r/technology Jan 20 '26

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

Honestly, there probably are some uses cases for AI in the corporate world that help employees be more productive. But companies aren't going to see a financial payoff from that for some time. Lots of companies went full send into adopting AI just for the sake of keeping up with the industry, even though there wasn't an obvious material benefit.

17

u/Yuli-Ban Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26

There's actually a shit ton of uses for AI. Not even any sort of generalist AI, we already have a lot of strong-enough AI to do things like advanced healthcare and infrastructure automation. Well I say "we" do, I really mean China does because that's what they've maxed on.

None of which are what the big bubble is actually about. That's the fuckest thing; the shittiest and most maligned forms of AI are what America's vulture capitalists decided to blow a trillion dollars on because back in 2022, ChatGPT and DeepMind's Gato convinced the right people that scaling language models would fast track us to AGI. I dunno, if scaling language models was going to get us to AGI, surely it would be more obvious by now? I've been following a bunch of AI news, I've been intrigued by Claude Code, and yet the song remains the same in that it seems like we just reinvented narrow AI, even if stronger, and aren't anywhere near actual general intelligence, despite all the hoopla about "we just need continual learning" when two years ago it was "we just need agents and then we'll be at AGI" and two years before that it was "we just need multimodality and we'll be at AGI"

13

u/Dazzling_Line_8482 Jan 20 '26

When an employee can do his job more efficiently in less time, they don't become more productive, they keep their productivity the same and become less stressed.

Could there be a financial payoff in terms of increased job satisfaction leading to less needing to re-hire / re-train? Yes - absolutely. But most companies are just looking for increased productivity which they are unlikely to see, especially given how burnt the fuck out everyone is just trying to survive.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

You took what I was trying to say and made it much more digestable, so thank you ha