[izzydata]

My impression of companies pushing AI so heavily is that they are basically being forced to do it by it merely existing. Imagine if AI really is as powerful as it is suggested to be and you didn't jump on the bandwagon. Then you would be behind. So by it existing and other companies using it, you have to as well because even if it turns out to be a failure at least everyone else will have failed too and you are on an even playing field.

[stephen_cagle]

I feel like this is kind of like the gambler's risk of "going bust" but applied backwards?

Feels like it would be better to spend just enough so that you have the capacity to scale up IFF LLM's end up being a big deal. You spent less than your rivals (who were competing for a supremacy that never came), but you have saved more "dry powder" to compete against them for the more likely future. The only future you exclude with this strategy is the "LLM Supremacy" future, which you only had a 1/(number_of_players) chance of winning anyway. :]

I think the real reason for the spending is that the scent of LLMs in the air causes stock values to go up. And even if everyone knows it does not make sense, they still want "NUMBER GO UP", and so they will spend more money to excite the amateur and professional investor class.

[jrmg]

You could kind of use that line of thinking to justify spending on anything.

[bluGill]

There is a fad every few years that uses similar thinking to justify spending. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't. But they never work out as good as the most optimistic predictions.

[nitwit005]

I commented on wasteful AI spending, and my father immediately started talking about how he "went through that a couple of times" as a manager at an oil company.

The unusual thing is perhaps how global and cross industry it seems.

[12_throw_away]

> Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't

Genuinely asking: for which fads was it actually beneficial to jump in during the hype phase? Was there ever anything so critical that there was some huge disadvantage if you didn't adopt it right away?

ETA: I suppose the complicating factor, at least for B2B, is "customers demanding $fad", particularly when the purchasing decision makers don't actually understand what $fad is (e.g., "cloud", "blockchain", "ai", ...). If you don't become "$fad native" right away, you lose the Dunning-Kruger segment of the market.

[thewebguyd]

That's what throws me off about the AI hype. I've lived through plenty of other hype cycles, but none had such rapid adoption as this during the hype phase. Usually its a bunch of early adopters and a few doomed startups, with the big established (non tech) companies never fully jumping in, and then by the time they might have considered it, the fad died.

Even "cloud" which did stick around and actually did pan out, didn't see such immediate adoption during the hype. There were a lot of companies that stayed on-prem for a long time, many which still are, and none of them imploded for not jumping on the hype.

Why is the FOMO so strong with AI this time around? I don't ever recall being told "spend as much money on AWS as you possibly can!" during the cloud hype...

[y0eswddl]

because the tech industry is at a hole is out of creative ideas. That why ever seen so many hype cycles since the end of zirp - and why the only innovation we're seeing is on ways to squeeze more money out of people. and AI was sold as a salary cutting magical money machine... AKA one more hype to jump on.

except this one a isn't making anyone rich besides Nvidia

[bluGill]

> because the tech industry is at a whole is out of creative ideas

This isn't true. However the tech industry is out ideas that apply to many many people and scale well.

Most people need a word processor at some point in their life (if your school doesn't make you write at least one paper on a word processor then your education failed - you might never do it again in your life but it is still an important skill), but those were already powerful enough in the 1980s, and the 1990s solved most of the usability issues.

Robotic vacuums can get some more innovation, but the obvious next steps are unsolved problems (I want it to pick up before it cleans) that may not be solvable for a reasonable price.

There are however a ton of niches that could use more technology. However because they are niches they don't scale. You can make millions (gross profit) if you can solve their problems, but not tens of millions - this is enough to get your personally a nice lifestyle if you run or work for such a company (think a 3-5 person company), but even if you could interest an investor there isn't enough for them to skim off any profit and still make money.

Not all niches that need tech are that small. There are a few large ones, but they are hard to find (if they were easy someone would have done it already). There are also a lot of what looks like large ones that either are not large, or are not large enough to pay for the investment needed. There are also some medium sized places that tech can help. Once in a while there are even tiny places where someone can make a difference (but generally this means you do the thing as your business and tech as a hobby after work)

[jrmg]

Sears, the obvious choice, could have been Amazon. There are plenty of other less extreme examples of defunct brick-and-mortar stores who were killed by internet competitors (often, Amazon).

[LogicFailsMe]

Usually, someone extracts genuine value at the expense of everything else IMO. And the enshittification continues apace.

[pfannkuchen]

Only lemming spending. Where the first few lemmings have to justify it some other way.

[cdud3]

Not on anything but on some things like “Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM”