the AI koolaid so hard they say they’ll just let the AI fix it when it breaks.
I mean literally just yesterday one of the senior devs was bragging in the cube next to me that he just did 3 months of work in 5 minutes with AI.
Most of these AI sippers are old dudes who are one foot into retirement and instead of coding they want to yap about their golf club set all day.
As a younger dev and a person who loves to code it makes my heart hurt listening to the AI slop bragging.
To be fair, it did pay off in boats and vacation homes for a whole generation of salesmen.
I’d argue that most tech companies aren’t actually seeing benefit matching what they’ve wasted ineffectively
Yeah I don’t even know if the company I work for has actually gotten more benefit than it’s cost us. The bill is significant, for one thing. For another we have a whole group of people developing AI tools for internal use now. They aren’t cheap. Of course there’s some benefit but is it net positive? No idea. Is it hugely positive? Fuck no.
Definitely not the panacea it’s being peddled as. I have yet to see the expectation pan out that I can work less and do the things I enjoy more. (Keep in mind I loved what I did for work so it didn’t used to seem like work. Now it does)
Inside the tech industry, the company with the biggest payoff in this is NVIDIA. With another smaller payoff for AMD. That’s about it.
It’s like a gold rush for fool’s gold. The only ones making money are the guys selling shovels.
Yea no shit. How could anyone have foreseen this!?
Productivity is a collective achievement. AI in its current form increases individual output (not necessarily good output) without any way to support consensus, alignment, understanding, etc. Without AI supported collaboration, AI supported individual productivity makes everything go very fast in every direction. Like an explosion.
It’s a good thing those invasive advertisers are currently covering everybody’s losses. Fuck invasive ads, especially Tide!
With the recent reverse engineering achievements, rather than zero financial payoff, it might be even be negative for the gaming sector in particular.
I don’t believe this at all, the way it works is not completely direct, but through productivity gains that are harder to measure.
From the article (And OPs title)
“there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth.”
