If you want to increase your profit margins, you'll have to innovate! Adopting AI tools that somebody else created, and are equally available to your competitors, won't increase your revenue or margins. The ones who will see increased revenue and profit margins are the ones who actually innovated, by creating the AI.
This is exactly what Apollo reports: the Magnificent Seven increased their profit margins, while mainstream corporate America didn't.
The only way more efficient operations doesn't make margins go up is if prices go down. Is that what we're seeing?
There are hordes of grifters promising things they can't deliver and reaping in millions in capital from investors who are equally confused about the challenges of designing useful AI.
That said, AI can do useful things when properly designed. The market finding the people who can make this happen won't happen as fast as people expect.
BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work that previously just didn’t get done because it was overtaken by events or it got done to the absolute barest minimum level.
As a result the 20% where they add value never really grows or changes and in fact might be less valuable because of all the extra noise created by doing more tasks in the 80%.
This is working theory and likely full of holes.
- Cleaning - Picking up rubbish - Stocking shelves - Healthcare - Fruit picking
Thats only the start, while a lot of people do work on a computer, far more dont.
Healthcare is probably the one that we need some sort of help with the most! I think the need for people (fine - or robots) working in Healthcare will grow faster compared to the others in the future because of population aging.
Edit: Clarified my meaning by adding "some people think" to the sentence "...because some people think AI will solve..."
...which will also quickly be done by "AI", uncovering more such tasks until most of the "mundane work" is done by "AI" leaving humans free to do "non-mundane work". Of course those less mundane tasks require more insight, intelligence, knowledge and initiative from those humans which means some people will just not be able to keep up with their competitors, the humans who can do the less mundane tasks and the "AI" which can do the mundane stuff faster, more reliably and cheaper.
The big question is what those humans will do once such a scenario becomes true.
Unless AI companies are willing to do the impossible and accept liability for incorrect responses/outcomes, they're never going to be trusted with any task that could incur liability (law, accounting, medicine, architecture, engineering).
Could humans review AI output? Sure. You still need humans. Funnily enough wages won't decline in the long-run - they'll rise as firms compete for those who remained employed in said roles as others fell out of favour and have gaps in work experience.
Many, many variables at play. I never take anyone seriously who never considers this (many people on here).
609 points by the-mitr 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite | 645 comments
There is a lot of human work that can be offset with tokens. On the other hand, the amount of work for the highest intelligence models will remain limited - corporate strategy, major decisions, etc. are just not as frequent.
AI represents some weird intelligence-like resource. It clearly does something of value, but that must be combined with other resources. In tech there's a lot of that, so making it (roughly) infinitely accessible has had a nice impact and we've run into our next limiting factor: human time. Companies that aren't "pure tech" though will run into much earlier limiting factors – hardware, compliance, regulation, artistic value, human time, and so on.
It's also possible that AI has created value for consumers, but the profits flowed to the AI producers (due to scarcity) not the middle layer of the value chain, due to completion.