‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom

222 points · 335 comments · Betelbuddy

  1. bunderbunder · · 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 · · 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. base698 · · 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 · · 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. ben_w · · 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).

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.