Submitted 2 days ago by chobeat@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.world
https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
This is happening at my company. They gave us 6 months to build an AI-tool to replace a non-AI tool that has been very well built and tested for 6 years, and works perfectly well. The AI tool has some very amazing features, but it could never replace the good old tool.
The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.
The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.
AI in a nutshell.
A shame, because the underlying technology - with time and patience and less of an eye towards short term profits - could be very useful in sifting large amounts of disorganized information. But what we got was so far removed from what anyone asked for.
A narrow purpose AI trained to recognize tumor growths early is the kind of AI that makes sense to me.
Capitalism strikes again! All the good generative AI could and does sometimes do but some capitalist made an email sound less like a soulless, corporate turd and it was to the moon with whatever state the tech was at! Rich people have no creativity, imagination, or understanding of the tech. They’re always looking for ways to remove labor costs and make those phat stacks! We could have used generative AI to handle a lot of the shitty, mundane stuff at a faster rate, but no they chose to replace the artists’ creations so they didn’t have to pay for the cost of labor.
Management was planning implementing Google Vertex (AI search platform), but since we already have all our data in ElasticSearch and it supports vectors, I said why not try to implement it myself. With integrated GPU and a very small model, I could create a working POC and it is gonna be - not overexaggerating - 50 times cheaper.
As someone whose had to analyze probably a billion lines of log files in my career, having an AI to do at least some sifting would be pretty great.
Or one that watches a Grafana dashboard and figures out some obscure, long term pattern I can’t see that’s causing an annoying problem.
I hate when they make these “holographic screen” images and the screen isn’t mirrored. If the guy that’s working on it is looking at it normally, then it should be mirrored for the camera.
This is so pedantic but adorable lol
It’s actually a really good representation of how execs are viewing AI. It’s a bunch of meaningless graphs and pictures of robots with the word ‘AI’ sprinkled over the place, the whole thing is backwards for the worker, and it’s imaginary.
this article is itself a synecdoche of shitty management? oh, the irony!
Well now I can’t unsee that. Thanks for ruining my day 🤣
As a non native English speaker, I found the “pilot” thing a bit confusing. But:
pilot = pilot program
And then it made sense.
Anyways I think it’s not so much the 95% that fail that matter, it’s the 5% that succeed.
Anyways I think it’s not so much the 95% that fail that matter, it’s the 5% that succeed.
Succeeding in what is also a critical point.
Succeeding in dramatically improving the library sciences? In rapidly sequencing and modeling data in chemistry or biology? In language translation? Cool. Cool. Cool.
Succeeding in slop-ifying mass media? In convincingly fabricating data to dupe industry professionals and regulatory officials? In jamming up my phone with automated sales calls? Less cool.
Correct, not all things that matter are positive.,
Makes a planet burning bullshit machine.
Does not have any monetization plans.
“I’m telling you guys, it’s only a matter of time before investor money starts rolling in”
I want to start using your “PBBM” instead of “LLM”.
Oh, the investor money already rolled in.
It’s just that investors also want it to roll back out again. That’s what they’re going to struggle with.
Good.
Perish.
for example, “have seen revenues jump from zero to $20 million in a year,” he said. “It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” he added.
Sounds like they were able to sell their AI services. That doesn’t really measure AI success, only product market success.
Celebrating a revenue jump from zero, presumably because they did not exist before, is… quite surprising. It’s not like they became more efficient thanks to AI.
It depends on the objectives. They were successful at selling useless crap to fools.
Frankly, I don’t believe that even 5% werre successful by any objective criteria.
That’s on par with all start-ups
I can’t help but laugh at the note about small start ups lead by 19-20 YOs succeeding with millions of dollars by ‘partnering well’ and so on.
The success or failure of these AI companies seems almost entirely driven by the amount of Venture Capital thrown at them. A company like Perplexity, with practically zero product, having been formed less than 5 years ago, but being able to put up $35 billion in an offer to buy google chrome… I can’t help but suspect that a big part of it is google handing perplexity a pile of money via “Venture Capitalist” screens, to help offload Chrome to mitigate their regulatory monopoly problems. But whatever the details, them having that pile of money is sure as shit not a matter of having a good product / partnering with other industries well.
All work with AI has to be double checked. It only works on the first try in the simplest of cases. Even then I need it to run through a few iterations to get the code features I want. You still have to be able to run through the code and understand it regardless of the source.
I hope you’re all keeping some money set aside for when the AI bubble pops. It could end up being the best time to invest at a discount since March 2020.
When Trump got elected I sold some of my stocks. My investments are also my retirement funds, so I don’t need them for a while. I’m waiting until the next crash starts, or something else that’s pretty bad (war, rogue AI, whatever). If the market crashes I can immediately step in.
Nice.
I recently sold a portion of my crypto at a profit and am just keeping it in a money market for the moment. I want to have a certain amount to throw in stocks when the next crash comes, but don’t want to lose out on some of the good things happening now in terms of investing.
I can see that happening… but invest in what? NVIDIA?
Oil stocks were down 90% in March 2020. That’s what I went with. You can profit off a lot of things if you’re willing to hold for a few years.
I have trouble just connecting to copilot many days.
Good
I’m confused by the article suddenly changing to seemingly other semi-related topics and pieces.
That’s AI doing a thing that they are trying to sell you as the successful 5%
Nothing new
graycube@lemmy.world 2 days ago
We also don’t know the true cost of these tools since most AI service providers are still operating at a loss.
Thorry84@feddit.nl 2 days ago
Not simply operating at a loss, absolutely dumping their prices giving away their products for almost nothing to gain market share. They are burning money at an impressive rate, just for some imaginary payoff in the future.
altphoto@lemmy.today 2 days ago
A future where we don’t have jobs so the rich can make more money by selling us stuff? But I won’t have money to pay for stuff! Hmmm!
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
And, in doing so, they’ve set the market price at that value for the service they advertise, which is more than they deliver already.
When Ai enters the Valley of Discontent, the price it can set for what it actually offers will be even less than it is now.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The same was true for YouTube in the beginning, they operated at a loss, and when people were hooked on the service, they monetized it.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s hard to imagine that gaining market share is even meaningful right now. There’s such a profusion of stuff out there. How much does it actually mean if someone is using your product today, I wonder?
Taldan@lemmy.world 2 days ago
So many companies are going to get burnt by it
I know people replacing basic tools with AI versions that are basically just running the simply tool and pretty printing the output
They’re only foing it because it’s basically free to run it through AI. That
whoisbut with aI is going to be so expensive when these companies enshittif-AImmmac@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
This is true with most VC backed tech companies
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The dream is to destroy things like entry level professional jobs so they can add to the class divide.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They are sucking up our power supply at a furious pace though.