Ed Zitron: AI Doesn't Have ROI (return on investment)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/

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I don’t give a shit if you use them to spit out a script or do some simple sideline part of your job, or transcribe or dictate into them, or if you’ve used them as a search engine (and even then, you best check every source!), but the moment you rely on and run your entire process on these things, I immediately doubt your ability to do anything, or at the very least wonder how gullible you truly are when somebody ingratiates you enough.

Why? Because every single “AI setup” I’ve seen anyone ever use involves a rube goldberg machine of bullshit deterministic scripts to try and bring the hallucination-guaranteed nature of LLMs to heel, usually to the point that you’re doing more work making the LLM work than you did before they existed, and you’re only proud of it because you feel like you’re special.

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LLMs coddle the easily-led and narcissistic into believing that the model is doing the work as the human being has to constantly cater to the model’s inefficiencies and inabilities, using more energy and resources than any technology ever made.

And yet with all the money, all the attention, all the resources, all the land, all the power, all the affordances and excuses and endless fucking applause for mediocrity, nobody can actually point to the ROI of AI, because it doesn’t exist outside of it burping out stolen content and enriching and ingratiating billionaire dullards. Even at a hundredth of the price I’d be dismissive, because everything I’ve seen is so decidedly unexceptional.

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Much more at the link, including info on specific companies. And a couple of very different analyses of AI ROI, one from the semiconductor analyst firm SemiAnalysis (terrible name; what were they thinking?) wandering into hallucination territory to comically explain that AI produces "dark output" or "AI-enabled economic value that exists but is not visible" - and the other a return to sanity with a Bain and Co. report on lots of companies getting little or no ROI from AI, so Bain concludes that "The technology worked. The value didn’t arrive" (Ed calls that one of the funniest quotes of the AI bubble) and therefore companies that keep investing in AI without real ROI "are compounding risk rather than managing it."

Ya think?

Ed also has a wonderfully slippery quote from Sam Altman, who when asked when companies should expect to see an ROI and how long they might have to wait, babbles politely about how this is a "fair issue" to be asking about, but he assumes that "the industry will figure that out pretty quickly."

At which point Ed reminds people - not at all politely - that Altman IS the industry.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. I've posted this article a couple of times ... the author believes that AI could produce amazing results/products we

can't even predict .... but that STILL won't be enough to recover depreciation on datacenters already built, much less those still in the planning stages. The eventual results ? Billions of dollars in writeoffs, with no hope of ever breaking even for the majority of companies.

https://pracap.com/global-crossing-reborn/