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Comment by jmakov | Hacker News Reader

There's really no way back. AI is today helping design chips (check Google's report on how they use it for their own designs), drugs etc. And having a LLM connected to a simplistic enterprise app is a money printing machine. Really is a new ind revolution. And it's held back by not enough infra and power.

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I haven't seen a single case study about copilot helping a company make money by rewriting their excel formulas to have named references with type checking to prevent clerical errors, which must be a billion dollar industry on its own. Why not?

Rome wasn't built in a day? Humans are also creatures of habit.

There isn't much evidence for benefits of strongly typed computer languages or object oriented programming, yet here we are.

Typed vs Untyped is a different matter. Excel is typed but wrapping everything you do in type checks is annoying so spreadsheets used as sources of truth are littered with hard to find errors (strings become numbers, numbers become dates etc)

> And having a LLM connected to a simplistic enterprise app is a money printing machine.

What would be a concrete example of this? Has Salesforce revenue increased with their AI offerings? Has Microsofts?

This is what I was wondering reading that comment too. The only people I've seen making money off LLMs are spammers.

ChatGPT itself

ChatGPT loses billions of dollars, $5bn this year alone just on running the service. Even the subscription-based services like Github Copilot are losing money, $20 lost for every $10 subscriber according to MSFT. The only ones making money I can see are NVidia and maybe the oil and gas companies...

The gameplan is simple:

* Capture the market (like Uber), by doing whatever it takes to be successful (e.g. offer your services at 1/3rd of what it costs) -- flush the equivalent of several countries' GDP down the toilet, if necessary.

* Wait for everyone to use only your service (because it's like water??)

* Raise rates (hopefully, everyone is "locked-in" at this point)

* Profit!

What is amazing is that the LLM market is already comoditized and in a race to the bottom, so step #1 can only be done by dumping.

Also, it has almost no barriers to entry (AFAIK, closing a deal with NVidia is the largest one right now), so you can't do step #3.

Oh yeah, directly from the Softbank ventures playbook. Spoiler: it does not work as well as they hope.

Plus, we're talking about hyperscalers/big techs here, that would mean a commercial attrition war where OAI would be competing with actors such as Meta giving it for free from already existing platforms that have different main income sources (ig, fb, whatsapp). Good luck with that.

I think we are seeing in realtime the resetting of expectations which means we don’t need to “go back” rather we are realizing we aren’t anywhere to go back from. LLMs haven’t made more than a small dent. Non LLM inference is still more important and will continue to be. The problem with LLM is they input/output in text or images and are too general.

I think the keyword here is "helping". Then you have other industries, creative industries, copy-writing, human resource and customer support where LLMs are making thing worse, way worse.

Writing of LLMs a being useless isn't wrong and unproductive, but assuming that they are universally applicable, or that they can function without supervision is also very wrong and potentially dangerous.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not.

Not sarcastic. Imagine a LLM fine tuned on your country's accounting standards, legal and tax docs. Instead of paying sbdy 250/h you can now just type "eli5 can I apply for a tax relief for R&D I'm doing in my company".

Personally I think this is one of the killer applications for LLM. In some countries you can even have double tax deduction instead of only normal tax deduction for R&D activities, if your company fulfills the government requirements and following the correct procedures. But the main problem is that the info is oblivious to most of the companies and majority are ignorant of the tax discount facility available to them with respect to R&D [1].

[1] Comments on Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508656

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