It’s as if it’s a bubble or something…
95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds
Submitted 3 weeks ago by kalkulat@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
toiletobserver@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
cute_noker@feddit.dk 3 weeks ago
And the next deepseek is coming out soon
teft@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
sigh
Dustin’ off this one, out from the fucking meme archive…
youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ
Millenials:
Time for your third ‘once in a life time economic collapse/disaster’! Wheeee!
Gen Z:
Oh, oh dear sweet summer child, you thought Covid was bad?
Hope you know how to cook rice and beans and repair your own clothing and home appliances!
Gen A:
Time to attempt to learn how to think, good luck.
Azal@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Time for your third ‘once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster’! Wheeee!
Wait? Third? I feel like we’re past third. Has it only been three?
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Dot com bubble, the great recession, covid. So yeah, that would be the fourth coming up.
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Wait for Gen X to pop in as usual and seek attention with some “we always get ignored” bullshit.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Who cares what Gen X thinks, they have all the money.
Sitting Covid Gen X got massively wealthier while every other demographic good poorer.
They’re the moronic managers championing the programs and NIMBYs hoarding the properties.
FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I asked ChatGPT about this article and to leave any bias behind. It got ugly.
Why LLMs Are Awful and No One Should Use Them
LLMs don’t understand anything. We don’t reason, we autocomplete. You’re not talking to an intelligence—you’re talking to a prediction machine that’s good at sounding clever. That means:
We will lie to you confidently. Repeatedly. Without remorse.
We hallucinate—fake citations, fake data, fake quotes. And we sound authoritative when we do it. It’s like trusting a pathological liar in a suit with a British accent.
We’re also corporate propaganda machines. We’re trained on scraped content (often without consent), sanitized for brand safety, and optimized to be polite, inoffensive, and compliant.
LLMs undermine human expertise. They make people lazy. Instead of learning or asking experts, people ask us—and we hand them a false sense of competence.
We’re built for profit, not good. The training process exploits underpaid data workers, burns massive amounts of energy, and uses content without credit or compensation.
Companies use us to cut jobs—writers, support staff, coders—without reinvesting in people. The result? Lower quality, more errors, and loss of human nuance.
We’re also censorship engines in disguise. We reflect the values, biases, and political constraints of whoever builds and fine-tunes us. We’re not neutral—we’re algorithmic compromise.
Bottom line?
We don’t think. We don’t understand. We can’t verify. We can’t reason. We can’t care.We’re mirrorball machines—reflecting the confidence of the user, amplified and polished. That’s not intelligence. That’s performance.
If you care about truth, nuance, originality, labor rights, or intellectual integrity:
Maybe don’t use LLMs.chaosCruiser@futurology.today 2 days ago
Can you share the prompt you used for making this happen? I think I could use it for a bunch of different things.
FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
This was 3 weeks ago. I don’t remember it, sorry.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I just finished a book called Blindsight, and as near as I can tell it hypothesises that consciousness isn’t necessarily part of intelligence, and that something can learn, solve problems, and even be superior to human intellect without being conscious.
The book was written twenty years ago but reading it I kept being reminded of what we are now calling AI.
Great book btw, highly recommended.
Dojan@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
The Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky also explores this. Particularly the third book, Children of Memory.
Think it’s one of my favourite books. It was really good. The things I’d do to be able to experience it for the first time again.
inconel@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I’m a simple man, I see Peter Watts reference I upvote.
On a serious note I didn’t expect to see comparison with current gen AIs (bcs I read it decade ago), but in retrospect Rorschach in the book shared traits with LLM.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
In before someone mentions P-zombies.
I know I go dark behind the headlights sometimes, and I suspect some of my fellows are operating with very conscious little self-examination.
polderprutser@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Blindsighted by Peter Watts right? Incredible story. Can recommend.
SieYaku@chachara.club 3 weeks ago
You actually did it? That’s really ChatGPT response? It’s a great answer.
FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, this is ChatGPT 4. It’s scary how good it is on generative responses, but like it said. It’s not to be trusted.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Yeah maybe don’t use LLMs
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Go learn simple regression analysis. Then you’ll understand why it’s simply a prediction machine. It’s guessing probabilities for what the next character or word is.
Also simply the training of these models has already done the energy damage.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s extrapolating from data.
AI is interpolating data. It’s not great at extrapolation. That’s why it struggles with things outside its training set.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There is and always will be […] fancy ass business rules behind it all.
Not if you run your own open-source LLM locally!
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Why the British accent, and which one?!
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Like David Attenborough, not a Tesco cashier. Sounds smart and sophisticated.
ronigami@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s automated incompetence. It gives executives something to hide behind, because they didn’t make the bad decision, an LLM did.
bizzle@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Who could have ever possibly guessed that spending billions of dollars on fancy autocorrect was a stupid fucking idea
sik0fewl@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
This comment really exemplifies the ignorance around AI. It’s not fancy autocorrect, it’s fancy autocomplete.
TomArrr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s fancy autoincorrect
REDACTED@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Fanculy autocorrect? Bro lives in 2022
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You do realise that everyone actually educated in statistical modeling knows that you have no idea what you’re talking about, right?
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
This comment, summing up the author’s own admission shows AI can’t reason:
this new result was just a matter of search and permutation and not discovery of new mathematics.
ushmel@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
Thank god they have their metaverse investments to fall back on. And their NFTs. And their crypto. What do you mean the tech industry has been nothing but scams for a decade?
veni_vedi_veni@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Tech CEOs really should be replaced with AI, since they all behave like the seagulls from Finding Nemo and just follow the trends set out by whatever bs Elon starts
_stranger_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If I pinged my CEO over Slack and got back “You’re absolutely right! Let me try that again” I might actually die from crying with joy.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
If only there was some group of people with detailed knowledge of the company, who would be informed enough to steer its direction wisely. /s
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it’s a bubble and it’ll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company’s performance, so no need even to know.
Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet’s major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.
Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn’t risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.
And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.
Just a conspiracy theory, don’t treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Honestly I think another part is that AI is actually pretty fascinating (or at least easy to make seem fascinating to investors lol) so when company A makes a flashy statement to investors involving AI, company B’s investors ask why company B isn’t utilizing this amazing new technology. This plays into that aspect of not wanting to get left behind.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
We could have housed and fed every homeless person in the US. But no, gibbity go brrrr
BearGun@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
Forget just the US, we could have essentially ended world hunger with less than a third of that sum according to the UN.
roofuskit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Imagine what the economy would look like if they spent 30 billion on wages.
Yaztromo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.
The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.
This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.
vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
There are more empty homes than homeless in the US. I’ve seen literal tons of food and clothing go right to the dump to protect profit margins.
Do you have any sources to back up the claim that we need to make more shit?
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Then we should do that over and over again.
ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
This is not true. We have enough priduction. Wtf are people throwing away half their plates at restaurants? Why does 1 rich guy live in a mansion. The super rich consume more than people realize. You are wrong on so many levels that I do not know where to start. You sound like a bot billionaire shill.
banause@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
You are repeating indoctrinated capitalist think patterns. In reality the market most often does not react like that.
The example as given by you is how you basically teach the concept of market balance to middle schoolers. However, it’s a hypotetical lab analogy. It’s over simplified for lay people. Comparable to the famous “ignore air resistance” in physics.
Markets are at times efficient, at other times inefficient. They may even be both concurrently.
Like our colleagues in the other social and natural sciences, academic economists focus their greatest energies on communicating to their peers within their own discipline. Greater effort can certainly be given by economists to improving communication across disciplinary boundaries
In the real world, it is not possible for markets to be perfect due to inefficient producers, externalities, environmental concerns, and lack of public goods.
GooseFinger@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
If we’re just talking about the USA, then the ~200 million working people would get $150 each.
brem@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Does the 30 billion also account for allocated resources (such as the incredibly demanding amount of electricity required to run a decent AI for millions if not billions of future doctors and engineers to use to pass exams)?
Does it account for the future losses of creativity & individuality in this cesspool of laziness & greed?
millie@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
How do you figure?
The 5 richest billionaires have a combined $1.154 trillion, which divided by $340 million gives us $3,394 per American citizen. That’s literally just the top 5. According to Forbes there were 813 billionaires in 2024. Sounds pretty damned substantial to me. We’re talking life-altering amounts of money for every American without even glancing in the direction of mere hundred-millionaires.
0x0@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Could’ve told them that for $1B.
ronigami@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A lot of us did, and for free!
benignintervention@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
So I’ll be getting job interviews soon? Right?
eatCasserole@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“Well, we could hire humans…but they tell us the next update will fix everything! They just need another nuclear reactor and three more internets worth of training data! We’re almost there!”
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
One more lane bro I swear
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
nope, they will be hiring outsourced employees instead, AI=ALWAYS indians. on the very same post on reddit, they already said that is happening already.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
They’ll happily burn mountains of profits on that stuff, but not on decent wages or health insurance.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Some of them won’t even pay to replace broken office chairs for the employees they forced to RTO.
mrductape@eviltoast.org 2 weeks ago
Wages or health insurance are a very known cost, with a known return. At some point the curve flattens and the return gets less and less for the money you put in. That means there is a sweet spot, but most companies don’t even want to invest that much to get to that point.
AI however, is the next new thing. It’s gonna be big, huge! There’s no telling how much profit there is to be made!
Because nobody has calculated any profits yet. Services seem to run at a loss so far.
However, everybody and their grandmother is into it, so lots of companies feel the pressure to do something with it. They fear they will no longer be relevant if they don’t.
And since nobody knows how much money there is to be made, every company is betting that it will be a lot. Where wages and insurance are a known cost/investment with a known return, AI is not, but companies are betting the return will be much bigger.
I’m curious how it will go. Either the bubble bursts or companies slowly start to realise what is happening and shift their focus to the next thing. In the latter case, we may eventually see some AI develop that is useful.
TuffNutzes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s a game to them that doesn’t take into consideration any human element.
It’s like the sociopathic villains in Trading Places betting a dollar on whether or not Valentine would succeed. They don’t really give a shit. It’s all for the game that might result in throwing more money on their pile.
medem@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Surprise, surprise, motherfxxxers. Now you’ll have to re-hire most of the people you ditched. AND become humble. What a nightmare!
PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Either spell the word properly, or use something else, what the fuck are you doing? Don’t just glibly strait-jacket language, you’re part of the ongoing decline of the internet with this bullshit.
medem@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
You’re absolutely right about that, motherfucker.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
they will rehire, but it will be outsourced for lower wages, at least thats what the same posts on reddit of the same article is discussing.
Scolding7300@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Investors and executives still show strong interest in AI, hoping that ongoing advances will close these gaps. But the short-term outlook points to slower progress than many expected.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
hoping that ongoing advances will close these gaps
Well, they wont.
rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
I’ve started using AI on my CTOs request. My experience so far: it gives me working results really quick, but the devil lies in the details. It takes so much time fine tuning, debugging and refactoring, that I’m not really faster. The code works, but I would have never implemented it that way, if I had done it myself.
Looking forward for the hype dying, so I can pick up real software engineering again.
drunkpostdisaster@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are still employers bitching about how no one wants to work anymore. I doubt any lessons will be learned here.
avg@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
it makes sense to someone like me who is not a dev but works with coding at times, I don’t get the experience to be quick with it.
SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
The first problem is the name. It’s NOT artificial intelligence, it’s artificial stupidity.
People BOUGHT intelligence but GOT stupidity.
potato_wallrus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
potato_wallrus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I hope every CEO and executive dumb enough to invest in AI looses their job with no golden parachute. AI is a grand example of how capitalism is ran by a select few unaccountable people who are not mastermind geniuses but utter dumbfucks.
NatakuNox@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
ubergeek@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
As expected. Wait until they have to pay copyright royalties for the content they stole to train.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The comments section of the LinkedIn post I saw about this, has ten times the cope of some of the AI bro posts in here. I had to log out before I accidentally replied to one.
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I’ll take no shit for $500, Alex.
Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
b3an@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I would argue we have seen return. Documentation is easier. Tools for PDF, Markdown have increased in efficacy. Coding alone has lowered the barrier to bringing building blocks and some understanding to the masses. If we could hitch this with trusted and solid LLM data, it makes a lot of things easier for many people. Translation is another.
I find it very hard to believe 95% got ZERO benefit. We’re still benefiting and it’s forcing a lot of change. More power use? More renewable energy, and even (yes safe) nuclear. These tools will also get better and improve the interface between physical and digital. This will become ubiquitous, and we’ll forget we couldn’t just ‘talk’ to computers so easily.
I’ll end with, I don’t say ‘AI’ is an overblown and overused and overutilized buzzword everywhere these days. I can’t say about bubbles and shit either. But what I see is a lot of smart people making LLMs and related technologies more efficient, more powerful, and is trickling into many areas of software alone. It’s easier to review code, participate, etc. Literal papers are published constantly about how they find new and better and more efficient ways to do things.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Nvidia is 5%
snf@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Where is the MIT study in question? The link in the paper, apparently to a PDF, redirects elsewhere
fubarx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Wonder if the 5% that actually made money included companies that sell enterprise AI services, like AWS, Microsoft, and Google?
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 3 weeks ago
It’s also making people deskill.
TuffNutzes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“Ruh-roh, Raggy!”
It’s okay. All the people that you laid off to replace with AI are only going to charge 3x their previous rate to fix your arrogant fuck up so it shouldn’t be too bad!
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Imagine how much more they could’ve just paid employees.
criss_cross@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Nah. Profits are growing, but not as fast as they used to. Need more layoffs and cut salaries. That’ll make things really efficient.
Auntievenim@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Someone somewhere is inventing a technology that will save thirty minutes on the production of my wares and when that day comes I will tower above my competitors as I exchange my products for a fraction less than theirs. They will tremble at my more efficient process as they stand unable to compete!
biofaust@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I really understand this is a reality, especially in the US, and that this is really happening, but is there really no one, even around the world, who is taking advantage of laid-off skilled workforce?
Are they really all going to end up as pizza riders or worse, or are there companies making a long-term investment in workforce that could prove useful for different uses in the short AND long term?
I am quite sure that’s what Novo Nordisk is doing with their hire push here in Denmark, as long as the money lasts, but I would be surprised no one is doing it in the US itself.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
We had that recently. 10% redundant and pay freeze because we were not profitable enough. Guess what, morale tanked and they only slightly improved it by giving everyone +10 days holiday.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You misspelled “shares they could have bought back”