I’ve been curious about this too, but haven’t been able to find anything that puts a real price (including future profit margin) on GenAI. For example, having a chat conversation with a customer service agent in India might cost about $2-3. Is a GenAI bot truly cheaper than that once you factor in the energy & water costs, hardware, training, profits, etc.? It might be, but I’m skeptical.

I was only ever interested in these company’s services as a way to save money. They are no longer cheaper than a hotel, so I would rather stay at a hotel.

I love the games (haven’t played 76, but the rest are great). I watched the first 3 episodes and thought they connected well with the games thematically, but I never cared enough to continue. Every now and then I think I should get back to it, but I always have something that interests me more, including just scrolling Lemmy. To be fair, I don’t really enjoy watching TV or movies that much though.

I’ve been applying similar thinking to my job search. When I see AI listed in a job description, I immediately put the company into one of 3 categories:

1. It is an AI company that may go out of business suddenly within the next few years leaving me unemployed and possibly without any severance.
2. Management has drank the Kool-Aid and is hoping AI will drive their profit growth, which makes me question management competence. This also has a high likelihood of future job loss, but at least they might pay severance.
3. The buzzword was tossed in to make the company look good to investors, but it is not highly relevant to their business. These companies get a partial pass for me.

A company in the first two categories would need to pay a lot to entice me and I would not value their equity offering. The third category is understandable, especially if the success of AI would threaten their business.

You got me thinking a bit on this one. One possibility is if you want to make a bet on it failing to deliver value in the near future, look at the companies whose stock prices have fallen on the fear of AI putting them out of business. For example, Concentrix does call center outsourcing and their stock is down significantly from their 2022 peak, partially on the expectation that AI is going to take business from them. Now, their profit margin is tiny and they don’t seem to be growing much, so I don’t know that they are a great investment, but there could be upside if the negative cloud of AI is removed. There are probably better examples out there, this one just came to mind.

Note: I have not done any research on this idea or on Concentrix and don’t know if this is a good idea, but at least less risky than shorting the AI hype.

The only use case I can see for Access is when you absolutely must have a database and your company will not provide you a real database solution. I have experience with both, but haven’t touched Access in years (and hope to never do so again). To be fair, I also regularly use Excel for things that I should probably be using Word for because it is easier to get formatting right in Excel.