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95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds

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Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨kalkulat@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://thedailyadda.com/95-of-companies-see-zero-return-on-30-billion-generative-ai-spend-mit-report-finds/

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  • DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    As programmer. It’s helping my productivity. And look I am SDET in theory I will be the first to go, and I tried to make an agent doing most of my job, but it always things to correct.

    But programming requires a lot of boilerplate code, using an agent to make boilerplate files so I can correct and adjust is speeding up a lot what I do.

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    • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Same here. I love it when Windsurf corrects nested syntax that’s always a pain, or when I need it to refactor six similar functions into one, or write trivial tests and basic regex. It’s so incredibly handy when it works right.

      Sadly other times it cheats and does the lazy thing. Like when I ask it to write me an object, but chooses to derive it from the one I’m trying to rework. That’s when I ask it to move and I do it myself.

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      • witx@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        AI is not needed for any of the points you mentioned. It’s mostly intellisense and auto complete. Good luck when you need to link tests with requirements and you don’t know what the tests are doing

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  • BillDaCatt@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I have no proof, but I feel like the AI push and Turnip getting re-elected and his regression of the EPA rules sounds like this whole thing was an excuse to burn more fossil fuels.

    If I was invested in AI, and considering AI’s thirst for electricity, I would absolutely make a similar investment in energy. That way, as the AI server farms suck up the electricity I would get at least some of that money back from the energy market.

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  • RUN_DMG@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But surely the next 30 billion they are going to burn will get it right!

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  • BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    My experience with AI so far is that I have to waste more time fine tuning my prompt to get what I want and still end up with some obvious issues that I have to manually fix and the only way I would know about these issues is my prior experience which I will stop gaining if I start depending on AI too much, plus it creates unrealistic expectations from employers on execution time, it’s the worst thing that has happened to the tech industry, I hate my career now and just want to switch to any boring but stable low paying job if I don’t have to worry about going through months for a job hunt

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    • boor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Similar experience here. I recently took the official Google “prompting essentials” course. I kept an open mind and modest expectations; this is a tool that’s here to stay. Best to just approach it as the next Microsoft Word and see how it can add practical value.

      The biggest thing I learned is that getting quality outputs will require at least a paragraph-long, thoughtful prompt and 15 minutes of iteration. If I can DIY in less than 30 minutes, the LLM is probably not worth the trouble.

      I’m still trying to find use cases (I don’t code), but it often just feels like a problem in search of a solution….

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    • Lucky_777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Sounds like we all just wamt to retire as goat farmers. Just like before. The more things change…they say

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  • BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    But it’s okay, because MY company is AHEAD OF THE CURVE on those 95% losses

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  • null@lemmy.nullspace.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Reading the article, the conclusions seem to line up with what I experience. Namely the part where it says that individual users found a productivity boost.

    At my company, we have a bunch of AI based tools set up, and it’s impressive how much of the time consuming, boring, burnout-inducing gruntwork I can offload to the robots, and instead spend more of my working hours working on things I actually want to work on.

    And we also deploy things like AI search for internal knowledge bases. Being able to quickly get the information you need to complete your job, especially if that information is related to sales is definitely good for business, but I’m not even sure how you’d measure that in terms of “profit”.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Why do they keep throwing their money away on it?

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    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Image

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    • Dogiedog64@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      In no small part because they see it as a time-limited gateway to permanent, infinite profits through market consolidation, job cutting, and government contracts. After all, if they get there FIRST, it’s all theirs, and the infinite profits then will make up for all the money spent now. Never mind the fact that in doing so they’ll destroy the environment, the economy, and the world long before they can actually SPEND those profits on anything.

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      • grahamja@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        It worked for Google. They corraled a majority of the internet into providing them add revenue. Google maps, Gmail, google search engine, youtube… all just more ways for them to scrape your data and serve you adds. Investors are hedging their bets on what could replace google as the information monopoly of the future.

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    • TheMinister@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Sunken costs?

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      • fishy@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        More like most CEOs are fucking dumb. They attach to whatever the tech buzzword is. So AI being a buzzword drew them in, then the AI uses other buzzwords? It’s like a moth to the flame.

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  • Bebopalouie@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Image

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  • Sunflier@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Does this mean they’ll invest the money in paying workers? No… they’re just have to double down.

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  • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    How bad to you think this collapse gonna be? We gonna see a big name collapse into dust or we gonna see something akin to the Great Depression?

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    • stormeuh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      The AI bubble is going to be like the dot com bubble I think, but with the world being so heavily financialized it might spiral into something like 2008 or worse…

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      • Zannsolo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        It won’t be like the dot com bubble. The AI bubble is far more corporate investment with far fewer entities having money thrown at them.

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    • frog_brawler@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      We’ll see the beginning of a crash in about a year and the crash probably won’t end for 7-10 years.

      We’re looking at a full scale shift in the way large scale orgs are running their businesses; and it’s a shift a lot of them will need to pivot from once they realize it’s not working.

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  • 8000gnat@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    he’ll yeah, lose money you fuckers

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  • Mangoholic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Bubbles burst, who would have thought.

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  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think there are real productivity gains to be had but the vast majority are probably leaning into the idea of replacing people too much. It helps me do my job but I’m still the decision maker and I need to review the outputs. I’m still accountable for what AI gives me so I’m not willing to blindly pass that stuff forward.

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    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah. The dunning kruger effect is a real problem here.

      I saw a meme saying something like, gen AI is a real expert in everything but completely clueless about my area of specialisation.

      As in… it generates plausible answers that seem great but they’re just terrible answers.

      I’m a consultant I’m in a legal adjacent field. 20 years deep. I’ve been using a model from hugging face over the last few months.

      It can save me time by generating a lot of boiler plate with references et cetera. However it very regularly overlooks critically important components. If I didnt know about these things then I wouldn’t know it was missing from the answer.

      So really, it cant help you be more knowledgeable, it can only support you at your existing level.

      Additionally, for complex / very specific questions, it’s just a confidently incorrect failure. It sucks that it cant tell you how confident it is with a given answer.

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  • goatinspace@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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  • someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We’re now at the “if you don’t, your competitor will”. So you really have no choice. There are people that don’t use Google anymore and just use chatgpt for all questions.

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  • arin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Losing money is a called going into debt, not just zero returns.

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  • ShittDickk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    hello, welcome to taco bell, i am your new ai order specialist. would you like to try a combo of the new dorito blast mtw dew crunchwrap?

    spoken at a rate of 5 words a minute to every single person in the drive thru. the old people have no idea how to order with a computer using key words.

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  • zululove@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Nice

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  • thatkomputerkat@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Good

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  • nexguy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Pets.com all over again

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  • absquatulate@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Does abybody have the original study? I tried to find it but the link is dead ( looks like NANDA pulled it )

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  • vane@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s not about return it’s about addiction.

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  • bigbabybilly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Yeah. No shit. wtf did they think was gonna generate returns? They wanna run ads in the middle if responses?

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    • Bwaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I’m not sure they were expecting returns. Just afraid that if other companies had AI, they might lose business to them. Except of course a lot of people (or at least I) avoid anything with AI and mistrust its results.

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  • SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Oh, that reminds me that we’ve always lived in false bubbles, and when they burst, crises and other things started, and eventually the biggest bubble that we call civilization and progress will burst, maybe in 2040-2050+.

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  • doingthestuff@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Douse it with gasoline. Burn it with fire.

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  • pika@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The link in the article to the MIT report doesn’t directly link to any report. I wouldn’t trust this article until the report is accessible and verifiable.

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  • cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    30-40 billion USD in total worldwide over three years seems very little compared to the massive expenditures by the AI companies to build the things?

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  • Croquette@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It is how its done today.

    Every semi-big or big corpos gamble their money trying to be the one coming on top and capture the market.

    So it is not surprising to see that.

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  • andrewrgross@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Return? /s

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  • SwimmingInTheeStars@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    MANY companies aren’t profitable for several years. The one I work at wasn’t for 2 decades. It’s a long game.

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