Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
So I have been going through multiple websites and also been seeing AI in all the apps that I use. Do you think it is necessary ?
For some companies, automation that is based on being able to pull info from a gigantic knowledge base that still has bounds is helpful for them. Most orgs are still figuring this out in the face of immense pressure from their stakeholders not to fall behind and miss any potential windfall. They don’t know how LLMs can help them but the hype may push them in the black or lead to (false) growth so they lean in.
I think many of the larger tech companies were hoping to make human engineers obsolete so that they could achieve the true promise of SaaS - almost no investment, instant money faucet. Unfortunately for them, we still need people to help us understand people so engineers, designers, and product managers aren’t as expendable as some of them were hoping.
No one thought AI would be free or cheap, but a LOT of ppl bet that the true cost could be obfuscated or waved away temporarily while the money was stupid and then revealed once enterprise was addicted and struggled to manage their switching costs. By then the smartest folks have made their money, moved it to safer havens, and await the next stage of the lifecycle.
I love LLMs but the way we use them seems very stupid, IMHO. It’s like everything is a screw now but everyone still has bolts and nails.
If you're an investor, you're probably managing other people's money. Would you want to explain to your customers if & when you were wrong, why you didn't go all in on AI? This is the most transformative technology humanity has ever conceived and we've been making sci fi movies about for decades, and didn't put all our money into it?
So now that investor money is too scared to go anywhere else, that means if you're a CEO who cares about your share price, and who has to front up to the board every few weeks and defend your strategy lest they fire you, you must care about AI too. We aren't just a stiff old database anymore, noooo sir, we are the context layer for agents.
So now, if you're the CTO, are you going to tell the CEO that AI has no use case here? Not if you care about your job. Repeat, all the way down to the bottom.
There will be an emperor has no clothes moment. It might not be as dramatic as everyone is hoping, and it doesn't mean AI isn't world changing and is not here to stay, but the survival-induced psychosis at every level of the corporate world is absolutely unsustainable.
No one will blame you for going all in on AI
To find ways to cut costs and, ideally, make more revenue. It's that simple.
Basically if the technical leaders at such companies fail to shoehorn AI in somewhere, they will have to find a way to demonstrate to their board of directors that they are keeping up to date and not allowing the business to settle in to abandonware. The guys selling the software also have a similar problem -- industrial abandonware whose development team was laid off 12 years ago is for sale right now and you have to be careful not to accidentally spend a million dollars on it. Something that has AI bolted on, even in an insignificant capacity, is more likely to have present day relevance.
It's an industry-wide excuse/opportunity to force what was a stagnant commodity enterprise software market back into a new buying cycle with enough face-saving modernization chrome that buyers can make spending justifications.
At best, this will be a de-evolutionary enshittification local minima era followed by a slow rebuild. More likely, the enshittification era will collapse under its own hyperinflated weight when the logrolling bubble pops, and there will be a consolidation of incremental gains, with a few new benefits being added to what would otherwise look on a long term scale as typical linear innovation if it were not for the hype bubble.
What was interesting to me here was that if I were to write a program to do the same, I could most likely do that (just simplify the tasks as they are and implement each one), but it would take me longer. As much as I hate AI, there are real benefits in at the least some areas.
You probably don't need the AI _they_ shoehorn in.
AI doesn’t need expertise, the nurturing of a company culture, or any of the hard to quantify things that make humanity worthwhile and good businesses functional. All it needs is cold hard cash.
If enough people/companies are on the bandwagon, you're afraid to push back and be the crazy one, potentially losing money. So you roll with it.
The reason of cause is that we are all doing AI wrong ;) 18 billion articles later and I am sure we will still be in the same position.
The great distraction, just think if we spent the same amount of time, effort and money on things that really mattered (climate emergency)
It was about Web 2.0, then we had "big data", then right before the pandemic we put things on the "blockchain", then Web3, and now it's A.I.