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. Legend2440 · 1790712395 · focus · HN ↗

      Keep in mind wealth is not a fixed thing. If AI makes their businesses more productive, it would allow the creation of more wealth, giving them more money to pay for AI with.

      This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.

      1. bunderbunder · 1790714104 · focus · HN ↗

         But that's where the "Why?" comes in.

         At a time when corporate CEOs are largely saying that they can't see that AI has improved office productivity at all, why should we believe that a killer productivity application of genai that's amazing enough to justify an order of magnitude increase in enterprise spending on productivity tools is just around the corner?

         1. strulovich · 1790714353 · focus · HN ↗

            Are they saying it right now?

            I think CEOs could honestly say it a year ago, but by now the numbers of those who say so should be dwindling.

            Recent surveys by BCG and others suggest things have changed.

            Personally, I know many people in different fields who’ve seen crazy speed ups in many of their tasks.

            1. trashface · 1790715930 · focus · HN ↗

               Maybe they are speeding up things that were not the bottleneck or don't matter. Or LLMs speed up the time to learn, "well this idea probably sucks actually", which is great, but in the end there is still no good idea. For software dev, it had already gotten pretty efficient before LLMs came around - the business of making software demanded it. There are still gains to be had no doubt, but many will have less impact.

               I'm using claude to make gaming mod apps I never would have bothered to code before, but they have zero monetizable value. There is demand for sure, but somewhat ironically, copyright/IP/TOS law stands in the way. The thing which committed the biggest copyright infringement in human history lets me make another thing which I can't release because of copyright law. I'd get cease-and-desisted instantly if I did so.

               1. bunderbunder · 1790724389 · focus · HN ↗

                  For my part I’ve seen it actually slowing down time to decide ideas suck. It’s reduced the friction to start implementing so much that people are just diving in before they’ve even had a chance to fully bake the idea. At which point they’re likely to get stuck on Mr Sunk Cost’s Wild Ride.

                  Management doesn’t see the problem because they are still completely distracted trying to measure dev team productivity in story points or KLOC instead of something meaningful like USD.

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