alt Hacker NewsFrontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
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It's more telling of the state of economy right now than AI.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs who are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors.
The product is firing half your workforce. You don't need marketing, that sells itself in the B2B space.
I'd argue the economy is propped up on pointless work providing employment. If you throw AI in that it'll contract and it'll either collapse entirely or move to a social care model that no one will foot and rapid class division. You'll end up with burning or unused datacentres that is all.
Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.