I’ve seen reports and studies that show products advertised as including / involving AI are off-putting to consumers. And this matches what almost every person I hear irl or online says. Regardless of whether they think that in the long-term AI will be useful, problematic or apocalyptic, nobody is impressed Spotify offering a “AI DJ” or “AI coffee machines”.
I understand that AI tech companies might want to promote their own AI products if they think there’s a market for them. And they might even try to create a market by hyping the possibilities of “AI”. But rebranding your existing service or algorithms as being AI seems like super dumb move, obviously stupid for tech literate people and off-putting / scary for others. Have they just completely misjudged the world’s enthusiasm for this buzzword? Or is there some other reason?
Because the boss thinks it sounds cool and doesn’t want to be the only kid in the block without an AI product to sell.
This as much as anything else.
I work at a company that’s looking to integrate AI into their product. The VP who started us down the AI road has made it clear that he doesn’t see it being the reason that anyone would choose our product over a competitor’s, but we also don’t want to be seen as the only ones who don’t have it.
It’s simple. Because Microsoft can’t say that their operating system is garbage and quietly wants their users to switch to Linux
Wrong thread?
So you’re telling me the software developed by Microsoft is being used on Linux platforms to convince manufacturers using Linux to use Linux instead of Microsoft because Microsoft systems are bad?? Make it make sense dawg.
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OpenAI struck gold, NVIDIA followed suit, and everyone else bought shovels hoping to get investors even though they have no plans on striking gold (developing useful AI).
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Would you like to buy a timeshare to the moon? If we all buy, you’ll be able to sell your spot for 10x the price! Don’t wait! Spots are limited!
Nvidia is the biggest shovel seller out there.
We kinda need to adapt the saying now. When someone finds gold, you need to sell wood and iron for all the shovel makers that will show up.
Nvidia sells the hardware (shovels), but also develops portions of the software to make it run more efficiently, like OpenAI. Nobody else but Microsoft seems to be actually developing software, though AMD is slowly working towards having comparable performance.
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The things that make a company successful are not the same as the things that make executives successful
Attracts investors.
When people are evaluating companies, and see a company missing out on the current trend, how is that going to factor into their valuation of the stock prices?
Because it attracts shareholders
Venture capitalists and shareholders want to make money. Company executives want to give them eternally increasing profit. Simple as that.
It will kill us all or solve everything, step right up and place your bets! No ma’am, there is no third option to bet on, none at all I say.
It’s just a modern version of “Fuzzy Logic”
Money was already spent. The hype companies were backed by big capital in their early days. Now the people who provided that capital want to cash out and they want their winnings. So you will have AI shoved down your throat on every piece of media channel those people also own. AI is a hype term that appears periodically since before the 2000s. This is nothing new. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
LLMs are toys that sparkle for a brief moment. Their value is laughable compared to their cost.
Think like a venture investor.
A small chance of huge growth via new technology can have a big payoff. They expect most companies to fail and are more worried about missing an opportunity than losing money in a single bad investment.
Nobody is quite sure where AI technology will be in ten years, but if it’s big, it’s going to make people who got in early very rich. It doesn’t matter that it sucks now; the web sucked in 1995, but it made people who got in (and out) at the right time very rich.
No, they’re pretty much just dumb. In tech, this works along hype cycles where there’s gotta be some new thing all the fucking time, and it cures what ails ya and is perfect for every case. This mostly involves taking any actual merits of [new tech] and blowing them way out of proportion and context, making it the best thing since sliced bread. This invariably makes people invest because hype is more important than making sense. When the cycle for that particular tech winds down into the Trough of Disillusionment, a new one shows up.
A lot of business people also think that AI is a “force multiplier” meaning that if they use it they can get more done in less time. Anything that can do that is basically a money printer at the business level, which is why all these execs and companies are so excited about it.
The problem is it’s not or at least not reliably proven to be so. All these companies are jumping on board thinking “shove some AI in there and get 20% growth” when in reality there’s no backing behind it working like that. And that’s why a lot of customers are turned off, because from the consumer side, AI is just sloppy unoriginal junk. But on the business side they just see “Productivity is up” never mind that the productivity is garbage quality.
Because whilst technical people know it has limited applications (like blockchain), business people tend to fall for buzzwords easily because they don’t realise a lot of the things it does were solved in other ways
It was super cool for like three weeks. Now it’s the gambler’s fallacy they’re hanging on to.
Ohhh, you fn nailed it. Nice comparison.
