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Comment by stevage | Hacker News Reader

Fundamentally they seem different. The web looked like it had the potential to make lots of money but no one knew exactly how.

AI literally does people's jobs for them. There's not much imagination required.

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But currently, nobody's actually making money on AI.

It's also not doing peoples' jobs for them, for the most part. AI's supporters do very loudly proclaim this, though.

What would it take to make money? Double or triple the pricing. Most of these companies messed on pricing initially. ChatGPT Plus/ Claude Plus (or whatever it is called) are $20/month. These should be $80 to $100/month products. Probably even more, $200.

But then, how do you get the users and growth figures that justify the current boom in infrastructure build-up? A high equilibrium might be profitable to a few companies and useful to a few rich customers, but it’s far from justifying current valuations.

For the most part, current AI tools do tasks for people, not their jobs. And for the most part it does rather poor quality, low-depth work (but with superhuman speed and superhuman breadth).

If the task is normally "hire a person to do X" it comes out the same.

People aren't usually hired just for some tasks.

The closest thing I can think of is fiverr type gigs, and I'm still paying someone on fiverr for like, UI assets/design for an extremely simple game with 5 screens, and it's not particularly close.

Which jobs is it doing, exactly?

From what I can tell at this point it's a solution looking for a problem. Incredibly impressive, not so useful

Customer service.

Only for the most basic of requests. I have interacted with a fair share of AI front loaded customer service chat portals and they are often misleading, sending outright incorrect info (telling us that the dev team would work on it even when they weren't going to) and I almost always just want to talk to an agent. Yes, it's a good first layer to prevent people who haven't even bothered to read any FAQ or informational pages, but it's not doing real customer service work.

Is it? https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2025/05/18/bu...

You cannot trust GenAI to do this job, so no, it's not doing this job

Anything that requires reasoning over data and applying experience, such as technical troubleshooting, is outside of this scope.

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