For the same reason that people were selling crypto mining boxes rather than just plugging them in:
The only guaranteed profit in a gold rush is to be the one selling shovels.
See Nvidia for details.
The reality is the product is the easy part.
Actually selling it, maintaining it, selling more of it and running a profitable business is the hard part.
So the AI makes the product really easy to make, but selling it is the hard part.
Why don’t they ask ai how to sell it. After all, isn’t it super intelligent?
I do work for a software company, and sales is part of my job. And yes, sometimes I get the AI to review a tricky sale. Not usually though.
However, the reality is it takes years and years to build relationships, get into markets, get visibility.
Basically embed yourself into a market. So the product is the easy part. The sale is the hard part.
They’re working on it. They just need a little more of your internal documents and source code.
They’ll announce soon that personal ai assistants require a blood sacrifice to run, on top of the monthly and metered fees.
They’ll need child-cannibalist rituals minute of work.
And a lot more money. And so much more power and water. And more data. And more money, too.
In a gold rush it is better, on average, to sell the shovels then to mine the gold.
Slop image
That’s like asking why doesn’t Adobe make their own content and keep the tools internal.
Because it is a scam. Just like the people selling, instead of using:
- healing crystals
- essential oils
- blockchain
- penis-enlargement pills
- JIRA
LOL Love the (accurate) JIRA inclusion there
Q: Couldn’t this JIRA ticket just be an email?
A: No! Because JIRA will send you like, 10 emails.
Jira, lol.
Jira is awful 😞😔
I mean yes, I hate the manager who set up JIRA that way, but JIRA is marketed to and designed for managers to over-complicate it. It is not designed as a tool for engineers to track their work. It is designed for managers to mis-manage teams, because that sells at volume.
I also have other reasons for hating JIRA:
- no ticket hierarchy
- no multiple owners
- slow. so very slow
- sometimes keyboard shortcuts work, sometimes they don’t. There is no apparently pattern.
I mean, it kinda fits with the rest of that category, other than I’ve never been harassed about healing crystals.
Because its a scam.
A scam that will inevitably end humanity on a global scale…… probably.
Nah mankind will continue, but it’ll definitely hurt when this shitshow implodes and possibly takes out the current economic model and quite a few governments with it.
The real reason isn’t that they can’t turn a profit, it’s that they don’t have to.
They don’t have to be profitable because they aren’t fueling growth with profits, they’re fueling it with debt and investment. Like many have noted, they cannot do that forever and will eventually pass that cost to consumers. A significant portion of their existing cost is driven by research, which they can scale back by lobbying for legislation, so that peers getting a leg up is more difficult and small players catching up is almost impossible.
Also, both Anthropic and OpenAI have planned IPOs, where they will inevitably raise a ton of cash. It’s a game of chicken though. How long can they fuel growth without being publicly accountable to balance sheets and shareholders? Whether we like it or not, they will almost certainly transition to being profitable businesses, but only when it is advantageous for them to do so. Right now, it’s not a priority; the priority is growth to the point of diminishing returns.
I’d wager it’s simply not possible to be profitable using AI for most use-cases. You either burn way too many tokens on your queries or risk your business falling victim to an under-tokenized AI hallucination.
Or any AI hallucination
I love the assumption that if you spend enough tokens, it won’t hallucinate, like it isn’t a mathematical certainty or anything.
I agree with you, but I liken to to how companies tend to replace competence with bureaucracy. With enough layers, a significant amount of mistakes get caught. It just slows everything down and costs a bunch of money. There are still problems that get through, just less of them.
You can cut hallucinations by 90% just by prompting the LLM to.not guess API and function names and to provide it with full docs or MCP to find docs.
Yeah but it’s not guessing in the first place. It has zero reasoning skills. It just outputs the most likely next word. Even when you ‘tell it not to’
I know I am getting down voted for this because people haven’t tried it. And let me differ, it has reasoning skills, it now gets beyond predicting the next word. And even reducing it to next word is some kind of primitive reasoning.
By experience, by telling the AI to not guess APIs and function names and instead provide it with a way of looking through docs, and inspecting the code and other tools to get it do some tests, the hallucinations disappear. I’ve been able to have better results with this setup.
This is very different than the “no mistakes” joke.
I’ll back you up on this. I’ve had the experience of seeing Claude fabricate stuff, and then when I challenge it, it says something like “I guessed, let me look deeper” and then it indeed does check deeper with docs or a configured LSP etc and then discovers the real answer.
It doesn’t matter if this was the result of reasoning or just more pattern prediction, the result is that if you tell it not to guess, it responds appropriately.
“it has reasoning skills” Nope. It has larger context windows and someone coded in the ability to reprompt itself for “thinking” steps that are literally just a new prompt with the same context that gets fed back in which merely increases the chances of it guessing the next output token correctly.
It still doesn’t “reason”. It still doesn’t know what the words mean. The modified algorithms are just attempting to generate the corrective prompts for you. If you’ve ever messed with them long enough, you’d understand that these, “no wait fix it” prompts have rapidly diminishing returns at the best of times. Their “thinking” is a bandaid, and a piss poor one at that.
I know I am getting down voted for this because people haven’t tried it.
People here have tried it, LLM use is basically enforced at a ton of companies and the tech industry crowd is a huge portion of the population here.
You’re likely being downvoted as you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs function. LLMs don’t reason. LLMs don’t think. Telling an LLM to not guess might help ever so slightly, but LLMs can and do hallucate search results regularly.
It’s a mistake to trust that LLMs aren’t hallucinating just because you told the LLM to not guess.
I juste don’t want to talk about this any more becausefor me adding those instructions in AGENTS.MD and giving it the full API and language and platform docs dropped significantly the hallucinations. You just disregarding my experience and want me to believe in your assumptions.
It helps, sure. But it still does stupid shit CONSTANTLY.
So do humans. Constantly.
It doing sgupid stuff is another issue separate from hallucinations. Preventing LLM from doing dumb shit is more difficult, you need more guards and harnesses.
This logically leads to a similar question to OP’s again: if it’s so easy to cut down on hallucinations, then why haven’t the designers of this software already integrated that in?
Right like. The more tokens you spend, the more hallucinations you get.
This is kinda fundamental to economics: the moment AI learns to perform some task, that task becomes less valuable.
But then aren’t there just different tasks to do? VisiCalc and Excel didn’t make accountants irrelevant.
That’s the economists angle, yes, but that’s not what I’m getting at.
You can’t make a business with AI because anyone can use an LLM to do anything an LLM can do.
There are exceptions in the short term, but they may not last. For example, we’re paying a hefty subscription fee for an AI service that scrapes financial data from scanned pages. It’s much more accurate than traditional OCR.
Presently its better than its competitors so commands a premium price. However, I don’t think it will enjoy that position for long.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Just because everyone can use Word doesn’t mean you can’t make a business using it. Oh no, everyone has calculators, guess you can’t have a business that uses calculators. Businesses and people in general use the best tools available for the job, which might be pencil and paper, or eventually an LLM.
You’re conflating a tool with a service.
If you noticed that calculators were really good at adding up numbers, and started a business using a calculator to add up numbers for people, you won’t attract any customers because people can just use their own calculators.
That does not mean businesses do not use calculators.
Wild, accountants must not exist in your mind. Everyone can own a computer but there are massive services of renting those computers ‘in the cloud’. Everyone can buy storage, but for some reason the majority think its easier and cheaper to buy in the cloud. Hell, you could go to the store and purchase a movie, but many still think seeing them in a theatre, or you know, streaming them are a better option. You say LLMs have no business opportunity which seems to show the failure of your thinking.
Because nobody but nvidia profits from LLMs.
Shovel salesmen
How’s TSMC doing these days?
Yeah, all right, “hardware suppliers” in general.
This is exactly the question i ask “investment advisor” services when they call asking if i want help managing investments.
For you to have a system that works well enough for me to be interested , there’d be no need for you to spend money on call centers full of people ringing up strangers for money, you could take all of that money and invest it in the plan you are trying to sell me.
I’ve always thought that as well. Surely it wouldn’t take them long to become ludicrously wealthy with their top investing acumen.
Ikr. If I knew a “foolproof” investing strategy to “make loads of money”, I wouldn’t spend my time trying to teach other people about it, id just be using that strategy myself and actually NOT want other people to know about it.
If I recall correctly, shovel companies made a lot of money while only a few of their shovels actually struck gold.
Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the gold rush.
The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began, he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and resold them at a substantial profit.
When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.
Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.
The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they’re not because they know the limitations of the models. It’s what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.
I like your newly coined term: “marketing bullshit gap”. I will start using it.
A agree with your point of view fully.
I mean if you were an economist you’d know exactly why AI companies are making massive profits, because its more profitable to sell shovels during the gold rush than it is to find gold. Doesn’t mean gold is worthless and not profitable, it’s pretty basic economics, but you know that already.
I mean if you were an economist you’d know exactly why AI companies are making massive profits
They are literally not making massive profits. They may be making lyin’ Sam Altman rich, but the VC money is drying up and OpenAI has repayments coming up in 2027 that it doesn’t have a chance in hell of being able to payback.
You aren’t separating hardware/training costs and costs when the models are developed. Ask the Chinese how thats working out for them, and one of many reasons why their models are so much cheaper.
Well, hardware companies (Nvidia) are making massive profits. The rest, no.
Yeah, but they aren’t an “AI company”. They are a hardware company that is propping up AI companies to keep them buying (and warehousing) GPUs via circular financing.
I think the person “selling shovels during a gold rush” is nvidia slingin GPUs. And also in this analogy the gold is pyrite.
Better question is if you can really build an app as easily as writing a prompt, why would anyone pay you for your app?
Somehow AI bros like to pretend that AI is some secret lifehack despite it being one of the most mainstream things in human history.
It still takes time and effort to be a project manager for app developer agents. Might as well just pay for it and get stuff done today. Instead of spending time on software maintenance, you could just pay for someone else to deal with all that hassle.
Right. But Fermi’s Paradox applies.
Everyone is buying and selling software miracle cure…but all of the software itself is still exaclty as healthy as a con artists prize race horse (not healthy, and actually a mule).
Fermi paradox? The one about aliens existing?
Yea. Slightly modified - “If conditions are now so prefect now that 8 billion humans can ask their computer nicely to program itself, and it works, then why is non-shit-tier software still vanishingly rare?”
Oh that way. Now I get it.
Anyone can prompt Shlawp to write some code, but an expert would need to check it for errors and stupid design decisions. Normally, the user isn’t qualified to verify the validity of the answer or quality of the code and that’s why people who use Shlawp can’t make high quality applications.
So, when you say “it works” it’s true for being able to generate at least some kind of code, not good code. The thing about Shlawp is that all of its outputs are very mediocre at best. They look convincing to everyone who aren’t qualified to evaluate the outputs. Those who are, will immediately notice all sorts of flaws.
Been shouting this from the rooftops since the beginning. If it was half as good as claimed, I would NOT have access to it.
