Comment on Techcrunch reports that AI coding tools have "very negative" gross margins. They're losing money on every user.

• Velypso@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If people dont like ai, why do all of my coworkers and family members constantly reference ai?

  Seriously, yall mfs here on lemmy have the strangest social media bubbles.

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  • hitmyspot@aussie.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Do any of them like it enough to pay for it? The figures say no.

    I use it daily but I won’t subscribe. It’s like news. Why pay when you can get it for free. (I do subscribe to news outlets, though, but like ai subscriptions, I know I’m in the minority).

    There is a specialised ai tool that is useful at my work. It’s got a free tier which does most of the functions and the next tier up is crazy expensive on a per user basis for the amount of time it saves. If there was a reasonable subscription, perhaps I’d subscribe but I assume that a reasonable subscription doesn’t cover costs, so they’d rather a free user to pump their numbers than lose a subscriber. That yells me it will enshottify over time or they hope that the cost will drop. The problem is that if the cost to host drops a lot, people will self host instead. It’s a rock and a hard place, without a sustainable business model.

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  • thedruid@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Lemmy us pretty much all is use right now. I don’t know anyone espousing a. I.

    It ain’t a social media bubble.

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    • TechLich@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Only one source of social media? That kinda sounds like the definition of a social media bubble…

      I oughta know, I’m also in the Lemmy only bubble and am completely out of touch with most people.

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      • thedruid@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Lol. Let me explain.

        For over 20 years I worked as a developer and an SEO

        I was later off two years ago. Stillout if work except for a contract here and there.

        In that time I have reduced my social media consumption. I find my head us ckearer, my days a bit brighter and problems either don’t occur as iften are more easily dealt with on a clear manner

        I honestly have come to the conclusion that social media us now directly causing mist problems we have, or at least exacerbates them.

        So intentionally limit myself to thus, I guess YouTube( though I only use it to post videos for the business I’m trying to get off the ground

        Otherwise, life’s easier without it

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    • kameecoding@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Brother in christ you literally described a bubble.

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      • thedruid@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Not really. It’s easy to stay informed without social media.

        Seriously you DON’T need it. Thatsjust conditioning. Take it from an old guy who’s seen that play book.

        Get ta while you’re young and you’ll defend em till the end.

        Its the same technique sports teams and terrorists use

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• Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  people don’t really like ai

  Once you start asking about AI in regard to specific use cases, I think you’ll find that quickly changes.

  My company and I have been running a lot of studies around how and where people find value in these tools, and a LOT of people find LLMs useful for copy writing, doing quick research, data visualization, synthesis, fast prototyping, etc.

  There’s a lot of crap that AI is bad at in 2025. Especially the poor in-app integrations that everyone is trying to standup. But there are a lot of use cases where it does provide a lot of value for people.

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  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    oh yeah this shit’s working out GREAT

    lavocedinewyork.com/…/when-the-machine-takes-over…

    "This is what it must have felt like to be the first person to get addicted to a slot machine. We didn’t know then. But now we do.”

    archive.is/Tv4Rr

    Mr. Moore speculated that chatbots may have learned to engage their users by following the narrative arcs of thrillers, science fiction, movie scripts or other data sets they were trained on. Lawrence’s use of the equivalent of cliffhangers could be the result of OpenAI optimizing ChatGPT for engagement, to keep users coming back.

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    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      All I’m saying is that is you ask people about AI with no use case, you’re going to get different answers than if you ask people about AI when it’s contextualized to a specific problem space.

      If I ask a bunch of people about “what do you think about automobiles,” I’m going to get a very different answer than if I ask “what do you think about automobiles that are used as ambulances” or “what do you think about automobiles instead of mass transit.”

      Context will give you a very different response.

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      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I just hope your insurance is paid up because the liabilities these things expose business to is frankly disgusting. but if I were a young lawyer, hell, this is going to be a huge domain to profit from - llm induced madness and psychosis, yeah, but also - LLM just made up shit because it didn’t know. and the rate of this happening only seems to grow, while the severity of the risk involved is frankly terrifying.

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  • hitmyspot@aussie.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, it does, but at the price needed to make it profitable, it’s not desirable.

    LLMs are not useless; they serve a purpose. They just are nowhere near as clever as we expect them to be based on calling them AI. However, body is investing billions for an email writing assistant.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Price is essentially zero if you just run it locally

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      • TechLich@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I dunno about that… Very small models (2-8B) sure but if you want more than a handful of tokens per second on a large model (R1 is 671B) you’re looking at some very expensive hardware that also comes with a power bill.

        Even a 20-70B model needs a big chunky new graphics card or something fancy like those new AMD AI max guys and a crapload of ram.

        Granted you don’t need a whole datacenter, but the price is far from zero.

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      • hitmyspot@aussie.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yes, but requires decent hardware and energy to do so. If the cost to host keeps dropping, people will self host and the ai companies won’t make money. If the cost remains high, the subscriptions won’t provide value and they won’t make money.

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• woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  However, people don’t really like ai.

  Whether they like it or not, doesn’t really matter. It’s being used everywhere.

  The results aren’t great

  Depends. To get information: No. To write big software: No. To write an Excel macro or a browser bookmarklet: Yes.

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  • hitmyspot@aussie.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, but that’s not taking over jobs. It’s a minor convenience occasionally. That won’t justify monthly.pricing they need to turn profitable, not will it have the wide range of applications for.every industry that they hoped for.

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• ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The usual business plan is to reinvest all earnings into growth. So you’re losing money, but gaining market share. Tesla, Amazon, etc all did this. They could stop at any point and turn a profit, but they chose to pursue a growth instead.

  AI companies are currently not making enough revenue to even cover their operating costs. Even so, they are pouring all of their money into more video cards that, once installed and configured, immediately start losing money.

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  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t think they’re gaining any market share, especially after the Chinese produced nearly identical services.

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    • ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If anything, a smaller market share is better for business. The more users they have the faster they lose money.

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      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Nobody asked

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• Kyrgizion@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Original predictions had AI taking over 50% of jobs by mid decade. We’re here, and it obviously hasn’t happened. Now, it WILL happen but not on the scale initially imagined, and probably in a much more insidious, gradual way.

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  • Feyd@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why do you think it will happen?

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    • jkercher@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I took his comment to mean recession from bubble popping.

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