True story time. I was talking to a guy at $dayjob and he says he’s been talking with a third party company, whose solution we might buy. I asked him how the talks with them went and he said they were negotiating and I asked him how that was going.
He offhandedly said that he asked if and how they were using AI at all in their solution. I asked “Why did you ask about AI?”, since I was sort of curious what benefit he was looking for.
He said “Well, it’s not that I actually care about AI in their product, but if they don’t have any AI stuff, I can use that as leverage when negotiating the contract for a lower price.”
I was a bit astonished and he did kinda knowingly smile. He said “yea I know, I am part of the problem”. He also said “it’s also about taking a temperature on how ahead in technology the company is”.
I just wanted to share cause this is so insidious. Companies are asking each other about AI, despite the fact that (at least sometimes) nobody actually wants it! They are asking in order to use the lack of AI as leverage, which incentivizes companies to include AI in their offerings, not because it’s actually useful, but because it gives them leverage to raise prices!
This really makes AI seem more and more like a bubble.
.com boom and bust wasn’t established companies, it was tons of startups over flushed with cash who had no viable business models and the cash dried up.
this is far worse. the only light is that these massive data centers might make computing super cheap when the data is sold at rock bottom prices.
plenty of household names went down during dotcom, you don’t remember any of them because they went out of business, some of the ones that survived are only just now recovering to their dotcom-highs…
cough
IBM
cough
they’ve been a negative/stagnant growth company for over a decade…so consider what’s about to happen to their price again.