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. simianwords · 1790712643 · focus · HN ↗

         this also happened with the internet. 6T is possible only if AI creates more wealth. same as with internet. Its not a zero sum game.

         1. Legend2440 · 1790713076 · focus · HN ↗

            Indeed, it is hard to say exactly how much wealth the internet creates, but it's a lot. E-commerce alone is $30 trillion industry; some estimates put the total economic value of the internet at $200 trillion or higher.

            That said, this came too late for investors in the dot-com boom. AI investors may find themselves in a similar situation.

            1. sigmoid10 · 1790713999 · focus · HN ↗

               The dotcom bubble burst because the development of the internet could not keep up with expectations, even though investors were correct in principle with their assumption it would generate swaths of wealth. For AI the hope is that AI itself will start to push its own development and adoption sooner rather than later, so the timing issue that killed dotcom investors might instead make AI investors insanely rich. That's why we're still seeing heaps of money getting dumped into it.

               1. eurhe · 1790718823 · focus · HN ↗

                  That’s a very charitable take.

                  Without smartphone, cellular networks etc you’d be miles off. Nobody had this in their thesis so they were plain wrong.

                  1. sigmoid10 · 1790871355 · focus · HN ↗

                     Young people and vanilla users might only see "the internet" as something that primarily happens on smartphones, but there are entire industries out there dependent on software that doesn't even exist for mobile phones yet still requires an internet connection. Smartphone internet is primarily an end-user/casual consumer thing. Sure there is a lot of money in that too if you can capture millions of users, but the real easy money is in B2B. And everyone in the dotcom era correctly saw that coming, but the digitalisation simply happened too slow for most industries because there was a whole generation of people who grew up without computers and who didn't mind wasting hours everyday on something senseless.

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