And at the same time, absurdly slow? ChatGPT is almost 3 years old and pretty much AI has still no positive economic impact.
It will take some time for whatever reality is to actually show truthfully in the financials. When VC money stops subsidising datacentre costs, and businesses have to weigh the full price against real value provided, that is when we will see the reality of the situation.
I am content to be wrong either way, but my personal prediction is if model competence slows down around now, businesses will not be replacing humans en-mass, and the value provided will be notable but not world changing like expected.
Nobody seems to consider that LLMs are democratizing programming, and allowing regular people to build programs that make their work more efficient. I can tell you that at my old school manufacturing company, where we have no programmers and no tech workers, LLMs have been a boon for creating automation to bridge gaps and even to forgo paid software solutions.
This is where the change LLMs will bring will come from. Not from helping an expert dev write boilerplate 30% faster.
I agree that most of the AI companies describe themselves and their products in hyperbolic terms. But that doesn't mean we need to counter that with equally absurd opposing hyperbole.
If it costs them even just one more dollar than that revenue number to provide that service (spoiler, it does), then you could say AI has had no positive economic impact.
Considering we know they’re being subsidized by obscene amounts of investment money just like all other frontier model providers, it seems pretty clear it’s still a negative economic impact, regardless of the revenue number.