this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
790 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
74131 readers
3554 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
Are you sure that "people don't really like AI", or is it more "the people here in my self-selected online bubble don't really like AI?"
You're right we are in an anti ai bubble ( we all remember THE CLOUDDDDD buzzword companies wouldn't shut the hell up about, and that was an objectively far better service than Ai is) however, I can't name anyone in the company I work for thats had llms revolutionize their job. It helps summarize (badly) and help with excel formulas (does ok if you know what you're doing). Plus, our clients dont pay us to use a shitty half ass llm, they expect actual intelligent humans to do the work correctly.
I also won't buy from any company blatantly using llms in their products. They're good at hiding it. But I will notice.
I’m jealous, my director at a software company has a second laptop just for AI so he doesn’t have to deal with IT and is insistent on using it for every project. One of his annual goals is 100% of his division using AI at least once per day. For every person against AI, there is another who can’t get enough.
The stupid are easily addicted.
The 'cloud' was a pretty big thing though... everyone used to self host, now only some self host.
AWS, GCP, Azure make a lot of money
But it wasn't new anything new. The "cloud" services were literally the internet, just made a little easier for stupid people. Just like this llm shit isn't really new. The paid off media wants idiots to think its revolutionary but its not. Its a chatbot that sometimes gets stuff right.
Have i done surveys, no. Have I seen the percent that subscribe, yes. I can only talk from my experience of my bubble. However, it bears up to the finances and the criticisms I've seen.
People like the idea and like that or can be a time saver for things like writing an email or resume etc. Managers like that it is purported to save money. The reality seems to be that it doesn't, or at least doesn't save much, based on studies.
I know people who love it and use it at work all the time for research with reference to internal info. I know people for whom it's banned and they need to document that ai was not used.
I know parents that use it when doing projects with their kids to save time but they worry that it circumvents the point of the project.
I don't know anyone that subscribes personally. From my perspective, most companies seem to be pushing very hard to get users. If their product was great, they wouldn't need to. There is no network effect like with recem fast spreading tech.
I should have phrases better. People don't like ai enough to pay for it and it's costly to run.
The companies that enshittify their service never actually care about their premium service. They provide a service which is good enough for free users and a pro version for power users. Later once they amass a critical userbase, they slowly make their free service shitty and ask users to pay to get their good-enough service back. Free users were their focus all along and these premium users are there just to pay some of their costs.
Yes, that works when providing the service is cheap to scale. Like social media, search etc
AI is not cheap to scale and is not as disruptive or groundbreaking.
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.
If people dont like ai, why do all of my coworkers and family members constantly reference ai?
Seriously, yall mfs here on lemmy have the strangest social media bubbles.
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.
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.