The claim that big US companies “cannot explain the upsides” of AI is misleading. Large firms are cautious in regulatory filings because they must disclose risks, not hype. SEC rules force them to emphasise legal and security issues, so those filings naturally look defensive. Earnings calls, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly positive about AI. The suggestion that companies only adopt AI out of fear of missing out ignores the concrete examples already in place. Huntington Ingalls is using AI in battlefield decision tools, Zoetis in veterinary diagnostics, Caterpillar in energy systems, and Freeport-McMoran in mineral extraction. These are significant operational changes.

It is also wrong to frame limited stock outperformance as proof that AI has no benefit. Stock prices reflect broader market conditions, not just adoption of a single technology. Early deployments rarely transform earnings instantly. The internet looked commercially underwhelming in the mid-1990s too, before business models matured.

The article confuses the immaturity of current generative AI pilots with the broader potential of applied AI. Failures of workplace pilots usually result from integration challenges, not because the technology lacks value. The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest.

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rsynnott a day ago | parent | next [-]

> The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest.

There was a weird moment in the late noughties where seemingly every big consumer company was creating a presence in Second Life. There was clearly a lot of strategic interest...

Second Life usage peaked in 2009 and never recovered, though it remains somewhat popular amongst furries.

Bizarrely, this kind of happened _again_ with the very similar "metaverse" stuff a decade or so later, though it burned out somewhat quicker and never hit the same levels of farcical nonsense; I don't think any actual _countries_ opened embassies in "the metaverse", say (https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/sweden-first-to-o...).

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julkali a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The issue is that the examples you listed mostly rely on very specific machine learning tools (which are very much relevant and good use of this tech), while the term "AI" in layman terms is usually synonymous for LLMs.

Mentioning the mid-1990s' internet boom is somewhat ironic imo, given what happened next. The question is whether "business models mature" with or without a market crash, given that the vast majority of ML money is provided for LLM efforts.

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comp_throw7 a day ago | parent [-]

(You're responding to an LLM-generated comment, btw.)

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nelox a day ago | parent | next [-]

The comment was definitely not LLM generated. However, I certainly did use search for help in sourcing information for it. Some of those searches offered AI generated results, which I cross-referenced, before using to write the comment myself. That in no way is the same as “an LLM-generated comment”.

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comp_throw7 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For the benefit of external observers, you can stick the comment into either https://gptzero.me/ or https://copyleaks.com/ai-content-detector - neither are perfectly reliable, but the comment stuck out to me as obviously LLM-generated (I see a lot of LLM-generated content in my day job), and false positives from these services are actually kinda rare (false negatives much more common).

But if you want to get a sense of how I noticed (before I confirmed my suspicion with machine assistance), here are some tells: "Large firms are cautious in regulatory filings because they must disclose risks, not hype." - "[x], not [y]"

"The suggestion that companies only adopt AI out of fear of missing out ignores the concrete examples already in place." - "concrete examples" as a phrase is (unfortunately) heavily over-represented in LLM-generated content.

"Stock prices reflect broader market conditions, not just adoption of a single technology." - "[x], not [y]" - again!

"Failures of workplace pilots usually result from integration challenges, not because the technology lacks value." - a third time.

"The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest." - not just the infamous emdash, but the phrasing is extremely typical of LLMs.

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dnissley a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's popular now to level these accusations at text that contains emdashes.

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fzzzy a day ago | parent [-]

An llm would “know” not to put spaces around an em dash. An en dash should have spaces.

	▲	jdiff 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've actually seen LLMs put spaces around em dashes more often than not lately. I've made accusations of humanity only to find that the comment I was replying to was wholly generated. And I asked, there was no explicit instruction to misuse the em dashes to enhance apparent humanity.

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lossolo 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The use of “ instead of ", two different types of hyphens/dash, specific wording and sentence construction are clear signs that the whole comment was produced by chatGPT. How much of it was actually yours (people sometimes just want LLM to rewrite their thoughts), we will never know but it's an output of an LLM.

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nelox 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, I use an iPhone and “ is default on my keyboard.

Tell me, why should I not use a hyphen for hyphenated words?

I was schooled is British English where the spaced endash - is preferred.

Shall I go on?

	▲	lossolo 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm using ChatGPT daily to correct wording and I work on LLMs, construction and the wording in your comment is straight from ChatGPT. I looked at your other comments, and a lot of them seem to be LLM output. This one is an obvious example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44404524 And anyone can go back to the pre LLM era and see your comments on HN. You need to understand that ChatGPT has a unique style of writing and overuses certain words and sentence constructions that are statistically different from normal human writing. Rewriting things with an LLM is not a crime, so you don’t need to act like it is.

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fragmede 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

and you're responding to a comment where the LLM has been instructed to not to use emdashes.

And I'm responding to a comment that was generated by an LLM that was instructed to complain about LLM generated content with a single sentence. At the end of the day, we're all stoichastic parrots. How about you respond to the substance of the comment and not whether or not there was an emdash. Unless you have no substance.

	▲	comp_throw7 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Posting (unmarked) LLM-generated content on public discussion forums is polluting the commons. If I want an LLM's opinion on a topic, I can go get one (or five) for free, instantly. The reason I read the writing of other people is the chance that there's something interesting there, some non-obvious perspective or personal experience that I can't just press a button to access. Acting as a pipeline between LLMs and the public sphere destroys that signal.

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Frieren a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Huntington Ingalls is using AI in battlefield decision tools, Zoetis in veterinary diagnostics, Caterpillar in energy systems, and Freeport-McMoran in mineral extraction.

But most AI push is for LLMs, and all the companies you talk about seem to be using other types of AI.

> Failures of workplace pilots usually result from integration challenges, not because the technology lacks value.

Bold claim. Toxic positivism seems to be too common in AI evangelists.

> The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest.

If the financial crisis taught me something is that if a company jumps of a bridge the rest will follow. Assuming that there must be some real value because capitalism is missing the main proposition of capitalism, companies will take stupid decisions and pay the price for it.