State of the Market

[Fraidycat]

Need the next IT boom to come along, something like an IPhone or .Net Boom. Something. At this rate, the next pay packet for me will be the state pension, hopefully outside

Even if you don't believe in AI yourself, the fact is AI is sucking up all investment over the last two year and for the foreseeable future, the people with the big money to start new companies (venture capitalists) are not really interested in anything but AI at the moment.

[willendure]

And how did you know the results were as expected?

I quickly checked it over at the end. Its a spreadsheet so not too hard to see its all correct.

What I did was give it all the bank transactions and ask it to add more columns and put an X in the relevant column to categorize each transaction. Then I added some formulas to verify that each row has exactly 1 X. And a SUM to add up all the Xed amounts for each category. Then check the total of all categories matches the end balance - start balance.

A team effort, but it saved me hours of going through each transaction one bye one. I did the clever part, and got the AI to do the grunt work, just as it should be.

[SchumiStars]

Even if you don't believe in AI yourself, the fact is AI is sucking up all investment over the last two year and for the foreseeable future, the people with the big money to start new companies (venture capitalists) are not really interested in anything but AI at the moment.

I haven't seen any large investments into AI TBH. I might be wrong but unless someone can show me how a concrete business case whereby it saves money or generates an income I may invest time into it.

The same thing could be said for mobile apps. These were cited as the next big, great thing. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon to produce the next hit game or app that would save time and money. And that has gone precisely nowhere.

Sure companies produced an app that helped save calls on their help desk but they didn't replace websites. In fact, it probably cost companies more money to now have to keep the apps and the websites updated via synch mechanisims.

My wife is studying for another degree. She tells me that some of questions answered by the other students have been produced using AI. One guy had used AI to generate an answer and then processed the answer again using AI. However all of this was easily detectable by the marking software and lectures.

The biggest problem with AI is that if a companiea competitors are using it and not making anymore money than, then why should they?

Basically there is no money to be made from AI, if there was, everyone would be on it. And I mean everyone.

I tend not to learn anything which is not relevant. ATM AI is not relevant to my life, it may be to yours and I wish you luck.

[fatJock]

Basically there is no money to be made from AI, if there was, everyone would be on it. And I mean everyone.

That's both a very bold, and a very naïve statement. The recent US $500bn joint investment announcement into AI isn't for charity.

[dsc]

I haven't seen any large investments into AI TBH. I might be wrong but unless someone can show me how a concrete business case whereby it saves money or generates an income I may invest time into it.

The same thing could be said for mobile apps. These were cited as the next big, great thing. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon to produce the next hit game or app that would save time and money. And that has gone precisely nowhere.

Sure companies produced an app that helped save calls on their help desk but they didn't replace websites. In fact, it probably cost companies more money to now have to keep the apps and the websites updated via synch mechanisims.

My wife is studying for another degree. She tells me that some of questions answered by the other students have been produced using AI. One guy had used AI to generate an answer and then processed the answer again using AI. However all of this was easily detectable by the marking software and lectures.

The biggest problem with AI is that if a companiea competitors are using it and not making anymore money than, then why should they?

Basically there is no money to be made from AI, if there was, everyone would be on it. And I mean everyone.

I tend not to learn anything which is not relevant. ATM AI is not relevant to my life, it may be to yours and I wish you luck.

OpenAI gathered over $18bn, US announced $500bn private investment into AI, I keep reading about loads of companies using AI chatbots to help with efficiency and people loosing jobs to AI (translators, writers etc.), so no idea what you are talking about.

There's loads of money to be made with AI if you use it correctly, the fact AI is not relevant to your life means absolutely nothing.

[sadkingbilly]

I hate the term AI.
it's not 'intelligence' at all.
just fast recursive data matching.
and if the underlying data's naff, the output is teranaff.

[SussexSeagull]

I haven't seen any large investments into AI TBH. I might be wrong but unless someone can show me how a concrete business case whereby it saves money or generates an income I may invest time into it.

The same thing could be said for mobile apps. These were cited as the next big, great thing. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon to produce the next hit game or app that would save time and money. And that has gone precisely nowhere.

Sure companies produced an app that helped save calls on their help desk but they didn't replace websites. In fact, it probably cost companies more money to now have to keep the apps and the websites updated via synch mechanisims.

My wife is studying for another degree. She tells me that some of questions answered by the other students have been produced using AI. One guy had used AI to generate an answer and then processed the answer again using AI. However all of this was easily detectable by the marking software and lectures.

The biggest problem with AI is that if a companiea competitors are using it and not making anymore money than, then why should they?

Basically there is no money to be made from AI, if there was, everyone would be on it. And I mean everyone.

I tend not to learn anything which is not relevant. ATM AI is not relevant to my life, it may be to yours and I wish you luck.

I, and millions of others, use apps to do most of our banking, buy public transport tickets and order food plus hundreds of other things, To say apps have gone nowhere simply isn'y true.

You might not see a future in AI, and I agree to a point as it is probably overhyped at the moment, but there is literally billions of pounds of investment in it and we are beginning to see it impact the real world.

[Bluenose]

What about the investment banks, can they save loads of money or are the stockbrokers now using this new tech to find new avenues to invest in?

Don't want to take a pee all over your post but those that worked in and around the City will know that thousands of non-tech jobs were lost due to technology progression in this area between 2004 and 2016 (approx). I don't think theres much fat to be chopped off here however, in Legal and Accountancy, I think these jobs are most at risk from AI and yes, I have seen and implemented technology recently which demonstrates that. Oddly, the people that stand the most to lose from this are the big four.

Anyway back on topic : state of the market January 2025 - appaling.

[willendure]

https://www.begbies-traynorgroup.com...ncial-distress

"The number of UK businesses in ‘critical’ financial distress rose by 50.2% quarter-on-quarter to 46,853 in Q4 2024 (Q3 2024: 31,201)"

[willendure]

Don't want to take a pee all over your post but those that worked in and around the City will know that thousands of non-tech jobs were lost due to technology progression in this area between 2004 and 2016 (approx). I don't think theres much fat to be chopped off here however, in Legal and Accountancy, I think these jobs are most at risk from AI and yes, I have seen and implemented technology recently which demonstrates that. Oddly, the people that stand the most to lose from this are the big four.

This does not surprise me at all. Techies are excited about trying to get LLMs to program, but they are generally bad at logical thinking so progress in this area is not as fast as some might think. But analysing written text is what they excel at. The technology is at a level where reading and analyzing legal documents can be done at a human expert level, and unlike humans it does not get tired of reading these kinds of long and boring texts.

You can use ChatGPT for this kind of thing yourself. Perhaps you are doing a DIY extension on your house and need to know about the building code? Just dump it in and ask questions about it - whats the max height of the extension allowed? What level of insulation must it have? and so on.