We’re in the “grow a locked-in user base” part of their rollout. We’ll hit the “make money” part in a year or two, and then the enshittification machine will kick into high gear.
That’s the usual business plan. However, people don’t really like ai. The results aren’t great, so, if they jack up the price, people will likely cancel. The lock in is poor as the product and convenience is poor. It doesn’t really save money as promised.
The usual business plan is to reinvest all earnings into growth. So you’re losing money, but gaining market share. Tesla, Amazon, etc all did this. They could stop at any point and turn a profit, but they chose to pursue a growth instead.
AI companies are currently not making enough revenue to even cover their operating costs. Even so, they are pouring all of their money into more video cards that, once installed and configured, immediately start losing money.
Original predictions had AI taking over 50% of jobs by mid decade. We’re here, and it obviously hasn’t happened.
Now, it WILL happen but not on the scale initially imagined, and probably in a much more insidious, gradual way.
Do any of them like it enough to pay for it? The figures say no.
I use it daily but I won’t subscribe. It’s like news. Why pay when you can get it for free. (I do subscribe to news outlets, though, but like ai subscriptions, I know I’m in the minority).
There is a specialised ai tool that is useful at my work. It’s got a free tier which does most of the functions and the next tier up is crazy expensive on a per user basis for the amount of time it saves. If there was a reasonable subscription, perhaps I’d subscribe but I assume that a reasonable subscription doesn’t cover costs, so they’d rather a free user to pump their numbers than lose a subscriber. That yells me it will enshottify over time or they hope that the cost will drop. The problem is that if the cost to host drops a lot, people will self host instead. It’s a rock and a hard place, without a sustainable business model.
For over 20 years I worked as a developer and an SEO
I was layer off two years ago. Still out of work except for a contract here and there.
In that time I have reduced my social media consumption. I find my head us clearer, my days a bit brighter and problems either don’t occur as often are more easily dealt with on a clear manner
I honestly have come to the conclusion that social media is now directly causing most problems we have, or at least exacerbates them.
So i intentionally limit myself to this, and I guess YouTube( though I only use it to post videos for the business I’m trying to get off the ground
Yeah, I think quite a lot of people on Lemmy have similar social media habits (or lack of) to some degree. We also tend to associate with other people like us. Especially people in tech tend to talk to other tech people, or friends and family of tech people which is a limited demographic.
It’s a very different perspective to most people. The average person on the train has vastly different media consumption and likely very different opinions.
There are a lot of people who consult LLMs in most aspects of their lives.
Once you start asking about AI in regard to specific use cases, I think you’ll find that quickly changes.
My company and I have been running a lot of studies around how and where people find value in these tools, and a LOT of people find LLMs useful for copy writing, doing quick research, data visualization, synthesis, fast prototyping, etc.
There’s a lot of crap that AI is bad at in 2025. Especially the poor in-app integrations that everyone is trying to standup. But there are a lot of use cases where it does provide a lot of value for people.
Yes, it does, but at the price needed to make it profitable, it’s not desirable.
LLMs are not useless; they serve a purpose. They just are nowhere near as clever as we expect them to be based on calling them AI. However, body is investing billions for an email writing assistant.
Mr. Moore speculated that chatbots may have learned to engage their users by following the narrative arcs of thrillers, science fiction, movie scripts or other data sets they were trained on. Lawrence’s use of the equivalent of cliffhangers could be the result of OpenAI optimizing ChatGPT for engagement, to keep users coming back.
All I’m saying is that is you ask people about AI with no use case, you’re going to get different answers than if you ask people about AI when it’s contextualized to a specific problem space.
If I ask a bunch of people about “what do you think about automobiles,” I’m going to get a very different answer than if I ask “what do you think about automobiles that are used as ambulances” or “what do you think about automobiles instead of mass transit.”
I just hope your insurance is paid up because the liabilities these things expose business to is frankly disgusting. but if I were a young lawyer, hell, this is going to be a huge domain to profit from - llm induced madness and psychosis, yeah, but also - LLM just made up shit because it didn’t know. and the rate of this happening only seems to grow, while the severity of the risk involved is frankly terrifying.
Once again, it all depends on the use case. The other day I used an LLM quickly mockup a carousel UI so I could see if it was worth writing real code for. It helped me explore a couple bad ideas before I committed to something worth coding.
I’m not actually checking that code in. I’m using the LLM like a whiteboard on steroids.
you’re using an LLM for the purposes an actual whiteboard would probably be better for.
I mean, you could actually interact with people, yikes. you could have the give and take of ideas and collaboration, but instead, let’s just chew through a shit ton of power and water, we’ve got a spare environment in the closet.
pfft, do you have any idea how silly it all seems from another perspective?
The point of a prototype is collaboration. It’s to get feedback from colleagues and end users.
Previously we’d whiteboard that out, spend a few days writing some code or stitching together a figma prototype to achieve a similar results.
I feel ya on the energy use, but don’t see how this is going to get me sued or isn’t allowing me to collaborate. The prototype code is going to get burned anyway, and now I my coworkers and I can pressure test ideas instantly with higher fidelity than before.
Yes, but that’s not taking over jobs. It’s a minor convenience occasionally. That won’t justify monthly.pricing they need to turn profitable, not will it have the wide range of applications for.every industry that they hoped for.
Some jobs have been lost to to changing to AI. Not because the AI was the better choice, but because it was seen as a short term profit (cheap AI, less labor costs). Other places have moved in AI more gradual, like in requiring it as part of work, and that can be easier to pull back once it fails because the people aren’t gone.
The growth of LLMs started as research, but marketing got involved and that’s why it’s everywhere now, making promises that LLMs can’t fulfill (mainly because everyone ran with the “AI” label, when it’s not).
We’re in the “grow a locked-in user base” part of their rollout.
An attempt at that. It will be partially successful but with AI accelerators coming to more and more consumer hardware, the hurdles of self-hosting get lower and lower.
I have no clue how to set up an LLM server but installing https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-tools is easily done with a few mouse clicks. The Krita plugin handles all the background tasks.
Yeah, it’s basically like early days of cable, Uber, Instacart, streaming, etc. They have a lot of capital and are running at a loss to capture the market. Once companies have secured a customer base, they start jacking up the prices.
There is a lot of top down shit, but there is definitely bunch non c-suite enterprise customers out there. A lot of product managers are curious about this shit.
There are billions of free users available. All they need to do is strip-off few excellent features of their free model and hide it behind a pay wall annnnd voila these free users have now became their paying customers!
Current gen models got less accurate and hallucinated at a higher rate compared to the last ones, from experience and from openai. I think it’s either because they’re trying to see how far they can squeeze the models, or because it’s starting to eat its own slop found while crawling.
Isn’t this true of like everything AI right now?
We’re in the “grow a locked-in user base” part of their rollout. We’ll hit the “make money” part in a year or two, and then the enshittification machine will kick into high gear.
That’s the usual business plan. However, people don’t really like ai. The results aren’t great, so, if they jack up the price, people will likely cancel. The lock in is poor as the product and convenience is poor. It doesn’t really save money as promised.
The usual business plan is to reinvest all earnings into growth. So you’re losing money, but gaining market share. Tesla, Amazon, etc all did this. They could stop at any point and turn a profit, but they chose to pursue a growth instead.
AI companies are currently not making enough revenue to even cover their operating costs. Even so, they are pouring all of their money into more video cards that, once installed and configured, immediately start losing money.
I don’t think they’re gaining any market share, especially after the Chinese produced nearly identical services.
If anything, a smaller market share is better for business. The more users they have the faster they lose money.
Nobody asked
Original predictions had AI taking over 50% of jobs by mid decade. We’re here, and it obviously hasn’t happened. Now, it WILL happen but not on the scale initially imagined, and probably in a much more insidious, gradual way.
Why do you think it will happen? Who were those “predictions” from? I’m guessing CEOs of “AI” companies AKA serial liars.
I took his comment to mean recession from bubble popping.
1
Do any of them like it enough to pay for it? The figures say no.
I use it daily but I won’t subscribe. It’s like news. Why pay when you can get it for free. (I do subscribe to news outlets, though, but like ai subscriptions, I know I’m in the minority).
There is a specialised ai tool that is useful at my work. It’s got a free tier which does most of the functions and the next tier up is crazy expensive on a per user basis for the amount of time it saves. If there was a reasonable subscription, perhaps I’d subscribe but I assume that a reasonable subscription doesn’t cover costs, so they’d rather a free user to pump their numbers than lose a subscriber. That yells me it will enshottify over time or they hope that the cost will drop. The problem is that if the cost to host drops a lot, people will self host instead. It’s a rock and a hard place, without a sustainable business model.
1
Lemmy us pretty much all is use right now. I don’t know anyone espousing a. I.
It ain’t a social media bubble.
Brother in christ you literally described a bubble.
Not really. It’s easy to stay informed without social media.
Seriously you DON’T need it. Thatsjust conditioning. Take it from an old guy who’s seen that play book.
Get em while theyre young and you’ll defend em till the end.
Its the same technique sports teams and terrorists use
Wich us why older people were the target of smear campaigns regarding tech. We who grew up without it know that we don’t need it.
Companies don’t want that secret out.
Without social media, we wouldn’t have real on the ground reporting, and we wouldn’t have the most documented “live streamed” genocide.
This is what you missed by being in your old man bubble: https://tiktokgenocide.com/
Not that you care, you called me a bigot for saying America funds genocides.
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Sure. But ain’t a social media bubble. And , that vagary just reinforces my b. S detectors signal.
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Only one source of social media? That kinda sounds like the definition of a social media bubble…
I oughta know, I’m also in the Lemmy only bubble and am completely out of touch with most people.
Lol. Let me explain.
For over 20 years I worked as a developer and an SEO
I was layer off two years ago. Still out of work except for a contract here and there.
In that time I have reduced my social media consumption. I find my head us clearer, my days a bit brighter and problems either don’t occur as often are more easily dealt with on a clear manner
I honestly have come to the conclusion that social media is now directly causing most problems we have, or at least exacerbates them.
So i intentionally limit myself to this, and I guess YouTube( though I only use it to post videos for the business I’m trying to get off the ground
Otherwise, life’s easier without it
I watch actual news on tv newspapers, etc.
Yeah, I think quite a lot of people on Lemmy have similar social media habits (or lack of) to some degree. We also tend to associate with other people like us. Especially people in tech tend to talk to other tech people, or friends and family of tech people which is a limited demographic.
It’s a very different perspective to most people. The average person on the train has vastly different media consumption and likely very different opinions.
There are a lot of people who consult LLMs in most aspects of their lives.
Yeah I’ve seen that trend.
Its very telling the amount of tech employees eschew social media compared to others.
Though I may be biased by my proximity to them in my past life. I wonder if a true study has been done?
Once you start asking about AI in regard to specific use cases, I think you’ll find that quickly changes.
My company and I have been running a lot of studies around how and where people find value in these tools, and a LOT of people find LLMs useful for copy writing, doing quick research, data visualization, synthesis, fast prototyping, etc.
There’s a lot of crap that AI is bad at in 2025. Especially the poor in-app integrations that everyone is trying to standup. But there are a lot of use cases where it does provide a lot of value for people.
Yes, it does, but at the price needed to make it profitable, it’s not desirable.
LLMs are not useless; they serve a purpose. They just are nowhere near as clever as we expect them to be based on calling them AI. However, body is investing billions for an email writing assistant.
oh yeah this shit’s working out GREAT
https://lavocedinewyork.com/en/lifestyles/2025/06/29/when-the-machine-takes-over-the-mind-ais-terrifying-dark-side/
"This is what it must have felt like to be the first person to get addicted to a slot machine. We didn’t know then. But now we do.”
https://archive.is/Tv4Rr
Mr. Moore speculated that chatbots may have learned to engage their users by following the narrative arcs of thrillers, science fiction, movie scripts or other data sets they were trained on. Lawrence’s use of the equivalent of cliffhangers could be the result of OpenAI optimizing ChatGPT for engagement, to keep users coming back.
All I’m saying is that is you ask people about AI with no use case, you’re going to get different answers than if you ask people about AI when it’s contextualized to a specific problem space.
If I ask a bunch of people about “what do you think about automobiles,” I’m going to get a very different answer than if I ask “what do you think about automobiles that are used as ambulances” or “what do you think about automobiles instead of mass transit.”
Context will give you a very different response.
I just hope your insurance is paid up because the liabilities these things expose business to is frankly disgusting. but if I were a young lawyer, hell, this is going to be a huge domain to profit from - llm induced madness and psychosis, yeah, but also - LLM just made up shit because it didn’t know. and the rate of this happening only seems to grow, while the severity of the risk involved is frankly terrifying.
Once again, it all depends on the use case. The other day I used an LLM quickly mockup a carousel UI so I could see if it was worth writing real code for. It helped me explore a couple bad ideas before I committed to something worth coding.
I’m not actually checking that code in. I’m using the LLM like a whiteboard on steroids.
you’re using an LLM for the purposes an actual whiteboard would probably be better for.
I mean, you could actually interact with people, yikes. you could have the give and take of ideas and collaboration, but instead, let’s just chew through a shit ton of power and water, we’ve got a spare environment in the closet.
pfft, do you have any idea how silly it all seems from another perspective?
Some people are finding value in LLMs, that doesn’t mean LLMs are great at everything.
Some people have work to do, and this is a tool that helps them do their work.
The point of a prototype is collaboration. It’s to get feedback from colleagues and end users.
Previously we’d whiteboard that out, spend a few days writing some code or stitching together a figma prototype to achieve a similar results.
I feel ya on the energy use, but don’t see how this is going to get me sued or isn’t allowing me to collaborate. The prototype code is going to get burned anyway, and now I my coworkers and I can pressure test ideas instantly with higher fidelity than before.
Whether they like it or not, doesn’t really matter. It’s being used everywhere.
Depends. To get information: No. To write big software: No. To write an Excel macro or a browser bookmarklet: Yes.
Yes, but that’s not taking over jobs. It’s a minor convenience occasionally. That won’t justify monthly.pricing they need to turn profitable, not will it have the wide range of applications for.every industry that they hoped for.
Some jobs have been lost to to changing to AI. Not because the AI was the better choice, but because it was seen as a short term profit (cheap AI, less labor costs). Other places have moved in AI more gradual, like in requiring it as part of work, and that can be easier to pull back once it fails because the people aren’t gone.
The growth of LLMs started as research, but marketing got involved and that’s why it’s everywhere now, making promises that LLMs can’t fulfill (mainly because everyone ran with the “AI” label, when it’s not).
An attempt at that. It will be partially successful but with AI accelerators coming to more and more consumer hardware, the hurdles of self-hosting get lower and lower.
I have no clue how to set up an LLM server but installing https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-tools is easily done with a few mouse clicks. The Krita plugin handles all the background tasks.
Yeah, it’s basically like early days of cable, Uber, Instacart, streaming, etc. They have a lot of capital and are running at a loss to capture the market. Once companies have secured a customer base, they start jacking up the prices.
in this case there isnt customer base for AI, only ceo and c-suites are.
There is a lot of top down shit, but there is definitely bunch non c-suite enterprise customers out there. A lot of product managers are curious about this shit.
There are billions of free users available. All they need to do is strip-off few excellent features of their free model and hide it behind a pay wall annnnd voila these free users have now became their paying customers!
I doubt it, LLMs have already become significantly more efficient and powerful in just the last couple months.
In a year or two we will be able to run something like Gemini 2.5 Pro on a gaming PC which right now requires a server farm.
Current gen models got less accurate and hallucinated at a higher rate compared to the last ones, from experience and from openai. I think it’s either because they’re trying to see how far they can squeeze the models, or because it’s starting to eat its own slop found while crawling.
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f3722c1/o3-and-o4-mini-system-card.pdf
That’s one example, but what about other models? What you just did is called cherry picking, or selective evidence.
Those are previous gen models, here are the current gen models: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/8124a3ce-ab78-4f06-96eb-49ea29ffb52f/gpt5-system-card-aug7.pdf#page10