I recently had an hook to get some investment for a startup. Money is flowing in this sector. The investor told me: find me any idea that might sell, be useful.
I went to speak with 3 associations of entrepreneurs in 3 different countries. Like guys, we have the money, give me some ideas, all services will be free for.you. All these entrepreneurs did not know where to fit AI if not for some support chat.
Several flaws here: dependomg on the tasks, you can train and retrain models. Instruct new ones. Previous errors will be greatly reduced, or disappear completely. ( if we talk about errors only ). Hallucinations are mathematically certain for less specialized models, but this is another problem all togheter.
Using ai is indeed saving money ( and time ). It excels at tedious tasks with well defined constraints. This saves me so much time everyday: ie: find X in dataset Y that do not much Z. This work was usually done by humans, with an higher error rate. If I take 3 minutes to classify 1 millions rows, which would have took me at least 3 days before, that is money saved.
This said, they trying to push the reverse centaur approach, human overseeing the ai worker, which is flawed. But companies reason in stakeholders profit and 3 months windows.
When I started as a junior i was the guy classifying 1 M records. That is how I leaned. Now we dont have juniors anymore. But companies seems to dont care about the next 5 years.
I work in AI and the only obvious profit is the ability to fire workers. Which they need to rehire after some months, but lowering wages. It is indeed a powerful tool, but tools are not driving profits. They are a cost. Unless you run a disinformation botnet, scamming websites, or porn. It is too unpredictable to really automatize software creation ( fuzzy is the term, we somehow mitigate with stochastic approach ). Probably movie industry is also cutting costs, but not sure.
AI is the way capital is trying to acquire skills cutting off the skilled.
Have to say though that having an interfacd that understands natural language opens so many possibilities. Which could really democratize access to tech, but they are so niche that they would never really drive profit.
My second phone is a Nokia t800 with KaiOS. 99 bucks and I can bring it hiking for 3 days without recharging.