Corporate America seems ready to spend real money on AI, at least for now. This money being spent today doesn’t come close to recouping the investment OpenAI et al have made, but the trickle’s begun. The money’s not all imaginary.
OpenAI's bet is that its frontier models will be so far ahead of the current status quo that, if they are the only ones providing those frontier models, they will be able to name their price (to end users and advertisers alike) while increasing their share of spend in the space.
But even today, last-generation and open-source models form a meaningful portion of adopted solutions. Not every application in 2028 will need the AGI-approaching GPT-10 - especially if those applications can leverage a relatively small amount of code, perhaps even written by that GPT-10, that can in turn orchestrate (say) DeepSeek V5 running on compute that can be obtained for pennies on the dollar.
OpenAI could become a victim of its own success, and cause a house of cards to take down the global economy in the process. I personally hope this doesn't happen, but there is real risk here.
There will be the WebVans of the AI boom era, we just don't know their names yet. There also will be Ciscos and Suns that will never reach their high-water mark ever again, or become obsolete in a few years, and sold for less that what people expect.
I really don’t know what a full complement of good tools mean! your team is very large your team is very cheap You spend an awful lot on Ai tooling!
We spend about £50 - £200 a head per month on AI tooling.
Assuming everyone was at the top of of that scale (most aren’t) it’s like ai for 50 employees = cost of 1 employee.
...i just wish the code it generated was decent.
It's still pretty funny money. Companies are buying those subscriptions to show their shareholders how trendy they are, not because they're useful to them. And the subscription price points are widely speculated to not even have positive gross margin, yet alone starting to recoup any investment. It's far from clear that there's any kind of viable business here.
I can’t just copy-paste what comes out. But I have to say I’m able to get substantially more done as it saves me a lot of grunt work. You do have to learn how to use it like any other tool. I have found that it’s helped me sharpen a lot of my own skills in multiple areas and improved my understanding of systems I’m working on. I am able to learn new things much faster because it has a real-time feedback mechanism.
I can’t speak to your direct report but I’d be concerned about falling behind as a leader if you aren’t using it in the course of your regular work.
Like Okay, it sounds like a valid point. The issue is the hand waving and the fact it is not grounded in reality.
