The latest BCG report I saw on this was the one from this summer that found that employees are saying they're saving time, but businesses still haven't figured out how to turn that into dollars.

And employees self-reporting that they saved time doesn't necessarily mean they actually save time. Humans are famously crap at estimating that sort of thing.

Maybe they are speeding up things that were not the bottleneck or don't matter. Or LLMs speed up the time to learn, "well this idea probably sucks actually", which is great, but in the end there is still no good idea. For software dev, it had already gotten pretty efficient before LLMs came around - the business of making software demanded it. There are still gains to be had no doubt, but many will have less impact.

I'm using claude to make gaming mod apps I never would have bothered to code before, but they have zero monetizable value. There is demand for sure, but somewhat ironically, copyright/IP/TOS law stands in the way. The thing which committed the biggest copyright infringement in human history lets me make another thing which I can't release because of copyright law. I'd get cease-and-desisted instantly if I did so.

But does crazy speedup of tasks actually yield more productivity? Or does it yield greater numbers of pointless tasks?

Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?

GenAI is revolutionary.

GenAI is difficult to monetize.

Two things can be true at the same time.

For example, I helped build a specialized GenAI product that disrupted its niche and unseated the incumbent market leader. It was also, as of when I left the company earlier this year, losing money hand over fist.

Are you putting your money where your mouth is and creating a startup then?

If not then a) don’t diss the mba folks b) you don’t have as much conviction as you claim c) if you are then send a link so I can review?

Cheers

This. Positive sum games are deflationary. Economic policy can, and has, offset the deflation of techno capital growth.

Indeed, although there are also pressures pushing banks to lend out money regardless of created wealth. This is why there's so much investment into stupid things like AI - they call it TINA or "There Is No Alternative" (to put your dollars into). The scale of AI is as big as it is because there were huge pools of money sloshing around looking for things to invest into, that's the underlying problem that caused the RAM crisis, not AI itself.

And, perhaps more to this particular point, it came too late for vendors behind the dotcom boom. Lucent Technologies no longer exists. WorldCom no longer exists. Cisco is a shadow of its former self, with a stock price that only recovered last year.

The dotcom bubble burst because the development of the internet could not keep up with expectations, even though investors were correct in principle with their assumption it would generate swaths of wealth. For AI the hope is that AI itself will start to push its own development and adoption sooner rather than later, so the timing issue that killed dotcom investors might instead make AI investors insanely rich. That's why we're still seeing heaps of money getting dumped into it.