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AI Revolution vs. Computing Revolution

2 points by nitinagg ↗ HN
I have been reading a lot about computing revolution in 60s/70s. Seeing a lot of parallels to today. A bunch of enterprises spent millions on these IBM/DEC machines but didn't see any ROI. But then a lot of consulting and product companies popped up to help with that. IBM/DEC had crazy high margins during this time (similar to Nvidia/micron etc) but all withered away eventually. In the end the software companies (Microsoft, Google etc.) captured most of the value, what's the equivalent of that for AI?

6 comments

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silverFork
Well the cheap and dinky but yet accessible won over complex and expensive. Then they all learned to be cheap and then extract the cash some other way; ads became the money generator over functionality; they started to look at whatever industry that can make money using internet and sucking it all.

Ai premise is that it will be replacing costly labor or maybe something else will emerge but whatever that shows any new way of making money. The same old companies are all looking like hawks to steal any business that will make money of of Ai. Who has the most cash, will buy it or copy it. They will all so the same thing and my guess is that they will compete for the same and add new industries to extract cash from them.

Wormaus
Of course they will. They are for-profit companies. It’s all about being the 'best', the 'biggest', and the most 'famous'. Whoever can control their environment gets to set the rules. And that’s exactly what’s used to become even 'bigger', 'better', and more 'prominent'. Everything else is just a means to an end.
platevoltage
Much like PCs made these big mainframes impractical, LLMs will probably end up mostly on-device, and medium/large organizations will run their own inference in-house. That might work out for some hardware companies, but I think there will be a big loss on these data centers.
segmondy
We don't know, predicting the future is hard. What we know is that some companies around today will not be around in the future, and some new companies will pop up. Between now and then, a lot of money will be made by some people and a lot will be lost by others.
mikewarot
Where did you read that they didn't see any ROI? I find that highly unlikely.

They don't hire filing clerks any more. They don't have rooms full of people doing manual computation, of typing out monthly bills to mail to customers.

The Gary works went from about 60,000 workers down to about 3000 thanks to process automation.

It was a huge payoff for those who automated.