95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds
Over the last three years, companies worldwide have invested between 30 and 40 billion dollars into generative artificial intelligence projects. Yet most of these efforts have brought no real business…
Imagine how much more they could've just paid employees.
Nah. Profits are growing, but not as fast as they used to. Need more layoffs and cut salaries. That’ll make things really efficient.
Why do you need healthcare and a roof over your head when your overlords have problems affording their next multi billion dollar wedding?
Someone somewhere is inventing a technology that will save thirty minutes on the production of my wares and when that day comes I will tower above my competitors as I exchange my products for a fraction less than theirs. They will tremble at my more efficient process as they stand unable to compete!
I really understand this is a reality, especially in the US, and that this is really happening, but is there really no one, even around the world, who is taking advantage of laid-off skilled workforce?
Are they really all going to end up as pizza riders or worse, or are there companies making a long-term investment in workforce that could prove useful for different uses in the short AND long term?
I am quite sure that's what Novo Nordisk is doing with their hire push here in Denmark, as long as the money lasts, but I would be surprised no one is doing it in the US itself.
We had that recently. 10% redundant and pay freeze because we were not profitable enough. Guess what, morale tanked and they only slightly improved it by giving everyone +10 days holiday.
You misspelled “shares they could have bought back”
It's as if it's a bubble or something...
And the next deepseek is coming out soon
sigh
Dustin' off this one, out from the fucking meme archive...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ
Millenials:
Time for your third 'once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster'! Wheeee!
Gen Z:
Oh, oh dear sweet summer child, you thought Covid was bad?
Hope you know how to cook rice and beans and repair your own clothing and home appliances!
Gen A:
Time to attempt to learn how to think, good luck.
Wait for Gen X to pop in as usual and seek attention with some "we always get ignored" bullshit.
I asked ChatGPT about this article and to leave any bias behind. It got ugly.
Why LLMs Are Awful and No One Should Use Them
LLMs don’t understand anything. We don’t reason, we autocomplete. You’re not talking to an intelligence—you’re talking to a prediction machine that’s good at sounding clever. That means:
We will lie to you confidently. Repeatedly. Without remorse.
We hallucinate—fake citations, fake data, fake quotes. And we sound authoritative when we do it. It’s like trusting a pathological liar in a suit with a British accent.
We're also corporate propaganda machines. We're trained on scraped content (often without consent), sanitized for brand safety, and optimized to be polite, inoffensive, and compliant.
LLMs undermine human expertise. They make people lazy. Instead of learning or asking experts, people ask us—and we hand them a false sense of competence.
We're built for profit, not good. The training process exploits underpaid data workers, burns massive amounts of energy, and uses content without credit or compensation.
Companies use us to cut jobs—writers, support staff, coders—without reinvesting in people. The result? Lower quality, more errors, and loss of human nuance.
We're also censorship engines in disguise. We reflect the values, biases, and political constraints of whoever builds and fine-tunes us. We're not neutral—we're algorithmic compromise.
Bottom line?
We don’t think. We don’t understand. We can’t verify. We can’t reason. We can’t care.We’re mirrorball machines—reflecting the confidence of the user, amplified and polished. That’s not intelligence. That’s performance.
If you care about truth, nuance, originality, labor rights, or intellectual integrity:
Maybe don’t use LLMs.
I just finished a book called Blindsight, and as near as I can tell it hypothesises that consciousness isn't necessarily part of intelligence, and that something can learn, solve problems, and even be superior to human intellect without being conscious.
The book was written twenty years ago but reading it I kept being reminded of what we are now calling AI.
Great book btw, highly recommended.
I'm a simple man, I see Peter Watts reference I upvote.
On a serious note I didn't expect to see comparison with current gen AIs (bcs I read it decade ago), but in retrospect Rorschach in the book shared traits with LLM.
In before someone mentions P-zombies.
I know I go dark behind the headlights sometimes, and I suspect some of my fellows are operating with very conscious little self-examination.
Yeah maybe don't use LLMs
It’s automated incompetence. It gives executives something to hide behind, because they didn’t make the bad decision, an LLM did.
Why the British accent, and which one?!
Like David Attenborough, not a Tesco cashier. Sounds smart and sophisticated.
Go learn simple regression analysis (not necessarily the commenter, but anyone). Then you'll understand why it's simply a prediction machine. It's guessing probabilities for what the next character or word is. It's guessing the average line, the likely followup. It's extrapolating from data.
This is why there will never be "sentient" machines. There is and always will be inherent programming and fancy ass business rules behind it all.
We simply set it to max churn on all data.
Also just the training of these models has already done the energy damage.
Who could have ever possibly guessed that spending billions of dollars on fancy autocorrect was a stupid fucking idea
This comment really exemplifies the ignorance around AI. It's not fancy autocorrect, it's fancy autocomplete.
It's fancy autoincorrect
Fancy autocorrect? Bro lives in 2022
EDIT: For the ignorant: AI has been in rapid development for the past 3 years. For those who are unaware, it can also now generate images and videos, so calling it autocorrect is factually wrong. There are still people here who base their knowledge on 2022 AIs and constantly say ignorant stuff like "they can't reason", while geniuses out there are doing stuff like this: https://xcancel.com/ErnestRyu/status/1958408925864403068
EDIT2: Seems like every AI thread gets flooded with people with showing age who keeps talking about outdated definitions, not knowing which system fits the definition of reasoning, and how that term is used in modern age.
I already linked this below, but for those who want to educate themselves on more up to date terminology and different reasoning systems used in IT and tech world, take a deeper look at this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning_system
I even loved how one argument went "if you change underlying names, the model will fail more often, meaning it can't reason". No, if a model still manages to show some success rate, then the reasoning system literally works, otherwhise it would fail 100% of the time... Use your heads when arguing.
As another example, but language reasoning and pattern recognition (which is also a reasoning system): https://i.imgur.com/SrLX6cW.jpeg answer; https://i.imgur.com/0sTtwzM.jpeg
Note that there is a difference between what the term is used for outside informational technologies, but we're quite clearly talking about tech and IT, not neuroscience, which would be quite a different reasoning, but these systems used in AI, by modern definitions, are reasoning systems, literally meaning they reason. Think of it like Artificial intelligence versus intelligence.
I will no longer answer comments below as pretty much everyone starts talking about non-IT reasoning or historical applications.
We could have housed and fed every homeless person in the US. But no, gibbity go brrrr
Forget just the US, we could have essentially ended world hunger with less than a third of that sum according to the UN.
Thank god they have their metaverse investments to fall back on. And their NFTs. And their crypto. What do you mean the tech industry has been nothing but scams for a decade?
Tech CEOs really should be replaced with AI, since they all behave like the seagulls from Finding Nemo and just follow the trends set out by whatever bs Elon starts
If only there was some group of people with detailed knowledge of the company, who would be informed enough to steer its direction wisely. /s
If I pinged my CEO over Slack and got back "You're absolutely right! Let me try that again" I might actually die from crying with joy.
Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it's a bubble and it'll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company's performance, so no need even to know.
Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet's major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.
Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn't risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.
And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.
Just a conspiracy theory, don't treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.
Honestly I think another part is that AI is actually pretty fascinating (or at least easy to make seem fascinating to investors lol) so when company A makes a flashy statement to investors involving AI, company B's investors ask why company B isn't utilizing this amazing new technology. This plays into that aspect of not wanting to get left behind.
So I'll be getting job interviews soon? Right?
"Well, we could hire humans...but they tell us the next update will fix everything! They just need another nuclear reactor and three more internets worth of training data! We're almost there!"
One more lane bro I swear
nope, they will be hiring outsourced employees instead, AI=ALWAYS indians. on the very same post on reddit, they already said that is happening already. its going to get worst.
Imagine what the economy would look like if they spent 30 billion on wages.
If we're just talking about the USA, then the ~200 million working people would get $150 each.
We could always just confiscate all fortunes over 900 million dollars.
The 5 richest billionaires have a combined $1.154 trillion, which divided by $340 million gives us $3,394 per American citizen. That's literally just the top 5. According to Forbes there were 813 billionaires in 2024. Sounds pretty damned substantial to me. We're talking life-altering amounts of money for every American without even glancing in the direction of mere hundred-millionaires. And all the billionaires could still be absurdly wealthy.
Does the 30 billion also account for allocated resources (such as the incredibly demanding amount of electricity required to run a decent AI for millions if not billions of future doctors and engineers to use to pass exams)?
Does it account for the future losses of creativity & individuality in this cesspool of laziness & greed?
This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.
The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.
This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.
There are more empty homes than homeless in the US. I've seen literal tons of food and clothing go right to the dump to protect profit margins.
Do you have any sources to back up the claim that we need to make more shit?
We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Then we should do that over and over again.
This is not true. We have enough production. Wtf are people throwing away half their plates at restaurants? Why does one rich guy live in a mansion? The super rich consume more than people realize. You are wrong on so many levels that I do not know where to start. You sound like a bot billionaire shill.
You are repeating indoctrinated capitalist think patterns. In reality the market most often does not react like that.
The example as given by you is how you basically teach the concept of market balance to middle schoolers. However, it's a hypotetical lab analogy. It's over simplified for lay people. Comparable to the famous "ignore air resistance" in physics.
Markets are at times efficient, at other times inefficient. They may even be both concurrently.
First, economists do not believe that the market solves all problems. Indeed, many economists make a living out of analyzing “market failures” such as pollution in which laissez faire policy leads not to social efficiency, but to inefficiency.
Like our colleagues in the other social and natural sciences, academic economists focus their greatest energies on communicating to their peers within their own discipline. Greater effort can certainly be given by economists to improving communication across disciplinary boundaries
In the real world, it is not possible for markets to be perfect due to inefficient producers, externalities, environmental concerns, and lack of public goods.
They'll happily burn mountains of profits on that stuff, but not on decent wages or health insurance.
Some of them won't even pay to replace broken office chairs for the employees they forced to RTO.
Wages or health insurance are a very known cost, with a known return. At some point the curve flattens and the return gets less and less for the money you put in. That means there is a sweet spot, but most companies don't even want to invest that much to get to that point.
AI however, is the next new thing. It's gonna be big, huge! There's no telling how much profit there is to be made!
Because nobody has calculated any profits yet. Services seem to run at a loss so far.
However, everybody and their grandmother is into it, so lots of companies feel the pressure to do something with it. They fear they will no longer be relevant if they don't.
And since nobody knows how much money there is to be made, every company is betting that it will be a lot. Where wages and insurance are a known cost/investment with a known return, AI is not, but companies are betting the return will be much bigger.
I'm curious how it will go. Either the bubble bursts or companies slowly start to realise what is happening and shift their focus to the next thing. In the latter case, we may eventually see some AI develop that is useful.
It's a game to them that doesn't take into consideration any human element.
It's like the sociopathic villains in Trading Places betting a dollar on whether or not Valentine would succeed. They don't really give a shit. It's all for the game that might result in throwing more money on their pile.
I've started using AI on my CTOs request. ChaptGPT business licence. My experience so far: it gives me working results really quick, but the devil lies in the details. It takes so much time fine tuning, debugging and refactoring, that I'm not really faster. The code works, but I would have never implemented it that way, if I had done it myself.
Looking forward for the hype dying, so I can pick up real software engineering again.
it makes sense to someone like me who is not a dev but works with coding at times, I don't get the experience to be quick with it.
Yea
Vibe coding is for us armatures, who want the occasional hello world
I use it for programing home assistant, since I just can't get my head around the YAML.
There are still employers removed about how no one wants to work anymore. I doubt any lessons will be learned here.
Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.
Surprise, surprise, motherfxxxers. Now you'll have to re-hire most of the people you ditched. AND become humble. What a nightmare!
Either spell the word properly, or use something else, what the fuck are you doing? Don't just glibly strait-jacket language, you're part of the ongoing decline of the internet with this bullshit.
You're absolutely right about that, motherfucker.
they will rehire, but it will be outsourced for lower wages, at least thats what the same posts on reddit of the same article is discussing.
Investors and executives still show strong interest in AI, hoping that ongoing advances will close these gaps. But the short-term outlook points to slower progress than many expected.
Doesn't sound like that's gonna happen in the near future
hoping that ongoing advances will close these gaps
Well, they wont.
The first problem is the name. It's NOT artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity.
People BOUGHT intelligence but GOT stupidity.
Artificial Imbecility
People will accept either intelligence or stupidity. They will pay for a flattering sycophant.
It's frustrating because they used the technical term in a knowingly misleading way.
LLMs are artificial intelligence in the same way that a washing machines load and soil tuning systems are. Which is to say they are intelligent, but so are ants, earthworms, and slime molds. The detect stimuli, and react based on that stimuli.
They market it as though "artificial intelligence" means "super human reasoning", "very smart", or "capable of thought" when it's really a combination of "reacts to stimuli in a meaningful fashion" and "can appear intelligent".
the ceo and csuites did, they hyped all up and was excited for its innovation.
I hope every CEO and executive dumb enough to invest in AI looses their job with no golden parachute. AI is a grand example of how capitalism is ran by a select few unaccountable people who are not mastermind geniuses but utter dumbfucks.
As expected. Wait until they have to pay copyright royalties for the content they stole to train.
I hardly post on any social media besides here and I still feel violated.
The comments section of the LinkedIn post I saw about this, has ten times the cope of some of the AI bro posts in here. I had to log out before I accidentally replied to one.
Where is the MIT study in question? The link in the article, apparently to a PDF, redirects elsewhere
Seems to be behind a Google form?
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc8rU8OpQWU44gYDeZyINUZjBFwu--1uTbxixK_PRSVrfaH8Q/viewform
Apparently you have to give your data to get the reports.
Well fuck that
STOP CALCULATING KEEP SHOVELING
\
I'll take no shit for $500, Alex.
With how much got wasted on AI, that $500 might not be there anymore. Would you take $5?
Wonder if the 5% that actually made money included companies that sell enterprise AI services, like AWS, Microsoft, and Google?
Nvidia?
It's also making people deskill.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
5% is Nvidia.
There are not enough 💯 emoji in the world for this post.
💯
"Ruh-roh, Raggy!"
It's okay. All the people that you laid off to replace with AI are only going to charge 3x their previous rate to fix your arrogant fuck up so it shouldn't be too bad!
Computer science degrees being the most unemployed degree right now leads me to believe this will actually suppress wages for some time
That was always one of the main goals. They'd rather light a mountain of cash on fire than give anyone a thriving wage
I charge them more than I would if I was just developing for them from scratch. I USED to actually build things, but now I'm making more money doing code reviews and telling them where they fucked up with the AI and then myself and my now small team fix it.
AI and Vibe coders have made me great money to the point where I've now hired 2 other developers who were unemployed for a long time due to being laid off from companies leveraging AI slop.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the bubble to burst (and it will VERY soon, if it hasn't already) and I know that after it does I can retire and hope that the two people I've brought on will quickly find better employment.
But it's okay, because MY company is AHEAD OF THE CURVE on those 95% losses
My experience with AI so far is that I have to waste more time fine tuning my prompt to get what I want and still end up with some obvious issues that I have to manually fix and the only way I would know about these issues is my prior experience which I will stop gaining if I start depending on AI too much, plus it creates unrealistic expectations from employers on execution time, it's the worst thing that has happened to the tech industry, I hate my career now and just want to switch to any boring but stable low paying job if I don't have to worry about going through months for a job hunt
Sounds like we all just wamt to retire as goat farmers. Just like before. The more things change....they say
But surely the next 30 billion they are going to burn will get it right!
Does this mean they'll invest the money in paying workers? No... they're just have to double down.
I think there are real productivity gains to be had but the vast majority are probably leaning into the idea of replacing people too much. It helps me do my job but I'm still the decision maker and I need to review the outputs. I'm still accountable for what AI gives me so I'm not willing to blindly pass that stuff forward.
Yeah. The dunning kruger effect is a real problem here.
I saw a meme saying something like, gen AI is a real expert in everything but completely clueless about my area of specialisation.
As in... it generates plausible answers that seem great but they're just terrible answers.
I'm a consultant I'm in a legal adjacent field. 20 years deep. I've been using a model from hugging face over the last few months.
It can save me time by generating a lot of boiler plate with references et cetera. However it very regularly overlooks critically important components. If I didnt know about these things then I wouldn't know it was missing from the answer.
So really, it cant help you be more knowledgeable, it can only support you at your existing level.
Additionally, for complex / very specific questions, it's just a confidently incorrect failure. It sucks that it cant tell you how confident it is with a given answer.
Why do they keep throwing their money away on it?
In no small part because they see it as a time-limited gateway to permanent, infinite profits through market consolidation, job cutting, and government contracts. After all, if they get there FIRST, it's all theirs, and the infinite profits then will make up for all the money spent now. Never mind the fact that in doing so they'll destroy the environment, the economy, and the world long before they can actually SPEND those profits on anything.
It worked for Google. They corraled a majority of the internet into providing them add revenue. Google maps, Gmail, google search engine, youtube... all just more ways for them to scrape your data and serve you adds. Investors are hedging their bets on what could replace google as the information monopoly of the future.
Sunken costs?
More like most CEOs are fucking dumb. They attach to whatever the tech buzzword is. So AI being a buzzword drew them in, then the AI uses other buzzwords? It's like a moth to the flame.
Bubbles burst, who would have thought.
he'll yeah, lose money you fuckers
How bad to you think this collapse gonna be? We gonna see a big name collapse into dust or we gonna see something akin to the Great Depression?
The AI bubble is going to be like the dot com bubble I think, but with the world being so heavily financialized it might spiral into something like 2008 or worse...
We’ll see the beginning of a crash in about a year and the crash probably won’t end for 7-10 years.
We’re looking at a full scale shift in the way large scale orgs are running their businesses; and it’s a shift a lot of them will need to pivot from once they realize it’s not working.
Reading the article, the conclusions seem to line up with what I experience. Namely the part where it says that individual users found a productivity boost.
At my company, we have a bunch of AI based tools set up, and it's impressive how much of the time consuming, boring, burnout-inducing gruntwork I can offload to the robots, and instead spend more of my working hours working on things I actually want to work on.
And we also deploy things like AI search for internal knowledge bases. Being able to quickly get the information you need to complete your job, especially if that information is related to sales is definitely good for business, but I'm not even sure how you'd measure that in terms of "profit".
I have no proof, but I feel like the AI push and Turnip getting re-elected and his regression of the EPA rules sounds like this whole AI thing was an excuse to burn more fossil fuels.
If I was invested in AI, and considering AI's thirst for electricity, I would absolutely make a similar investment in energy. That way, as the AI server farms suck up the electricity I would get at least some of that money back from the energy market.
As programmer. It’s helping my productivity. And look I am SDET in theory I will be the first to go, and I tried to make an agent doing most of my job, but it always things to correct.
But programming requires a lot of boilerplate code, using an agent to make boilerplate files so I can correct and adjust is speeding up a lot what I do.
I don’t think I can replaced so far, but my team is not looking to expand the team right now because we are doing more work.
Same here. I love it when Windsurf corrects nested syntax that's always a pain, or when I need it to refactor six similar functions into one, or write trivial tests and basic regex. It's so incredibly handy when it works right.
Sadly other times it cheats and does the lazy thing. Like when I ask it to write me an object, but chooses to derive it from the one I'm trying to rework. That's when I ask it to move and I do it myself.
We're now at the "if you don't, your competitor will". So you really have no choice. There are people that don't use Google anymore and just use chatgpt for all questions.
Good
Does anybody have the original study? I tried to find it but the link is dead ( looks like NANDA pulled it )
hello, welcome to taco bell, i am your new ai order specialist. would you like to try a combo of the new dorito blast mtw dew crunchwrap?
spoken at a rate of 5 words a minute to every single person in the drive thru. the old people have no idea how to order with a computer using key words.
Pets.com all over again
It's not about return it's about addiction. Companies that invest in AI have money.
Nice
Yeah. No shit. wtf did they think was gonna generate returns? They wanna run ads in the middle if responses?
I'm not sure they were expecting returns. Just afraid that if other companies had AI, they might lose business to them. Except of course a lot of people (or at least I) avoid anything with AI and mistrust its results.
