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The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI. Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I'm not a hater, it could be true, but it seems to be gospel and I'm not sure why. Mapping to 2001 feels silly to me, when we've had other bubbles in the past that led to nothing of real substance. LLMs are cool, but if they can't be relied on to do real work maybe they're not change the world cool? More like 30-40B market cool. EDIT: Just to be clear here. I'm mostly talking about "agents" It's nice to have something that can function as a good Google replacement especially since regular websites have gotten SEOified over the years. Even better if we have internal Search/Chat or whatever. I use Glean at work and it's great. There's some value in summarizing/brainstorming too etc. My point isn't that LLMs et al aren't useful. The existing value though doesn't justify the multi-trillion dollar buildout plans. What does is the attempt to replace all white collar labor with agents. That's the world changing part, not running a pretty successful biz, with a useful product. That's the part where I haven't seen meaningful adoption. This is currently pitched as something that will have nonzero chance of destroying all human life, we can't settle for "Eh it's a bit better than Google and it makes our programmers like 10% more efficient at writing code."

aurareturn 1y ago
Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of programming come from? ChatGPT released data showing that programming is just a tiny fraction of queries people do.
- admissionsguy 1y ago
  When your work consists of writing stuff disconnected from reality it surely helps to have it written automatically.
  - patapong 1y ago
    On the other hand, it's a hundreds-of-billions of dollars market...
    - Gerardo1 1y ago
      What is?
      - NoGravitas 1y ago
        Writing stuff disconnected from reality, I assume.
- Etheryte 1y ago
  The recent MIT report on the state of AI in business feels relevant here [0]: > Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. There's no doubt that you'll find anecdotal evidence both for and against in all variations, what's much more interesting than anecdotes is the aggregate. [0] https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    No. The aggregate is useless. What matters is the 5% that have positive return. In the first few years of any new technology, most people investing it lose money because the transition and experimentation costs are higher than the initial returns. But as time goes on, best practices emerge, investments get paid off, and steady profits emerge.
kumarm 1y ago
[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.
- piker 1y ago
  > Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Try changing something old in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have used before. Your opinion might change drastically.
  - UrineSqueegee 1y ago
    this is literally how i maintain the code at my current position, if i didn't have copilot+ i would be cooked
    - jennyholzer 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - Gerardo1 1y ago
      ...what were you doing before? That's bread and butter development work.
      - UrineSqueegee 11mo ago
        didnt have to maintain any code before thankfully
    - aurareturn 1y ago
      Same here. Coworker left. I now maintain a bunch of Go code and I had never written any before. I use copilot in agent mode.
apercu 1y ago
"Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers." The business model is it is data collection about you on steroids, and that the winning company will eclipse Meta in value. It's just more ad tech with multipliers, and it will continue to control thought, sway policy and decide elections. Just like social media does today.
viking123 1y ago
I think there is real value, for instance nowadays I just use chatGPT as google replacement, brainstorming, and for coding stuff. It's quite useful and it would be hard to go back to time without this kind of tool. The 20 bucks a month is more than worth it. Not sure though that do they make enough revenue and what will be the moat if more or less the best models will converge around the same level. For most normies, it might be hard to spot difference between gpt 5 and claude for instance. Okay for Grok the moat is that it doesn't pretend to be a pope and censor everything.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming Odd way to describe ChatGPT which has >1B users. AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users, Gemini has ~200M users, etc. Adoption is far from low.
- TheCapeGreek 1y ago
  > AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users Does that really count as adoption, when it has been introduced as a default feature?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    Yes, if people are interacting with them, which they are. HN seems to think everyone is like in the bubble here, which thinks AI is completely useless and wants nothing to do with it. Half the world is interacting with it on a regular basis already. Are we anywhere near AGI? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. Inference costs are dropping like a rock, and usage is continuing to skyrocket.
    - majewsky 1y ago
      I am interacting with AI daily through Google products. YouTube is consistently giving me auto-translated titles that are either hilarious or wrong, and I desparately want to turn this bullshit off, but I can't, because it's not giving me an option. That's the kind of adoption that should just be put up for adoption instead. (And of course, the reason that I can tell that the auto-translated video titles are hilarious and/or wrong is because they are translating into a language that I speak from a language that I also speak, but apparently the YouTube app's dev team cannot fathom that a person might speak more than one language.)
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Mostly agreed, but AI overviews are a very bad example. Google can just force feed its massive search user base whatever bullshit it damn pleases. Even if it has negative value to the users. I don't actually think that AI overviews have "negative value" - they have their utility. There are cases where I stop my search right after reading the "AI overview". But "organic" adoption of ChatGPT or Claude or even Gemini and "forced" adoption of AI overviews are two different beasts.
raincole 1y ago
> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming In the last few months, every single non-programmer friend I've met has ChatGPT installed on their phone (N>10). Out of all the people that I know enough to ask if they have ChatGPT installed, there is only one who doesn't have it (my dad). I don't know how many of them are paying customers though. IIRC one of them was using ChatGPT to translate academic writing so I assume he has pro.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  I’ve been trying out locally run models on my phone. The iPhone 17 is able to run some pretty nice models, but they lack access to up to date information from the web like ChatGPT has. Wonder if some company like Kagi would offer some api to let your local model plug in and run searches.
  - data-ottawa 1y ago
    Kagi do but it’s fairly expensive (for my taste) and you have to email them for access. There are other companies that provide these tools for anything supporting MCP.
  - fxtentacle 1y ago
    That would be perfect. Especially because Kagi could also return search results as JSON to the AI if they control both sides of the interaction.
- hermannj314 1y ago
  My daughter and her friends have their own paid chatgpt. She said she uses it to help with math homework and described to me exactly why I bought a $200 TI-92 in the 90s with a CAS. Adoption is high with young people.
billy99k 1y ago
"Where's the business value? " Have you ever used an LLM? I use it every day to help me with research and completing technical reports (which used to be a lot more of my time). Of course you can't just use it blindly, but it definitely adds value.
- sakesun 1y ago
  Have you read the article ? The cost is currently not justified for the benefit.
- lm28469 1y ago
  Does it bring more value than it cost ? That's the real question. Nobody doubt it works, everybody doubt Altboy when he asks $7 trillion
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - UpsideDownRide 1y ago
    This question is pretty hard to answer without knowing the actual costs. Current offerings are usually worth more than they cost. But since the prices are not really reflective of the costs it gets pretty muddy if it is a value add or not.
- player1234 1y ago
  How did you measure this "a lot more of my time", please share your results and methodology!
aiisnotjustah 1y ago
I don't know what you mean by this at all tbh. I don't think the researchers at the top think LLM is AGI. DeepMind and co are already working on world models. The biggest bottleneck right now is compute compute and compute. If an experiement takes MONTH to train, you want a lot more compute. You need compute to optimize what you already have like LLMs and then again a lot of compute to try out new things. All of the compute/Datacenters and GPUs are not LLM GPUs. They are ML capable GPUs.
mnky9800n 1y ago
i think it is more like maps. before 2004, before google maps, the way we interacted with the spatial distribution of places and things was different. all these ai dev tools like claude code as well as tools for writing, etc. are going to change the way we interact with our computers. but on the other side, the reason everyone is so gung ho on all this is because these models basically allow for the true personalization of everything. They can build up enough context about you in every instance of you doing things online that they can craft the perfect ad experience to maximize engagement and conversion. that is why everyone is so obsessed with this stuff. they don't care about AGI, they care about maintaining the current status quo where a large chunk of the money made on the internet is done by delivering ads that will get people to buy stuff.
- UpsideDownRide 1y ago
  I think there is a good flipside too. LLMs potentially enable generating custom made tooling tailored just for you. If you can get/provide data it's pretty easy to cook up solutions. As an example - I'd never bother with mobile app just for myself since it's too annoying to get into for a somewhat small thing. Now I can chug along and have LLM fill in quickly my missing basic in the area.
  - mnky9800n 1y ago
    Yes. In my opinion the promise of LLMs isn’t whatever AGI robots doing everything for you. It’s a kind of holodeck or computer like in Star Trek. A tool that simply is able to translate your ideas into a computational representation.
cornholio 1y ago
It's silly to say that the only objective that will vindicate AI investments is AGI. Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU ) So only looking at video capabilities, or at coding capabilities, it's already ready to automate and upend industries worth trillions in the long run. The emerging reasoning capabilities are very promising, able to generate new theories and make scientific experiments in easy to test fields, such as in vitro drug creation. It doesn't matter if the LLM hallucinates 90% of the time, if it correctly reasons a single time and it can create even a single new cancer drug that passes the test. These are all examples of massive, massive economic disruption by automating intellectual labor, that don't require strict AGI capabilities.
- asdf1280 1y ago
  The problem is that it’s already commodified; there’s no moat. The general tech practice has been capture the market by burning vc money, then jack up prices to profit. All these companies are burning billions to generate a new model and users have already proven there is no brand loyalty. They just hop to the new one when it comes out. So no one can corner the market and when the VC money runs out they’ll have to jack up prices so much that they’ll kill their market
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    > The problem is that it’s already commodified; there’s no moat. From an economy-wide perspective, why does that matter? > users have already proven there is no brand loyalty. They just hop to the new one when it comes out. Great, that means there might be real competition! This generally keeps prices down, it doesn't push them up! It's true that VCs may end up unhappy, but will they be able to do anything about it?
  - frogperson 1y ago
    The most isnt with the llm crestors, its with nvidia, but even that is under seige by Chinese mskers.
codingdave 1y ago
There is a middle ground where LLMs are used as a tool for specific use cases, but not applied universally to all problems. The high adoption of ChatGPT is the proof of this. General info, low accuracy requirements - perfect use case, and it shows. The problem comes in when people then set expectations that a chat solution can solve non-chat problems. When people assume that generated content is the answer but haven't defined the problem. We're not headed for AGI. We're also not going to just say, "oh, well, that was hype" and stop using LLMs. We are going to mature into an industry that understands when and where to apply the correct tools.
calmoo 1y ago
FWIW Derek Thompson (the author of this blogpost) isn't exactly a 'business guy'
- jennyholzer 1y ago
  If I'm not mistaken he's working with Ezra Klein to push the Democrats to embrace racism instead of popular economic measures. Edit: I expect that these guys will try to make a J.D. Vance style Republican pivot in the next 4-8 years. Second Edit: Ezra Klein's recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates is very specifically why I expect he will pivot to being a Republican in the near future. Listen closely. Ezra Klein will not under any circumstances utter the words "Black People". Again and again, Coates brings up issues that Black People face in America, and Klein diverts by pretending that Coates is talking about Marginalized Groups in general or Trans People in particular. Klein's political movement is about eradicating discussion of racial discrimination from the Democratic party. Third Edit: @calmoo: I think you're not listening to the nuances of my opinion, and instead having an intense emotional reaction to my well-justified claims of racism.
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    We're very off topic, but if you're truly interested in Ezra Klein's worldview, I highly recommend his recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. At minimum, I think you'll discover that Ezra's feelings are a lot more nuanced than you're making them out to be. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ta-nehisi-coates.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qU8.UBmt.T1yHskjmGbl4&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
  - calmoo 1y ago
    I don't really want to discuss politics off the bat of my purely 'for your information' comment, but I think you're grossly misrepresenting Ezra Klein's worldview and not listening to the nuances of his opinion, and instead having an intense emotional reaction to his words. Take a step back and try to think a bit more rationally here. Also your prediction of them making a JD vance republican pivot is extremely misguided. I would happily bet my life savings against that prediction.
PicassoCTs 1y ago
[dead]
joules77 1y ago
Cause the story is no more about Business or Economics. This is more like the nuke arms race in the 1940s. Red Queen Dynamics.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Why would we want AGI? I've yet to read a convincing argument in favor (but granted, I never looked into it, I'm still at science-fiction doomerism). One thing that irks me is that people see it as inevitable, and that we have to pursue AGI because if we don't, someone else will. Or more bleak, if we don't actively pursue us, our malignant future AGI overlords will punish us for not bringing it into existence (roko's basilisk, the thing Musk and Grimes apparently bonded over because they're weird)
skybrian 1y ago
Maybe you just haven’t heard of them? For example, just the other day I heard about a company using an LLM to provide advice to doctors. News to me. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openevidence-the-fastest-growing-application-for-physicians-in-history-announces-210-million-round-at-3-5-billion-valuation-302505806.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openevidence-the-fa... > OpenEvidence is actively used across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide and by more than 40% of physicians in the United States who log in daily to make high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care. OpenEvidence continues to grow by over 65,000 new verified U.S. clinician registrations each month. […] More than 100 million Americans this year will be treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence. More: https://robertwachter.substack.com/p/medicines-ai-knowledge-war-heats https://robertwachter.substack.com/p/medicines-ai-knowledge-...
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  I've had doctors google things in front of me. This may be an improvement.
kalap_ur 1y ago
Likely not true re adoption. According to McKinsey November 2024 12% of employees in the US used AI for >30% of their daily tasks. I saw another research early this summer, it said that 40% of employees use AI. Adoption is already pretty relevant. The real question is: number of people x token requirement of their daily tasks equals how many tokens, and where are we there. Based on McK, we possibly around 17% unless remaining 50% of tasks requires just way more complexity, because then that would obviously mean the incremental tasks require maybe exponentially more tokens and then penetration will be indeed low. But for this we need to know total token need of daily tasks of average office worker.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tim333 1y ago
>the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important... I don't think that's true. The people who think AI is important call it AI. The skeptics call it LLMs so they can say LLMs won't work. It's kind of a strawman argument really.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  You can buy a rice cooker that claims it uses "AI", it's too much of a marketing buzzword to be useful.

aurareturn 1y ago

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of programming come from? ChatGPT released data showing that programming is just a tiny fraction of queries people do.

admissionsguy 1y ago
When your work consists of writing stuff disconnected from reality it surely helps to have it written automatically.
- patapong 1y ago
  On the other hand, it's a hundreds-of-billions of dollars market...
  - Gerardo1 1y ago
    What is?
    - NoGravitas 1y ago
      Writing stuff disconnected from reality, I assume.
Etheryte 1y ago
The recent MIT report on the state of AI in business feels relevant here [0]: > Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. There's no doubt that you'll find anecdotal evidence both for and against in all variations, what's much more interesting than anecdotes is the aggregate. [0] https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...
- crazygringo 1y ago
  No. The aggregate is useless. What matters is the 5% that have positive return. In the first few years of any new technology, most people investing it lose money because the transition and experimentation costs are higher than the initial returns. But as time goes on, best practices emerge, investments get paid off, and steady profits emerge.

kumarm 1y ago

[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.

piker 1y ago
> Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Try changing something old in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have used before. Your opinion might change drastically.
- UrineSqueegee 1y ago
  this is literally how i maintain the code at my current position, if i didn't have copilot+ i would be cooked
  - jennyholzer 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - Gerardo1 1y ago
    ...what were you doing before? That's bread and butter development work.
    - UrineSqueegee 11mo ago
      didnt have to maintain any code before thankfully
  - aurareturn 1y ago
    Same here. Coworker left. I now maintain a bunch of Go code and I had never written any before. I use copilot in agent mode.

apercu 1y ago

"Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers." The business model is it is data collection about you on steroids, and that the winning company will eclipse Meta in value. It's just more ad tech with multipliers, and it will continue to control thought, sway policy and decide elections. Just like social media does today.

viking123 1y ago

I think there is real value, for instance nowadays I just use chatGPT as google replacement, brainstorming, and for coding stuff. It's quite useful and it would be hard to go back to time without this kind of tool. The 20 bucks a month is more than worth it. Not sure though that do they make enough revenue and what will be the moat if more or less the best models will converge around the same level. For most normies, it might be hard to spot difference between gpt 5 and claude for instance. Okay for Grok the moat is that it doesn't pretend to be a pope and censor everything.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming Odd way to describe ChatGPT which has >1B users. AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users, Gemini has ~200M users, etc. Adoption is far from low.

TheCapeGreek 1y ago
> AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users Does that really count as adoption, when it has been introduced as a default feature?
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  Yes, if people are interacting with them, which they are. HN seems to think everyone is like in the bubble here, which thinks AI is completely useless and wants nothing to do with it. Half the world is interacting with it on a regular basis already. Are we anywhere near AGI? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. Inference costs are dropping like a rock, and usage is continuing to skyrocket.
  - majewsky 1y ago
    I am interacting with AI daily through Google products. YouTube is consistently giving me auto-translated titles that are either hilarious or wrong, and I desparately want to turn this bullshit off, but I can't, because it's not giving me an option. That's the kind of adoption that should just be put up for adoption instead. (And of course, the reason that I can tell that the auto-translated video titles are hilarious and/or wrong is because they are translating into a language that I speak from a language that I also speak, but apparently the YouTube app's dev team cannot fathom that a person might speak more than one language.)
ACCount37 1y ago
Mostly agreed, but AI overviews are a very bad example. Google can just force feed its massive search user base whatever bullshit it damn pleases. Even if it has negative value to the users. I don't actually think that AI overviews have "negative value" - they have their utility. There are cases where I stop my search right after reading the "AI overview". But "organic" adoption of ChatGPT or Claude or even Gemini and "forced" adoption of AI overviews are two different beasts.

raincole 1y ago

> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming In the last few months, every single non-programmer friend I've met has ChatGPT installed on their phone (N>10). Out of all the people that I know enough to ask if they have ChatGPT installed, there is only one who doesn't have it (my dad). I don't know how many of them are paying customers though. IIRC one of them was using ChatGPT to translate academic writing so I assume he has pro.

Gigachad 1y ago
I’ve been trying out locally run models on my phone. The iPhone 17 is able to run some pretty nice models, but they lack access to up to date information from the web like ChatGPT has. Wonder if some company like Kagi would offer some api to let your local model plug in and run searches.
- data-ottawa 1y ago
  Kagi do but it’s fairly expensive (for my taste) and you have to email them for access. There are other companies that provide these tools for anything supporting MCP.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  That would be perfect. Especially because Kagi could also return search results as JSON to the AI if they control both sides of the interaction.
hermannj314 1y ago
My daughter and her friends have their own paid chatgpt. She said she uses it to help with math homework and described to me exactly why I bought a $200 TI-92 in the 90s with a CAS. Adoption is high with young people.

billy99k 1y ago

"Where's the business value? " Have you ever used an LLM? I use it every day to help me with research and completing technical reports (which used to be a lot more of my time). Of course you can't just use it blindly, but it definitely adds value.

sakesun 1y ago
Have you read the article ? The cost is currently not justified for the benefit.
lm28469 1y ago
Does it bring more value than it cost ? That's the real question. Nobody doubt it works, everybody doubt Altboy when he asks $7 trillion
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- UpsideDownRide 1y ago
  This question is pretty hard to answer without knowing the actual costs. Current offerings are usually worth more than they cost. But since the prices are not really reflective of the costs it gets pretty muddy if it is a value add or not.
player1234 1y ago
How did you measure this "a lot more of my time", please share your results and methodology!

aiisnotjustah 1y ago

I don't know what you mean by this at all tbh. I don't think the researchers at the top think LLM is AGI. DeepMind and co are already working on world models. The biggest bottleneck right now is compute compute and compute. If an experiement takes MONTH to train, you want a lot more compute. You need compute to optimize what you already have like LLMs and then again a lot of compute to try out new things. All of the compute/Datacenters and GPUs are not LLM GPUs. They are ML capable GPUs.

mnky9800n 1y ago

i think it is more like maps. before 2004, before google maps, the way we interacted with the spatial distribution of places and things was different. all these ai dev tools like claude code as well as tools for writing, etc. are going to change the way we interact with our computers. but on the other side, the reason everyone is so gung ho on all this is because these models basically allow for the true personalization of everything. They can build up enough context about you in every instance of you doing things online that they can craft the perfect ad experience to maximize engagement and conversion. that is why everyone is so obsessed with this stuff. they don't care about AGI, they care about maintaining the current status quo where a large chunk of the money made on the internet is done by delivering ads that will get people to buy stuff.

UpsideDownRide 1y ago
I think there is a good flipside too. LLMs potentially enable generating custom made tooling tailored just for you. If you can get/provide data it's pretty easy to cook up solutions. As an example - I'd never bother with mobile app just for myself since it's too annoying to get into for a somewhat small thing. Now I can chug along and have LLM fill in quickly my missing basic in the area.
- mnky9800n 1y ago
  Yes. In my opinion the promise of LLMs isn’t whatever AGI robots doing everything for you. It’s a kind of holodeck or computer like in Star Trek. A tool that simply is able to translate your ideas into a computational representation.

cornholio 1y ago

It's silly to say that the only objective that will vindicate AI investments is AGI. Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU ) So only looking at video capabilities, or at coding capabilities, it's already ready to automate and upend industries worth trillions in the long run. The emerging reasoning capabilities are very promising, able to generate new theories and make scientific experiments in easy to test fields, such as in vitro drug creation. It doesn't matter if the LLM hallucinates 90% of the time, if it correctly reasons a single time and it can create even a single new cancer drug that passes the test. These are all examples of massive, massive economic disruption by automating intellectual labor, that don't require strict AGI capabilities.

asdf1280 1y ago
The problem is that it’s already commodified; there’s no moat. The general tech practice has been capture the market by burning vc money, then jack up prices to profit. All these companies are burning billions to generate a new model and users have already proven there is no brand loyalty. They just hop to the new one when it comes out. So no one can corner the market and when the VC money runs out they’ll have to jack up prices so much that they’ll kill their market
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  > The problem is that it’s already commodified; there’s no moat. From an economy-wide perspective, why does that matter? > users have already proven there is no brand loyalty. They just hop to the new one when it comes out. Great, that means there might be real competition! This generally keeps prices down, it doesn't push them up! It's true that VCs may end up unhappy, but will they be able to do anything about it?
- frogperson 1y ago
  The most isnt with the llm crestors, its with nvidia, but even that is under seige by Chinese mskers.

codingdave 1y ago

There is a middle ground where LLMs are used as a tool for specific use cases, but not applied universally to all problems. The high adoption of ChatGPT is the proof of this. General info, low accuracy requirements - perfect use case, and it shows. The problem comes in when people then set expectations that a chat solution can solve non-chat problems. When people assume that generated content is the answer but haven't defined the problem. We're not headed for AGI. We're also not going to just say, "oh, well, that was hype" and stop using LLMs. We are going to mature into an industry that understands when and where to apply the correct tools.

calmoo 1y ago

FWIW Derek Thompson (the author of this blogpost) isn't exactly a 'business guy'

jennyholzer 1y ago
If I'm not mistaken he's working with Ezra Klein to push the Democrats to embrace racism instead of popular economic measures. Edit: I expect that these guys will try to make a J.D. Vance style Republican pivot in the next 4-8 years. Second Edit: Ezra Klein's recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates is very specifically why I expect he will pivot to being a Republican in the near future. Listen closely. Ezra Klein will not under any circumstances utter the words "Black People". Again and again, Coates brings up issues that Black People face in America, and Klein diverts by pretending that Coates is talking about Marginalized Groups in general or Trans People in particular. Klein's political movement is about eradicating discussion of racial discrimination from the Democratic party. Third Edit: @calmoo: I think you're not listening to the nuances of my opinion, and instead having an intense emotional reaction to my well-justified claims of racism.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  We're very off topic, but if you're truly interested in Ezra Klein's worldview, I highly recommend his recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. At minimum, I think you'll discover that Ezra's feelings are a lot more nuanced than you're making them out to be. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ta-nehisi-coates.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qU8.UBmt.T1yHskjmGbl4&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
- calmoo 1y ago
  I don't really want to discuss politics off the bat of my purely 'for your information' comment, but I think you're grossly misrepresenting Ezra Klein's worldview and not listening to the nuances of his opinion, and instead having an intense emotional reaction to his words. Take a step back and try to think a bit more rationally here. Also your prediction of them making a JD vance republican pivot is extremely misguided. I would happily bet my life savings against that prediction.

PicassoCTs 1y ago

[dead]

joules77 1y ago

Cause the story is no more about Business or Economics. This is more like the nuke arms race in the 1940s. Red Queen Dynamics.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

Why would we want AGI? I've yet to read a convincing argument in favor (but granted, I never looked into it, I'm still at science-fiction doomerism). One thing that irks me is that people see it as inevitable, and that we have to pursue AGI because if we don't, someone else will. Or more bleak, if we don't actively pursue us, our malignant future AGI overlords will punish us for not bringing it into existence (roko's basilisk, the thing Musk and Grimes apparently bonded over because they're weird)

skybrian 1y ago

Maybe you just haven’t heard of them? For example, just the other day I heard about a company using an LLM to provide advice to doctors. News to me. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openevidence-the-fastest-growing-application-for-physicians-in-history-announces-210-million-round-at-3-5-billion-valuation-302505806.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openevidence-the-fa... > OpenEvidence is actively used across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide and by more than 40% of physicians in the United States who log in daily to make high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care. OpenEvidence continues to grow by over 65,000 new verified U.S. clinician registrations each month. […] More than 100 million Americans this year will be treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence. More: https://robertwachter.substack.com/p/medicines-ai-knowledge-war-heats https://robertwachter.substack.com/p/medicines-ai-knowledge-...

datadrivenangel 1y ago
I've had doctors google things in front of me. This may be an improvement.

kalap_ur 1y ago

Likely not true re adoption. According to McKinsey November 2024 12% of employees in the US used AI for >30% of their daily tasks. I saw another research early this summer, it said that 40% of employees use AI. Adoption is already pretty relevant. The real question is: number of people x token requirement of their daily tasks equals how many tokens, and where are we there. Based on McK, we possibly around 17% unless remaining 50% of tasks requires just way more complexity, because then that would obviously mean the incremental tasks require maybe exponentially more tokens and then penetration will be indeed low. But for this we need to know total token need of daily tasks of average office worker.

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tim333 1y ago

>the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important... I don't think that's true. The people who think AI is important call it AI. The skeptics call it LLMs so they can say LLMs won't work. It's kind of a strawman argument really.

kalleboo 1y ago
You can buy a rice cooker that claims it uses "AI", it's too much of a marketing buzzword to be useful.