In other words - "We don't like the reporting around how bad the economics of AI are, so we're cherry picking our own data, presenting it out of context, and asking you to look at it through rose tinted spectacles."
Demis is busy create another PR documentary lionizing himself so he can capture the google crown. Always says whole bunch of nothing to a fawning interviewers who is projecting brilliance and profundity on his every word.
For every Steve Jobs there are a hundred Carly Fiorinas
TBH I'm surprised you're arguing. NeXT is generally accepted as a commercial failure. Hell the NeXT cube, alone, was a famously collosal flop. This isn't even a little bit controversial.
Jobs cared more about changing the world and advancing civilization than he cared about providing good value for investors. NeXT was a very solid success when measured by the yardstick of what Jobs set out to do.
Trying to make money by creating a new general-purpose operating system is inherently a very risky enterprise. NeXT's investors knew that.
-AI use at work is broad but shallow: -At work, most AI use is focused on collaboration and assistance with tasks, and so far task automation is uncommon:
Both of the above happen for a reason and if you work at any bigger corp ( esp publicly owned ), it is easy to understand why.
edit:
What I did find more amusing though was the coded cry for help ' To get there, we as a society must work together".
Also if all the built-in AI buttons could actually automate tasks instead of just telling you how they're unable to automate tasks.
My company (not my startup, my normal day to day work) spends millions on ai token every month.
I use AI every day for different things.
AI/GenAI disrupted already a lot of peoples jobs in real life.
And Google states very early "However within jobs, people are using AI selectively: in a typical job AI is used for only ~21% of tasks."
Did you read the article? Can you point out specific things you really don't like and think they are cherry picking?
How much profit does the AI company make from those tokens?
My company is a two digit billion dollar revenue company in the top 100.
My point was that real companies pay real money for AI.
But i use it daily at work and a lot of co-workers do too.
And we spend $3b/yr just to make sure our I is capitalized.
I don't want to share my company name (obvously?!) but i'm willing to share that one number to give more insight.
Feel free to not believe me.
Your company doesn't use AI at all? You are unable to use it?
I have a small startup AND i work for a normal well known big company
The company ranked 100th in the top 100 companies by revenue is Eli Lilly and they make 45 billion in revenue.
I don't believe you.
Not sure if its really top 100 or top 150, I checked google and the lists again i can find it in one i can't find it in the top 100 in the other. Shouldn't matter though the 2 digit billion dollar revenue is true and the amount spend on tokens is true too.
Everyone has access to claude, we get reminded regulalry to invest time into using AI.
If you're going to lie, at least keep your story straight.
My startup is not a billion company. Its a small startup.
Edit: I think i get the confusion now? I have a small startup on the side and i work for a big company.
Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net?
Reading the post, I had to keep thinking “why are they only talk about how people use it at work, and nothing about possible economic outcomes?”. Or “titled Understanding the AI Economy, but it avoids all the big questions”. Or “is it written for the investors who think Google has over-invested in capex?”. And I might be overthinking about all this! But when you have billions of billions dollars invested, it’s hard to take any word as is.
What value does Google has to cherry-pick the occupation metrics?
They were not searching for the answers. They were trying to get more investment money on the promises to investors about education and jobs displacement. Those are two different things.
But again, now it’s more of a “aight too much money on the table so maybe not real”.
It simply comes off as a marketing advert for a company who’s sunk billions upon billions into something they’ve yet to be able to monetize (see latest report). Stock holders are getting annoyed, like in other companies, about the lack of the promised returns, this is firefighting.
Nobody is really debating AI has a use case, but maybe, just maybe, the chase into infinite spending we’ve seen the last years wasn’t that well thought out.
Im missing the marketing opportunity here.
The spending is a complete different topic though. Google/ABC can easily afford their investments. Microsoft and Amazon too. Even if shareholders are not that happy (the shareprice of alphabet doesn't tell this story though) with it.
Nonetheless the biggest issue with this spending are 401k and other retirement investments from people who can't control the investment and the undefined risk of it. Thats the only real 'risk' (not a small one for these people depending on it though).
It doesn't affect me if Google spends its money on AI.
Nonetheless the progress on AI is huge, it still hasn't slowed down, its now a political and global issue (us export restrictions, Chinas Moonshot AI/Deepseek, EU lagging behind).
At least form my point of view, i'm very surprised that we even risk all of this investment and see it as a possitive thing. Imagine AI/AGI is a technology which sits very far away from our current local minimum and the jump to the other local minimum is massivly expensive but massivly beneficial?
GPT-2/3 was able to inflict this vision into people and because of this, we get A LOT more compute, push again boundaries on compute and memory after a longer period of stagnation. These richest companies in the world like Google also leverage the AI spend into investment of fusion and other energy sources.
We already got a lot better vision ML algorithm because of this (tx to suckerbergs dino and segment anything), we have alphafold tx to Googles Deepmind etc.
AI only consumes currently a little bit more about bitcoin but is acutally beneficial.
* what's a typical job? How did Google resample their data to make it representative of the typical job?
* is this all jobs, or just work-related Gemini conversations that they've classified as such?
* what's the denominator here? How do they know how many tasks there are that weren't subject to conversation with Gemini?
* how reliable is their classification of conversations as work related or not?
Accurately measuring this is so complex that to present the conclusion in such a confident way is bordering on farcical.
And its Version 1 and an ongoing project.
"In the workplace, we show that while AI adoption spans occupations covering just above 88% of US employment, penetration remains shallow and overwhelmingly collaborative in nature, with end-to-end task automation limited in scope. Outside of work, AI spans activities making up about 98% of Americans’ non-sleep time, with disproportionately high use in high-friction tasks such as engaging with government and professional service providers, likely delivering economic value that standard national accounts may miss. Globally, adoption scales with national wealth and has broad linguistic distribution, with English queries representing only around a third of volume."
It sounds reasonable enough and it contains nothing off.
For me its interesting to read that english is less dominant and thats def something i was very atuned when GPT-3 came out: I started to write english and my native language and mixing up words etc. The quality of understanding in my native language is sledomly good when a new product comes out but it was very good already when using GPT-3.
In comparision to this, i'm also aware of a research paper stating that programming in certain languages like spanish is worse.