I don't even think it's stupidity. It's simple greed and an extreme case of Goodhart's lawsl. Shareholders want to hear AI, so CEOs will burn the rest of the company to satisfy that. The company doesn't matter; they will get paid handsomely for destroying it.

Shareholders only care about short term gains, CEOs have no skin in the game, everyone else under wants to keep their job. None of these are aligned towards "make the nest proudct and satisfy customers".

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oro44 2 days ago | parent [-]

The counter point to this is Apple who have not invested barely a dime in LLMs. Their stock price has not been crushed at all, quite the opposite in fact. They focus on the good stuff. Perhaps that's the luxury of living off the vision and leadership of someone who died many years ago.

Personally I believe the stock market is incredibly, incredibly shaky. Investors are now in full-fear mode, it doesn't matter what news Nvidia etc print - if customers of OAI and others, are not seeing a meaningful INCREMENTAL increase in revenue generation or increase in cost-reduction (aside from white-washing it with lay-offs from insane hiring in the past).

RE. stupidity - it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al.

Wanna know how stupid it is? Someone I know who works at Blackrock as a portfolio manager pretty high up is all of a sudden being forced to learn how to code and use LLMs to code. Yes you heard me right - this behaviour is expanding out of the software engineering profession.

Its absolutely nuts.

	▲	johnnyanmac 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, Apple always seems to go its own way. I wonder if it truly is a matter of a strong visionary (be it Cook or Jobs's legacy being upheld) or if shareholders simply come in with different mentality. Nintendo also has similar vibes. I see shareholder calls asking about AI usage and their answers come down to something like "we're not ruling it out, but we'll only use it when a situation presents itself". They tend to be pretty good at pushing back against their shareholders. Having a proper war chest instead of constantly funding on debt probably helps. > it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al. Stupidity implies incompetence and lack of intent. Greed is incredibly intentional. There's always a bit of stupidity with greed (we even call such an algorithmic approach the "greedy method" after all), but I think they are important distinctions. I'll admit your blackrock example is plain stupidity, though. I know part of the end-goal is for "idea guys" to be able to make their ideas without pesky employees, but I don't think too many really think they can achieve that today.