That's investing, which is not the same pitch Ed is making repeatedly, that there is absolutely no value to this tech and everyone is lying about it. Saying it won't pay off to the level of investment is one thing, and may be true, but that is not his line.
Thats not investing - firms are paying out to llm producers in the form of operating expenses. What asset are they acquiring that deems it to be a investment? lmao
Laying people off offsets some of those expenses. Eventually revenue has to climb.
The reality is many of these tech firms have reached the peak of what they can offer - Meta and Google still have some ways to go with existing assets pre-LLMs that can generate lots more cash flows. So the sobering truth eventually will be that this tool seems really great but its not going to make the firm seem more productive in terms of its financials, beyond efficiency-generated growth which is finite.
And whether you like it or not, thats the only thing that matters. The firm exists to maximize wealth of its stockholders.
Most firms would consider experimenting with efficiency gains "R&D", which is investment. The AI companies under scrutiny here are gathering up as much compute as they can because people and companies are paying for it, and anybody pretending they're doing that for no reason is covering their eyes and ears.
> Laying people off offsets some of those expenses.
Layoffs are independent of AI. The impact of AI is that firms can do more with less, they are doing more with less, and when the economy supports them having more, they'll do more, not less.
> The firm exists to maximize wealth of its stockholders.
Deeply tired of hearing this type of argument. Your grandma is a stockholder. Your 401k is a stockholder. The Stockholders aren't some alien leech race. We've structured the economy so that the average person doesn't have to grow their own food; the result is stockholders, and it's not a scary word.
Ed is posturing to his explicitly anti-AI audience. Read any of his recent work on this topic and it's normal to feel embarrassed for agreeing with any of it.
If I skip 2 models of iPhone upgrades, there is definitely a difference between how the thing feels - and it feels its worth the money.
If I skip 2 models of upgrades of the frontier models now, I highly doubt I can discern what the difference is and what exactly I'd be paying more for.
Ofc they have hit a ceiling, why do you think OAI has shut down many of its projects like the research one called Prism?
The reality is both Anthropic and OAI have converged on LLMs as being a thing for software production - that's where the majority of their revenue is coming from.
That's not quite the same thing as paying for a product with absolute certainty each purchase comes with it a benefit.
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