'At some point you've got to make money': Goldman's top AI skeptic warns the clock is running out ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs

https://lemmy.today/post/54311965

'At some point you've got to make money': Goldman's top AI skeptic warns the clock is running out ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs - Lemmy Today

Lemmy

I’m not much of an AI skeptic compared to most on Lemmy. I think the technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society if we can remove the control of the ruling class.

That said I truly don’t understand how the AI business model is supposed to work. I’m sure there is some market for businesses, governments, etc., basically people who have too much money who may want to pay for the latest and greatest models.

But I don’t really see the average consumer doing this when slightly less good versions will almost certainly be available for free. And the above customers will not be able to support the level of investment that’s going on right now.

How is the technology useful?

For the love of Asimov, someone please explain.

It is useful for programming, I know a lot of people here don’t want to hear that, but denying it now is being willfully ignorant. No it isn’t good enough that you can tell it “just go do the thing” and then accept what it gives you without checking it, but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things. For me recently I used it to unpick a nasty race condition that was occasionally causing a program I was working on to lock up and couldn’t figure out why. It took some back and forth with it but it did help me figure it out when before I had been stumped.

It’s clearly a controversial thing to say on the fediverse, but everyone must realize that AI is another tool - a sometimes faulty, sometimes great tool. A professional can use it well, a careless person can use it carelessly. But it is a tool that can help in certain cases. It’s a nuanced thing, which many people unfortunately have trouble accepting. It has flaws, yes. It also has benefits. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.

That of course doesn’t guarantee that providing that tool must be profitable. It may well be that providing AI models is just too expensive to actually make sense, at least as it is right now.