Thread

1. bunderbunder · 1790711630 · focus · HN ↗

   They talk a bit about where the AI companies are supposed to get their revenue from. I’d like to see these analyses go a step further and talk about how those AI customers are supposed to come up with that money as well.

   For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now.

   Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

   1. kingstnap · 1790712123 · focus · HN ↗

      > enterprise productivity tooling market

      AI is not a replacement for powerpoint and excel. You can't substitute those.

      White collar worker salaries is ~$30T+ global.

      1. EA-3167 · 1790712419 · focus · HN ↗

         Please don't cover up one insane claim with an even less plausible one.

         1. kingstnap · 1790713167 · focus · HN ↗

            I'm very confused by what you mean.

            My point was that AI isn't some productivity software thing. The addressable market is white collar work that can be done on a computer.

            You think its implausible for AI to replace some fraction of white collar workers? To me this is directionally exactly where this is heading?

            1. shimman · 1790715249 · focus · HN ↗

               Agreed. The literal CEOs of these companies, and their acolytes, have been proudly proclaiming that you can replace all types of workers with AI. We know they have their anti-human sentiments but this is nothing new, as you said.

               1. owebmaster · 1790718941 · focus · HN ↗

                  Meanwhile they pay $500k for the same roles they want other companies to automate (using their products).
            2. tovej · 1790718650 · focus · HN ↗

               If that white collar work disappears, so does most of the demand in the entire economy.
            3. owebmaster · 1790718836 · focus · HN ↗

               > You think its implausible for AI to replace some fraction of white collar workers?

               Yes, it is. Software already did it. Better software (AI) can only marginally change what's already automated.

               1. eurhe · 1790719218 · focus · HN ↗

                  Yup spot on.

                  Either people don’t want to believe or they find it difficult to understand.

                  The only pipe dream AI has is to replace the human in totality. Otherwise it’s at best a complement.

                  1. EA-3167 · 1790720244 · focus · HN ↗

                     It's the old Upton Sinclair line, at the end of the day there's so much money on the line and so much pressure to buy in that people just do. People are easily influenced and overwhelmed by their environment, especially when economic and social incentives are strong to do so. We saw it here with the blind worship of Elon Musk many years ago, then Crypto, then NFT's, and now with this. In every case it wasn't as if there was NOTHING there to admire, whatever I feel about Musk personally SpaceX has achieved remarkable things. Admittedly crypto and NFT's are a lot less useful outside of speculation and some really dark use cases. ML really is incredible and it's going to be something that helps humanity cope with the sheer volume of information that's become available.

                     But that's been conflated with "Actually a $2T Anthropic IPO makes perfect sense because they're going to replace white collar work."

         2. micromacrofoot · 1790716752 · focus · HN ↗

            the people at these companies really believe the insane claims
      2. base698 · 1790713115 · focus · HN ↗

         What does this mean? I've been using AI as a replacement for both of those for longer than a year. If I need a PowerPoint file I have it generated off my tooling. Instead of fiddling to align text you say update slide 6 to look like this, strike this sentence. And you can add even more dynamic content. Like live application dashboards connected to real sources.

         1. kingstnap · 1790713482 · focus · HN ↗

            You can personally do that but I don't see how having ChatGPT means mass uninstalls of excel occur in enterprise. AI using PowerPoint doesn't mean powerpoint got replaced right.

            1. TheOtherHobbes · 1790714455 · focus · HN ↗

               You can't imagine AI keeping the format and replacing the software? Or making it possible to create cheap clones with some customised features?

               I very much can.

               That applies to most software.

               This doesn't solve the problem of "Who gets paid now, and for what?" at all. If anything it makes it worse.

            2. ben_w · 1790714523 · focus · HN ↗

               There's two things.

               LLMs can use PowerPoint, but also LLMs can write the raw document file directly without the software. One time I asked for a letter and what came out was it doing that.

               What really matters with this though is reading other people's documents, whatever format they happen to be in. PowerPoint isn't the only game in town for creating slide decks, but if you want to be sure you can read all the ones sent to you, it used to be the case you'd need a copy.

               Used to be. Now the AI can read and summarise the slides for you.

               ("AI, expand these bullet points into a slide deck" -> "AI, condense this slide deck into bullet points", as the meme goes).

            3. HEmanZ · 1790714663 · focus · HN ↗

               If there are no humans looking at the excel anymore, why is it needed? My guess is all of this office software gets replaced by stuff that looks a lot more low level and controlled by agents, and just converted to a nice view when a human wants to look for some reason.
         2. owebmaster · 1790718707 · focus · HN ↗

            Most people spent 15 minutes making bad PPTs in the past now they spend 5 minutes asking ChatGPT to create one. The presentation/meeting will take the same 2 hours where most ppl will get bored.

            This "productivity" gain changes nothing. Software already optimized most of it in the past 20 years, the gains now are marginal, at best incremental.

            1. eurhe · 1790719090 · focus · HN ↗

               I’d argue productivity is declining in this context.

               The PowerPoint object is meant to be a package of one’s insights. If those insights are of zero value (the less time you spend the less value - correlation) - that time expended is a net negative for he firm’s productivity.

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