Yet another Hacker News

Apollo says AI has delivered 'zero financial payoff' outside the tech industry

33 points levzettelin 3 hours ago 21 comments

elmer2 2 hours ago | parent

It's because other industries are buying expensive tokens, and there's no real ROI yet.

simonbarker87 2 hours ago | parent

I have a suspicion that, outside of tech, AI WILL speed up the mundane aspects of people’s jobs, that part which they spend 80% of their time getting through, so they can then do the 20% where they actually add value.

BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work that previously just didn’t get done because it was overtaken by events or it got done to the absolute barest minimum level.

As a result the 20% where they add value never really grows or changes and in fact might be less valuable because of all the extra noise created by doing more tasks in the 80%.

This is working theory and likely full of holes.

gamblor956 2 hours ago | parent

The mundane tasks are only about 20% of the work for white collar works. AI just eliminates the low-value mundane tasks.

Unless AI companies are willing to do the impossible and accept liability for incorrect responses/outcomes, they're never going to be trusted with any task that could incur liability (law, accounting, medicine, architecture, engineering).

wswx 2 hours ago | parent

Correct.

Could humans review AI output? Sure. You still need humans. Funnily enough wages won't decline in the long-run - they'll rise as firms compete for those who remained employed in said roles as others fell out of favour and have gaps in work experience.

Many, many variables at play. I never take anyone seriously who never considers this (many people on here).

cwillu 1 hour ago | parent

Wages only rise if you don't include the displaced in your average, which feels a bit dodgy in this context, even if it is technically the accepted practice.

wswx 1 hour ago | parent

Nope.

You clearly are not aware of how the world works are you? When people leave firms and join another - they get a higher wage. If they decide to boomerang. Guess what? Much higher pay boost. I get bored of educating people on here - I thought people clued up?

cwillu 51 minutes ago | parent

Not interested in conversing with a person who can't even keep their previous comment in their context window.

Good day, sir.

Leonard_of_Q 2 hours ago | parent

> BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work

...which will also quickly be done by "AI", uncovering more such tasks until most of the "mundane work" is done by "AI" leaving humans free to do "non-mundane work". Of course those less mundane tasks require more insight, intelligence, knowledge and initiative from those humans which means some people will just not be able to keep up with their competitors, the humans who can do the less mundane tasks and the "AI" which can do the mundane stuff faster, more reliably and cheaper.

The big question is what those humans will do once such a scenario becomes true.

wswx 2 hours ago | parent

Its not even a theory tbh. Its just a statement - utterance.

jshier 45 minutes ago | parent

Once the OS and app hooks are in place, I think its biggest win is going to be plain language automation. Even if we don't have it write all of our emails and report, simply being able to say "show me the emails Bob sent about the project" or "did Bob ever say he was going to call Phil?" and get an accurate answer will be huge. We're approaching that in programming, when I can use general terms to automate operations within a codebase. The dream of "programming" with plain language may finally be realized.

MiroslavPokorny 20 minutes ago | parent

How will AI do mundane work like:

- Cleaning - Picking up rubbish - Stocking shelves - Healthcare - Fruit picking

Thats only the start, while a lot of people do work on a computer, far more dont.

danpalmer 2 hours ago | parent

The economy has many different resources with different supplies available. Making the supply of one resource infinite may sound like a huge win, but nothing is dependent on a single resource, everything requires a combination – just like in board game economies, you can't win by only producing wood.

AI represents some weird intelligence-like resource. It clearly does something of value, but that must be combined with other resources. In tech there's a lot of that, so making it (roughly) infinitely accessible has had a nice impact and we've run into our next limiting factor: human time. Companies that aren't "pure tech" though will run into much earlier limiting factors – hardware, compliance, regulation, artistic value, human time, and so on.

dstroot 2 hours ago | parent

The cost of training/developing a frontier model will continue to rise. The cost of inference will continue to fall. Companies don't buy models as such, they buy inference. As inference becomes a larger and larger business expense companies will optimize that spending, routing work to the "capable enough" least cost tokens.

There is a lot of human work that can be offset with tokens. On the other hand, the amount of work for the highest intelligence models will remain limited - corporate strategy, major decisions, etc. are just not as frequent.

saithound 2 hours ago | parent

If mainstream corporate America thought it would turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins, then mainstream corporate America needs to go back to school.

If you want to increase your profit margins, you'll have to innovate! Adopting AI tools that somebody else created, and are equally available to your competitors, won't increase your revenue or margins. The ones who will see increased revenue and profit margins are the ones who actually innovated, by creating the AI.

This is exactly what Apollo reports: the Magnificent Seven increased their profit margins, while mainstream corporate America didn't.

d0liver 21 minutes ago | parent

Not really. Like, yes, relative to your competitors. But, if the cost of growing potatoes is ten cents per potato, and then I make something that can produce potatoes for one cent then I'd expect everyone to just have more potatoes. This would drive down the cost of potatoes, because the supply would be saturated eventually, but AI is supposed to just make more of everything. So, if AI works as advertised, then you'd probably expect a brief period of highly increased profit margins (by the consumers of AI) followed by rapid _deflation_ as the value of everyone's dollar increases exponentially. Of course, neither of those things is going to happen, because the AI sales pitch is actually a pyramid scheme, so you get the people at the top raking in cash, while everyone else tries to sucker the next tier of buyers so that they can make their buck.

gruez 2 hours ago | parent

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224463

609 points by the-mitr 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite | 645 comments

genldd 1 hour ago | parent

My biggest doubt isn't whether AI will find applications for speeding up people outside of tech, but that it will atrophy learning and cognitive development to the extent that in 20 years human ability without AI will be on average much lower than it is today. Overall with AI augmentation we may be more effective, but strip away that tool and the human left behind will be less

spolitry 45 minutes ago | parent

How does this compare to financial payoff from Bitcoin and NFT adoption?

spolitry 41 minutes ago | parent

I suspect AI has delivered financial value but AI psychosis has cancelled it out.

It's also possible that AI has created value for consumers, but the profits flowed to the AI producers (due to scarcity) not the middle layer of the value chain, due to completion.

ChrisArchitect 22 minutes ago | parent

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224463

MiroslavPokorny 18 minutes ago | parent

AI is the anti midas golden finger. Everyone who touches it is down, and those at the center are down hundreds of billions.