[flaque]

> Tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $1tn on AI capex in coming years, with so far little to show for it.

Regardless of whether or not the implicit claim here is true (the claim being "all this spend won't produce an ROI"), the explicit claim here is nonsensical.

Of course the $1tn in capex has nothing to show for it! The spend has not happened yet! Of the spend that _has_ happened, most of the chips are not physically in data centers yet. Of the chips that _are_ in data centers, most of the models are not yet trained!

And of the models that _have_ been trained, many have clearly had a significant ROI. GPT-4 cost $100m, and OpenAI's revenue is now reported to be $3.4 billion a year.

Saying there's "little to show for it" is an absurd claim; the products are _printing_ cash! We beat the turing test! You can drive around in a self-driving car!

It's perfectly reasonable to say "where does the ROI come from when you spend $1tn on capex", but it's hard to argue against the success of the spend of the last generation of models.

[fuzztester]

Er, what is your AIffiliation? Do you work for a coLLMnar database company, maybe in eGyPT?

[oezi]

GPT-4 might have cost 100m to train, but how much does it cost to run?

If we look at NVIDIAs profits roughly 10x that annual revenue number is spend on hardware from NVIDIA each quarter.

[flaque]

If OpenAI has merely 10% margins, they've recouped their costs by 3x.

[naikrovek]

> We beat the Turing test!

I guess? It's very clear that the Turing Test is not a sufficient benchmark for intelligence, though, because a lot of the answers I get (far too many, compared to a human) are nonsense, technically. They feature correct grammar, and they sound correct, but are very, very wrong. In fact, a lot of the responses I get are simply catastrophically wrong when I ask technical questions. I wonder what else these things are wrong about? There's no way it's merely technical stuff, where usually there are only a small number of correct answers, if there are multiple correct answers at all.

My employer has bots in Teams which have been trained on years of questions and answers and the answers they give are so incredibly wrong that we've replaced them all with fixed-response automation. GenAI has been a severe disappointment, even for me, and I had almost no hopes for it at all and have poo-pooed the technology from the start.

> You can drive around in a self-driving car!

Can you? Really? Or do you need to be there to prevent the car from doing stupid things? The only fully self-driving vehicles that I know of either follow fixed routes, operate in a small, fixed area, or do not carry humans at all. Another example of where many AI promises were made, and the results have simply failed to materialize.

Generative AI, at least for anything useful, has been a severe disappointment for me. Even if I spent $0.01 per year on it, I would consider it a waste of money.