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Comment by matchagaucho | Hacker News Reader

"previous killer apps" - exactly. That's the point. Everyone is anchored in AI as being the next desktop app. It's not.

We're only using 1% of what these models will ultimately do when they're running 24/7 as utilities serving new economic models.

There just isn't enough compute right now to realize the larger monetization strategies.

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On top of that, the APIs/Tools/Function Calls into the real world don't exist yet. But consumer products are going to start eventually exposing functionality to these LLMs. By that time, I wonder if we'll all have an edge-inference box sitting in every one of our houses that we buy from a consumer products company like Apple or from Amazon, or directly from OpenAI or Anthropic. These little brains will be the low latency central nervous system of a lot of things in our homes, and gateways to the larger models in the cloud. Or at least that's how I imagine it sorting out in the future.

Previous generations of technological change of the calibre we are told AI will be also required major changes to the real world and new products to be built: new cell towers had to be constructed, fibre cables laid, data centers built, personal computers produced, warehouses established. And software needed to be fundamentally rewritten to support each of these generations too. And yet the companies doing that in those previous generations managed to produce huge profits significantly faster than Generative AI has.

That's my biggest concern with it, I don't see the business case closing anywhere, and without businesses that actually make money all the technology in the world doesn't actually do anything.

> And yet the companies doing that in those previous generations managed to produce huge profits significantly faster than Generative AI has.

Have you considered a simple answer to this inconsistency? The market and investors does not demand that these AI companies make a profit. The only reason companies are expected to make profits is because either those who own shares in the company expect it, or those willing to invest in a company expect it.

More likely people will delegate their agents to run in the cloud.

Edge AI on iPhone, however... many potential applications around vision, hearing, interpreting your surroundings in real-time.

> There just isn't enough compute right now to realize the larger monetization strategies.

How can this be relevant? Why isn't the compute we have available right now sufficient for turning a profit?

Is this another one of those "We lose money on each sale but make it up in volume" things?

I mean, if much much larger investments are needed before current LLM providers can turn a profit, that's not a good indicator that they have any sort of sustainable business, is it?

Profit is not the goal in large transformational tech cycles.

See Bezos' playbook for Amazon. They weren't profitable for years.

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