[zlkanter]

Amazon missed earnings and promptly doubled down on AI spending:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-plans-200b-ai-spending...

It is encouraging to see that investors are punishing what is the greatest misallocation of capital since the dotcom bubble. Investors have figured out that AI is limited to probabilistic and annoying chatbots that are for entertainment and for looking up trivia questions.

[mark_l_watson]

I was disagreeing with just your last statement, but then I did a little research: about 80% of revenue is from chatbots and 20% from APIs. So +1 on your comment.

Bear with me here, I actually do have a point to make: I took my stepdaughter out for breakfast this morning. She is a financial wizard specializing in running large cities, and to explain to her the current craziness of overspending on AI infrastructure, I described "exponential spending increases for linear economic value increases." I may be wrong about this, but I am all for targeting the sweet spot of more efficient smaller AI models that are fit to purpose for specific use cases.

[thunky]

You're agreeing with GP but it's a flawed premise: a chatbot doesn't have to be limited to entertainment and trivia, as anyone who has used one for productivity knows.

[pfisherman]

Oh boy, are you going to be in for a rude awakening. Might I ask what is your exposure? Because this does not line up with what I am witnessing day to day at all.

This type of commentary reminds me of the people during the dot com boom who were adamant that e-commerce was all film flam and would never take off.

Consider that it is possible that both (1) we are in an investment bubble and (2) we are underestimating the long term impact of LLMs and perhaps mispredicting where they will land.

[symfrog]

In what way is the long term impact of LLMs being underestimated? If anything, it seems that it has been overestimated in the past years and that something other than LLMs will be needed to reach the original scaled LLM hope of AGI.

[byyrlogic]

By your logic the only way to achieve number 2 is to keep pumping number 1.

This type of commentary reminds of people propping up these LLM MLMs.

[bpodgursky]

I know it feels comforting to say this, but deep down you have to realize that saying things confidently does not cause them to become true.

[chucksta]

Was that comforting? At least the commentator came with a source

[sdf2erf]

Theres a real problem with people who are too tech-induced: youre disconnected from how the average person interacts with stuff.

[goalieca]

You’ll get downvoted for your second statement. I think investors are struggling to see how AI turns into more money for consumers if it. It’s one thing to exclaim how your productivity is up, but does that translate into more profit and larger customer base if you’re a business? I very much doubt consumers will pay more than dollars a month for an LLM and I also very much doubt the ad market can grow large enough to cover the spend on that (ad market is plenty big and driven by other economic factors)

[simonw]

Many people are spending significantly more time every day engaging with AI chatbots than they spend engaging with Google, and Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world.

[symfrog]

If only that is what investors have figured out.

Unfortunately, it seems investors now think that all paid software will be replaced by AI generated software, somehow open source projects laundered through generative AI models should finally convince enterprise customers to go with free.

[danielbln]

Why should anyone take your sensible first statement seriously if your second statement is so easily verifiably false?

Some of these AI critical posts really are an exercise in Gell Mann Amnesia, man.

[sdf2erf]

Im still waiting to read about macro-level mass-lay offs or insane productivity leaps.

Where are the results, tell me? What insanely great products have been shipped by people leveraging/building on top of LLMs...?

Yeah, silence. As usual.