CEOs to Keep Spending on AI, Despite Spotty Returns | Hacker News Reader

CEOs to Keep Spending on AI, Despite Spotty Returns

wsj.com

73 points1vuio0pswjnm746 comments

M$FT increased 365 student monthly charges from $7 to nearly $20 per month automatically to cover CoPilot for 2026. Evidently did not inform the college about this. Just sent yearly charges for nearly $200 to gob-smacked parents. We canceled the next day. WTF M$FT.

They say you will get refunded in you cancel within 30 days of the yearly charge. We did so, but I am wondering if M$FT simply and reliably does the refund. Or will I need to spend hours on the phone talking to a M$FT AI Customer Rep trying to get what is promised. Sincerely... I would appreciate others experience. I could do a charge-back in the next few days if the "promised, easy route" is not available. TIA, RF

My kid needed Windows and Office for school. I went through the pain of installing the system for her while avoiding creating a Microsoft account. As for Office, I bought a perpetual license. I believe these are the last months while these two options are still available.

> while avoiding creating a Microsoft account

They're going to eventually make it so the entire OS squawks if you aren't on a Microsoft account.

> After a year in which trillions of dollars worth of AI investments buoyed global markets and the economy, 68% of CEOs plan to spend even more on AI in 2026

They are too far in to turn back. They got into AI via fear of missing out (FOMO) and now they are too heavily invested to write it off on their balance sheet. To revert now would cause nothing but trouble.

> Less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said. They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources.

I.e., the best success has been in cutting jobs, not in aiding the productivity of individuals.

The promise of being able to run a business without having to employ people is just too alluring to these guys. They feel like they're nearly on the cusp of it: Like any day now, the technology will be there, and it can just be AI + robots, and the C-suite and shareholders can just pocket all the returns. No more pesky bags of meat to feed and clothe. You can feel it--they are absolutely salivating over the idea. "If we can just get rid of the need for human labor, Line Will Go Up forever!"

Then they can stand alone on a pile of ashes at The End of the World and then see how much happiness their "money" bought them.

> Then they can stand alone on a pile of ashes at The End of the World and then see how much happiness their "money" bought them.

Like the book "Don't Create the Torment Nexus," the wisdom of this cartoon is an inspiration to business leaders everywhere who know that shareholder value is paramount:

https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...

The whole history of AI from at least the 1930s happened in waves, and each wave could be accurately summarized by what you just said. Oh, and add Bitcoin with the same logic.

But it never happened. None of the AI waves, not perceptrons, not "deep neural networks", not RNNs, not support vector machines, not ... made zero-human companies possible, or even less-human companies, in contrast to buying from China I might add, and other nations before China.

I concur.

Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics. Every time I see one of these abominations on YouTube I think "is this working for you?"

With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI. A lot of companies will over invest, just as they did during the dot-com bubble. But some of those investments will actually pay off, because this technology is not going anywhere.

Regarding your first paragraph, I've even talked with people who go out of their way to actively _avoid_ said product after encountering AI-generated advertising. So that'll probably continue to have an effect for as long as average people with good eyes can still distinguish "AI"/generative media from "real"/traditional footage.

I have observed this as well, and we've already seen some pushback when major brands use AI in their creative. I wonder if we're entering an era where AI will actually taint a brand.

Measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns, particularly in the short term, is notoriously difficult. They likely mostly don't _know_ if it's working at this point (though, yeah, I'd kind of assume it isn't.)

Really? It shouldn't be difficult to measure the performance of a YouTube campaign. There are very clear metrics related to watch time, CTR and conversion rate (if applicable).

> Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics.

I'm sure that firing tonnes of marketing people for prompt engineers will be a good return on investment... Perhaps it reveals something deeper - which is that a 30 second Youtube ad doesn't generate that much revenue at all.

> With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI

In the long run, yes. But a lot of people will end up losing their shirts over this.

> But a lot of people will end up losing their shirts over this.

Oh absolutely. In particular, it's hard for me to see a path forward for OpenAI. If they implode, it will be a tsunami.

> Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics. Every time I see one of these abominations on YouTube I think "is this working for you?"

they likely track conversions, so someone is clicking and buying.

> Less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said.

Compares to non-AI software, is this a bad number?

Zero is technically a number smaller than 0.5

Most CEOs do what most other CEOs do, we haven't reached the turning point yet.

Most CEOs do what the board wants. And the board usually reflects shareholder primacy.

I'm pretty sure shareholders are not too keen on spotty returns...

You might be surprised. Disney is a pretty good example of activist shareholders undermining the value of their brand for purely ideological reasons. This is a little easier to wrap your head around when you recognize Black Rock-type situation where the custodians of the funds are able to take extraordinary personal liberty with other people’s money.

Yeh, cause they (the truly wise and savvy ones) realize it's not about fiat money (that's just political propaganda). It's about attention control.

Government will always financially bail out they who control the most eyeballs as it keeps politicians from dangling from capital buildings and bridges.

Only institutional shareholders matter, and they're on the same page as the CEOs.

Jim Chanos legendary short seller talks about AI bubble.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1HrPsfUkbk

Ironically I think Chanos got murdered by the data center boom. Back before his fund folded he was talking constantly about how data center REITs were an awful business by the numbers and they were an artifact of ZIRP because they were making small amounts of revenue on large amounts of capital. Longer term they were slowly losing to market consolidation by the "hyperscalers" (AWS, Azure etc).

His thesis was sound in a rational world but our world isn't rational anymore and his data center REIT short got obliterated by the AI bubble.

>His thesis was sound in a rational world but our world isn't rational anymore and his data center REIT short got obliterated by the AI bubble.

I suspect he might be a bit bitter about that one. He has also shorted tesla (rightly or wrongly) as well as Carvana

His Tesla short was off many years before his fund closed and he pretty much said he wasn't going to bet in meme stocks since their value is so detached from any kind of objective analysis.

The problem for him (and muddy waters and other shorts) was the memification of the entire economy. If you listen to his data center REIT short thesis it was very sound. Data center REITs were not meme stocks and there was every reason for them to respond to economic gravity. There was a lot of inflow of capital during ZIRP leading to a lot of buildout, but with the end of ZIRP the low return on capital in their business was going to kill them. But then the AI bubble came along and everything within three degrees of bacon went to the moon.

https://archive.ph/l6jpQ

https://x.com/i/status/1999124665801880032

Breaking: Fork found in kitchen

If only we could stick that fork in the AI bubble and call it "done."

url update: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ceos-to-keep-spending-on-ai-desp...

Archive link: https://archive.is/l6jpQ

I believe we will see breakthrough success in the B2B/SaaS market sometime in 2026. I am getting an uneasy feeling regarding the notion of a bubble. By most accounts it should have popped by now. I am still using the LLM tech on a daily basis. It definitely adds value. Concerns like whether or not a human needs to be in the loop seem practically irrelevant at this point. Applying this value through productized channels is only a matter of time.

That said, the B2C AI market is a joke compared to the B2B market. Consumer AI use is an undeterminable black hole of money. All the bubble talk does make sense in context of normal-ass people using ChatGPT on their phones all day. Advertising is the only possible application for this market and it's already incredibly saturated.

Don't forget, the bubble talk is more around "AGI is right around the corner, don't get left out!" and not so much the application of an LLM to business process flows. There's definitely value in some use cases to using an LLM but I don't see the massive bets on AGI paying off in timelines Wall St. is comfortable with. Further, my feeling is the AGI promise and investment is what is keeping some of the model providers in business. From what I understand, inference cost per user doesn't scale the way a webserver does. With an LLM, more users means significantly more infrastructure cost and Google, Meta, MSoft can afford to run/train models at a loss because they get revenue elsewhere but not everyone is in that boat.

Yes the problem is not whether LLM have value, but whether they will add enough value in the next two three years to pay for the hundred of billions of trillions needed to match the expectations. OpenAI has to find more than a trillion by the end of the decade, project Stargate still has 500 billions to find, etc. Also add fast depreciation on everything invested. The ZIRP playbook of building a monopoly for years before turning a profit cannot work here, models are commoditizing fast so no moat there either, and capabilities as a function of compute have plateaued.

404 page not found?

The “AI is in a bubble crowd” still has no answer to “why didn’t the tech bubble pop in 2022?”

Snowflake bought streanlit (a bad python UI/UX) for 800 million in 2022. I still have not seen a single deal even close to that bad post 2023, and especially post interest rate hikes.

https://datafortune.com/snowflake-acquires-streamlit-for-usd...

Actually investing in AI is smart and will deliver unfathomable ROI. AI bears deserve to reap what they (don’t) sow.

> The “AI is in a bubble crowd” still has no answer to “why didn’t the tech bubble pop in 2022?”

Are these things related? Why is the tech bubble popping in 2022 a necessary condition for current AI hype being a bubble?

unfathomable. The imagination has no limits. It could be billions, trillions even! The fact we do not know only means we don't know how high the ceiling can be. It could even be gazillions!

Many people are saying this!

"It could even be a boat!" :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZpIog7e-R4

> The “AI is in a bubble crowd” still has no answer to “why didn’t the tech bubble pop in 2022?”

I mean, the Fed funds rate was at 0.25%. Free money helps, for a while.

The answer seems very straightforward? The bubble did pop, as you can clearly see in a number of stocks like Comcast. But OpenAI also released a genuinely impressive innovation in ChatGPT, which reinflated it for AI and AI-adjacent companies. Whenever the next recession comes, investors will start to ask more serious questions about whether another ChatGPT-level innovation is on the way, and even from my relatively AI-sympathetic stance the answer seems to be no.

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