Cam PeggEd Zitron does brilliant job of summarizing and providing color commentary on the the Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit? report from Goldman Sachs.
I feel a little crazy every time I write one of these pieces, because it’s patently ridiculous. Generative AI is unprofitable, unsustainable, and fundamentally limited in what it can do thanks to the fact that it’s probabilistically generating an answer. It’s been eighteen months since this bubble inflated, and since then very little has actually happened involving technology doing new stuff, just an iterative exploration of the very clear limits of what an AI model that generates answers can produce, with the answer being “something that is, at times, sort of good.”
It’s obvious. It’s well-documented. Generative AI costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence. There are no killer apps, and no killer apps on the horizon. And there are no answers.
I’ve had the report open in a browser tab for a few days now (and have been resisting the passive-agressive urge to email it to lots and lots of people), and “costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence” encapsulates the situation pretty much perfectly.