> I have yet to see an end user product that in itself isnt a wrapper around LLMs that is impressive created by LLM assistance.
I don’t disagree that AI is overhyped. But I think you are probably looking in the wrong place.
I think most software that is written isn’t really a product, at least not a public product. It’s an in-house tool or a one-off project needed to complete some larger task. People everywhere are always writing small programs that make their life or job just a bit easier (and explains why so many corporate projects are little more than an excel spreadsheet).
And there are a lot of people who have made custom software just for themselves with AI. Not a product, just a tool or project that finally made sense to build.
Would you say the same about any other tool, like where is the revenue caused by Susan in accounting having a computer, shouldn't we take away her computer if she can't prove a benefit?
The benefits of having a computer that we can now interact with in plain natural language, that can extract intent from vague questions/statements, and that can piece together answers is obvious.
The link talks directly about the disconnect between the supposed productivity benefits of a technology and the measured productivity benefits of it in practice. And provides historical context about why the “obvious” benefits of a computer did not materialize when it was introduced; business and their processes had to be rebuilt around the computer before real gains were seen.
Nobody is talking about hand waving. Look at progress in models between the original ChatGPT release and what came out this year. The progress is incredible, both in the frontier models and in the smaller ones that can be run in high end laptops (<100GB of ram).
There are new architectures, paper, and harnesses coming out weekly that improve performance, accuracy, and/or performance efficiency.
Whether they can do better or not than a secretary is a poorly defined metric. But by objective metric they are already producing less buggy code than $30k developers, and doing it faster.
Only if by "incredible" you mean it takes vastly more resources to do the same thing slightly better but with an even larger chance of completely fouling the bed.
But by objective metric they are already producing less buggy code than $30k developers, and doing it faster.
That's like bragging that a $1 trillion tank can go faster than a cheap budget car. For $1 trillion being slightly better isn't good enough.
First off, the state of the art models are perusing a strategy of doing more with more, but there are lots of small models that can be run locally on high end pcs. Those small models are more capable, are cheaper, and are faster than the state of the art of 3 years ago.
If you consider the change in what’s possible in June 2026 vs 2025 (to say nothing of 2024) “incremental” than you and I are living in different realities and I don’t know what to tell you.
not sure one would expect huge revenue increases from these internal tools, but maybe dramatic cost savings? Surely a lot of corporate processes could be automated?
That's been the dream for the 40 years I've been paying attention. And in that time, I've seen plenty of incremental changes but never the kind of sudden sea change that the hype machine anticipates.
The perennial reality is that automation is inherently inflexible, so there's only so much of it that you can do before you've committed a huge strategic blunder by making your business resistant to change and severely curtailing its ability to cope with situations that don't cleanly fit the mold. So then we need to hack in ways to deal with the exceptions, but, since they're hacked in, they're often painful and time consuming. Sometimes so much so that after the new process stabilizes it turns out to be even more cumbersome and require more manual effort than the system it replaced.
When anyone other than a technologist suggests doing that kind of thing, we call it "bureaucracy", and we hate it. I think maybe what we have trouble seeing is that there's actually a pretty fundamental difference between automating purely technical processes like server deployment, and automating processes that are fundamentally about mediating human interactions.
I don’t disagree that AI is overhyped. But I think you are probably looking in the wrong place.
I think most software that is written isn’t really a product, at least not a public product. It’s an in-house tool or a one-off project needed to complete some larger task. People everywhere are always writing small programs that make their life or job just a bit easier (and explains why so many corporate projects are little more than an excel spreadsheet).
And there are a lot of people who have made custom software just for themselves with AI. Not a product, just a tool or project that finally made sense to build.