Their business is the LLMs. It's like asking if a loaf of bread is expensive, then why don't millers bake bread using their own flour

They’re working on it. They just need a little more of your internal documents and source code.

They are going for the gold rush pick axe business model

They want somebody else to be on the hook for their screw-ups. Doesn't mean they won't get sued if it's something bad enough or their meatshield business decides to make an issue out of it but this way, they've reduced their risks a little.

I'd wager it's simply not possible to be profitable using AI for most use-cases. You either burn way too many tokens on your queries or risk your business falling victim to an under-tokenized AI hallucination.

When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.

Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.

The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they're not because they know the limitations of the models. It's what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.

The plan is, broadly speaking, to commoditize intelligence. Instead of selling train cars filled with hogs, their train cars are filled with the next token, thought, or action.

You're on to something …

Because it is a scam. Just like the people selling, instead of using:

• healing crystals
• essential oils
• blockchain
• penis-enlargement pills
• JIRA

Yes, but selling the llms is not profitable either. They are burning through cash at extraordinary rates.

Even at highly subsidised rates, ai startups can’t make a profitable product. It’s nuts.

1. The AI tech they peddle is impressive and has some uses; but it is nowhere near ready to live up to the hype they created in which you can just pay $10K a year for a license and get rid of a $250K employee

2. The AI tech they sell for $10K a year, actually costs $20K to run and they know nobody would pay the full cost, let alone the cost + their profit margin

PS: those are made up numbers to answer the question, while not real numbers, they represent the points I am trying to make

I saw a thread a few minutes ago on a profitable AI business. The business model was hacking websites at scale to steal hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers...

https://lemmy.world/post/52304304

LOL Love the (accurate) JIRA inclusion there

If you come to seminar at the Holiday Inn, I'll teach you why! Only $500, and at the end you'll be able to start your own AI powered business and make millions per year!

Or any AI hallucination

I bet some Miller's would vertically integrate in that case

I love the assumption that if you spend enough tokens, it won’t hallucinate, like it isn’t a mathematical certainty or anything.

If they were not profitable just selling the flour but saw the potential profitability of baking bread, I'm sure they would. It's just that they are profitable selling the flour so there's no need.

They're waiting for the to big to fail bailout like the banks in '08.

You can cut hallucinations by 90% just by prompting the LLM to.not guess API and function names and to provide it with full docs or MCP to find docs.

I like your newly coined term: "marketing bullshit gap". I will start using it.

A agree with your point of view fully.

Jira, lol.

I guess you will teach me how to build courses using AI and sell them for $500 at a fancy resort?

You are right.

They’ll announce soon that personal ai assistants require a blood sacrifice to run, on top of the monthly and metered fees.

This is kinda fundamental to economics: the moment AI learns to perform some task, that task becomes less valuable.

That’s because the whole point of AI is to finally back us all into a corner where cloud computing is our only option and we can be monitored and controlled, our news and opinions filtered, dissenters found quickly, and our IP hoarded and summarized, our markets predicted and our products beaten before they launch.

They dazzle the brain dead middle managers who all lament the lack of flying car futures with a piece of magic, and once enterprise (the big money) isn’t demanding powerful workstations anymore then average consumers can get fucked and we will be locked out of society if we organize.

Dunno why the parent comment is downvoted; it’s slightly reductive but it’s correct

They want AGI, not LLMs. They're pretty much betting everything on getting there first knowing that if they do it'll pay them back a millionfold what they invested up front. They're taking a massive risk for a potentially massive reward. They're coaching a college kid to become a professional athlete. It's not profitable yet but they're investing heavily in them in the hopes that one day it will be.

Q: Couldn't this JIRA ticket just be an email?

A: No! Because JIRA will send you like, 10 emails.

No, they're coaching a spreadsheet to become a professional athlete.

Yeah but it’s not guessing in the first place. It has zero reasoning skills. It just outputs the most likely next word. Even when you ‘tell it not to’

Better question is if you can really build an app as easily as writing a prompt, why would anyone pay you for your app?

Somehow AI bros like to pretend that AI is some secret lifehack despite it being one of the most mainstream things in human history.

AI is highly subsidized for users so AI wrappers can be profitable. (Even though they are a net negative to the economy)

But ai companies burn trillions of dollars of investor money with fake promises. They can't make a reddit chatgpt bot that charges a user 10$ a month and make a profit.

So now the Holiday Inn is a fancy resort.

If I recall correctly, shovel companies made a lot of money while only a few of their shovels actually struck gold.

Exactly LLM are unable to become AGI. So it just them wasting trillions on something that can never advance to what they want.

I know I am getting down voted for this because people haven't tried it. And let me differ, it has reasoning skills, it now gets beyond predicting the next word. And even reducing it to next word is some kind of primitive reasoning.

By experience, by telling the AI to not guess APIs and function names and instead provide it with a way of looking through docs, and inspecting the code and other tools to get it do some tests, the hallucinations disappear. I've been able to have better results with this setup.

This is very different than the "no mistakes" joke.

LLM are unable to become AGI.

You could not possibly know that. You're attributing to it a probability of zero and zero is an extreme number. Unlikely is a claim you can defend. Zero you cannot.

I imagine they tried, but it just kept saying the only way to win was not to play.

Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the gold rush.
The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began, he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and resold them at a substantial profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gold_rush

The only upside to this is that all of these actual idiots puting money into this will lose that money, and hopefully put this reigh of speculation to an end for dacades.

Been shouting this from the rooftops since the beginning. If it was half as good as claimed, I would NOT have access to it.

It helps, sure. But it still does stupid shit CONSTANTLY.

We all know why…

Cuz it doesn't work.

No, we all know that for certain. AGI is a pipe dream that’s why they made up the term AGI so they could act like LLMs were anywhere close to movie AI and not just slightly improved Watson (the model that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy). AI has been around for 70 years and we are no closer to thinking computers now than we were then.

"it has reasoning skills" Nope. It has larger context windows and someone coded in the ability to reprompt itself for "thinking" steps that are literally just a new prompt with the same context that gets fed back in which merely increases the chances of it guessing the next output token correctly.

It still doesn't "reason". It still doesn't know what the words mean. The modified algorithms are just attempting to generate the corrective prompts for you. If you've ever messed with them long enough, you'd understand that these, "no wait fix it" prompts have rapidly diminishing returns at the best of times. Their "thinking" is a bandaid, and a piss poor one at that.

It doing sgupid stuff is another issue separate from hallucinations. Preventing LLM from doing dumb shit is more difficult, you need more guards and harnesses.

ELIZA effect is not and will never be AGI.