Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?

To find ways to cut costs and, ideally, make more revenue. It's that simple.

For some companies, automation that is based on being able to pull info from a gigantic knowledge base that still has bounds is helpful for them. Most orgs are still figuring this out in the face of immense pressure from their stakeholders not to fall behind and miss any potential windfall. They don’t know how LLMs can help them but the hype may push them in the black or lead to (false) growth so they lean in.

I think many of the larger tech companies were hoping to make human engineers obsolete so that they could achieve the true promise of SaaS - almost no investment, instant money faucet. Unfortunately for them, we still need people to help us understand people so engineers, designers, and product managers aren’t as expendable as some of them were hoping.

No one thought AI would be free or cheap, but a LOT of ppl bet that the true cost could be obfuscated or waved away temporarily while the money was stupid and then revealed once enterprise was addicted and struggled to manage their switching costs. By then the smartest folks have made their money, moved it to safer havens, and await the next stage of the lifecycle.

I love LLMs but the way we use them seems very stupid, IMHO. It’s like everything is a screw now but everyone still has bolts and nails.

Basically if the technical leaders at such companies fail to shoehorn AI in somewhere, they will have to find a way to demonstrate to their board of directors that they are keeping up to date and not allowing the business to settle in to abandonware. The guys selling the software also have a similar problem -- industrial abandonware whose development team was laid off 12 years ago is for sale right now and you have to be careful not to accidentally spend a million dollars on it. Something that has AI bolted on, even in an insignificant capacity, is more likely to have present day relevance.

AI doesn’t need expertise, the nurturing of a company culture, or any of the hard to quantify things that make humanity worthwhile and good businesses functional. All it needs is cold hard cash.

If enough people/companies are on the bandwagon, you're afraid to push back and be the crazy one, potentially losing money. So you roll with it.

It was about Web 2.0, then we had "big data", then right before the pandemic we put things on the "blockchain", then Web3, and now it's A.I.

What was interesting to me here was that if I were to write a program to do the same, I could most likely do that (just simplify the tasks as they are and implement each one), but it would take me longer. As much as I hate AI, there are real benefits in at the least some areas.