A more interesting “bear case” for AI is that, if you look at the list of industries that leading AIs like GPT-4 are capable of disrupting—and therefore making money off of—the list is lackluster from a return-on-investment perspective, because the industries themselves are not very lucrative. What are AIs of the GPT-4 generation best at? It’s things like:
writing essays or short fictions
digital art
chatting
programming assistance
What about LLMs that are taking over or helping with jobs that require sorting and organizing complicated data, and they do it fast, 24/7, and with just enough accuracy. They’re not flawless, but they mess up less than poorly trained and high turnover staff.
LLMs don’t sort or organize data. Machine learning can do it but LLMs specifically only generate text. I think that’s the whole point. People confuse machine learning with LLMs. Machine learning can do amazing things in many industries. Companies creating dedicated products using machine learning can make money. LLMs themselves can do very little and huge valuations of companies like OpenAI don’t make much sense.
This is exciting it just probably hasnt come to fruition this quarter. And businesses that are succeeding with AI dont really need to brag about it in the news. (Amazon?)