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Amazon Hits The Trifecta, Apple Stokes Holiday Optimism
Amazon topped estimates in results released after the bell on Thursday.
Total revenue in Q3 was $18
Has anyone gone to any of the lead AI companies and asked how they are benefiting from AI in their own operations. That is, show mo on paper, show me in action and explain how you calculated the benefit. It would be nice to have some real world data at this stage. It would help evaluate the investment thesis.
Agreed, it always feels like the boom is in the ‘idea’ of AI and its ‘potential’ but what is it really doing for us and companies? Yes, a ton of money is being spent building data centers but for what? So we can make fake pictures and videos? Help us write better? Identify unknown birds from a photo?
Where are the medical advances we were promised? Where are the robots? How is AI really going to help improve our lives over the next 10 years?
My daughter is a senior software product developer in AI products. I had this discussion with her a couple weeks ago. We know how Nvidia and other AI hardware producers make money. But how does the rest of this “non-industry” do it? The definition of an industry is a group of firms making products that are essentially close substitutes for one another. Firms making software are not in the same industry as Nvidia, for example. Software is nothing like hardware, economically or otherwise. We know how hardware guys make money but who else is out there? How do the software guys make money? They try to convince customers that they can use their software to make more money from using this software. How does that work exactly? AI involves several smaller industry groups whose business models are not really well defined at this moment My daughter’s Silicon Valley company currently produces products that support the management, marketing, and data support for pharma companies. This sort of thing is just one small part of what folks think AI will become. So far none of this is a foregone conclusion. By the way, my daughter has been toiling in this AI pit for more than 10 years and still no one really knows where the real cash flow is except at the top.