But where's the revenue from those? It has to add up to a couple trillion dollars to break even on the capital spending.
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Would you say the same about any other tool, like where is the revenue caused by Susan in accounting having a computer, shouldn't we take away her computer if she can't prove a benefit?
The benefit of a computer would be trivial to demonstrate.
Trivial now. It was not always the case: http://digamo.free.fr/david90.pdf
The benefits of computers were obvious before they went into production.
After 1T in spend, it's still not clear that AIs will beat out a $30k secretary.
Also, your link has nothing to do with computers.
The benefits of having a computer that we can now interact with in plain natural language, that can extract intent from vague questions/statements, and that can piece together answers is obvious.
The link talks directly about the disconnect between the supposed productivity benefits of a technology and the measured productivity benefits of it in practice. And provides historical context about why the “obvious” benefits of a computer did not materialize when it was introduced; business and their processes had to be rebuilt around the computer before real gains were seen.
But LLMs can't actually do that any better than a 30k secretary with no training.
It's a structural deficiency in the way they work that can't just be handwaived away.
Nobody is talking about hand waving. Look at progress in models between the original ChatGPT release and what came out this year. The progress is incredible, both in the frontier models and in the smaller ones that can be run in high end laptops (<100GB of ram).
There are new architectures, paper, and harnesses coming out weekly that improve performance, accuracy, and/or performance efficiency.
Whether they can do better or not than a secretary is a poorly defined metric. But by objective metric they are already producing less buggy code than $30k developers, and doing it faster.
Neither can an accounting computer.
not sure one would expect huge revenue increases from these internal tools, but maybe dramatic cost savings? Surely a lot of corporate processes could be automated?
That's been the dream for the 40 years I've been paying attention. And in that time, I've seen plenty of incremental changes but never the kind of sudden sea change that the hype machine anticipates.
The perennial reality is that automation is inherently inflexible, so there's only so much of it that you can do before you've committed a huge strategic blunder by making your business resistant to change and severely curtailing its ability to cope with situations that don't cleanly fit the mold. So then we need to hack in ways to deal with the exceptions, but, since they're hacked in, they're often painful and time consuming. Sometimes so much so that after the new process stabilizes it turns out to be even more cumbersome and require more manual effort than the system it replaced.
When anyone other than a technologist suggests doing that kind of thing, we call it "bureaucracy", and we hate it. I think maybe what we have trouble seeing is that there's actually a pretty fundamental difference between automating purely technical processes like server deployment, and automating processes that are fundamentally about mediating human interactions.
> It has to add up to a couple trillion dollars to break even
It doesn't have to and I'm pretty sure it won't.