For the same reason that people were selling crypto mining boxes rather than just plugging them in:
The only guaranteed profit in a gold rush is to be the one selling shovels.
See Nvidia for details.
The reality is the product is the easy part.
Actually selling it, maintaining it, selling more of it and running a profitable business is the hard part.
So the AI makes the product really easy to make, but selling it is the hard part.
Why don’t they ask ai how to sell it. After all, isn’t it super intelligent?
I do work for a software company, and sales is part of my job. And yes, sometimes I get the AI to review a tricky sale. Not usually though.
However, the reality is it takes years and years to build relationships, get into markets, get visibility.
Basically embed yourself into a market. So the product is the easy part. The sale is the hard part.
That’s like asking why doesn’t Adobe make their own content and keep the tools internal.
To be fair, a reasonable answer would be the same as any reseller or value-added business. They have some skill, capital, or existing market capture that the whole seller does not.
Don’t get me wrong it can still be bullshit, but it’s actually pretty common.
The AI companies could probably be profitable if they weren’t dumping tons of money into new model research, but then they would stagnate and die to the ones who keep moving forward.
Companies using their AI don’t need to worry about that expense.
It’d be so funny if research hits a breakthrough that absolutely collapses the cost of inference, allowing anyone to self host frontier models, eliminating the ability for all the main AI companies to ever recoup their costs.
Well, except where everyone’s data gets sold at bottom dollar in liquidation. Actually, that’d be pretty funny too.
Self host on what? The way we’re going 16GB of RAM to run the models will be a capital investment…
I don’t know if that’ll happen to frontier models, but I definitely see it happening with models that work well enough for the vast majority of personal use.
It’s a definite risk. They do steal your inputs and the outputs they send back to you. They will always have even more powerful models that aren’t released yet. If you avoid sending them all of your code, they could hack you to steal it. They will certainly copy any good ideas their competitors come up with (Meta Muse agent, jev) within weeks, as they all copied claude code and open claw. Answer to OP is “just not yet”.
The unified US establishment goal is to create skynet for global and domestic domination. Theoretically, the AI bond villains could make sufficently sophisticated weapon/control systems to threaten the government, but why bother when it already wants to give them all of our money. “Whoever wins AI, wins” means only first to skynet, wins. Zero relevance to any AI customers, who obviously win through the widest competition/choices on what to use to help them. Not the nationality of the oligarchs that profit off them.
https://naturalfinance.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-global-prosperity-manifesto.html
Why did the snake oil salesman grow old and die? Same reason.
They’re selling hype, not technology
They’re working on it. They just need a little more of your internal documents and source code.
And a lot more money. And so much more power and water. And more data. And more money, too.
They’ll announce soon that personal ai assistants require a blood sacrifice to run, on top of the monthly and metered fees.
They’ll need child-cannibalist rituals minute of work.
Because it is a scam. Just like the people selling, instead of using:
- healing crystals
- essential oils
- blockchain
- penis-enlargement pills
- JIRA
LOL Love the (accurate) JIRA inclusion there
Q: Couldn’t this JIRA ticket just be an email?
A: No! Because JIRA will send you like, 10 emails.
Jira, lol.
Jira is awful 😞😔
I mean yes, I hate the manager who set up JIRA that way, but JIRA is marketed to and designed for managers to over-complicate it. It is not designed as a tool for engineers to track their work. It is designed for managers to mis-manage teams, because that sells at volume.
I also have other reasons for hating JIRA:
- no ticket hierarchy
- no multiple owners
- slow. so very slow
- sometimes keyboard shortcuts work, sometimes they don’t. There is no apparently pattern.
I mean, it kinda fits with the rest of that category, other than I’ve never been harassed about healing crystals.
I’d wager it’s simply not possible to be profitable using AI for most use-cases. You either burn way too many tokens on your queries or risk your business falling victim to an under-tokenized AI hallucination.
Or any AI hallucination
I love the assumption that if you spend enough tokens, it won’t hallucinate, like it isn’t a mathematical certainty or anything.
I agree with you, but I liken to to how companies tend to replace competence with bureaucracy. With enough layers, a significant amount of mistakes get caught. It just slows everything down and costs a bunch of money. There are still problems that get through, just less of them.
Right like. The more tokens you spend, the more hallucinations you get.
You can cut hallucinations by 90% just by prompting the LLM to.not guess API and function names and to provide it with full docs or MCP to find docs.
Yeah but it’s not guessing in the first place. It has zero reasoning skills. It just outputs the most likely next word. Even when you ‘tell it not to’
I know I am getting down voted for this because people haven’t tried it. And let me differ, it has reasoning skills, it now gets beyond predicting the next word. And even reducing it to next word is some kind of primitive reasoning.
By experience, by telling the AI to not guess APIs and function names and instead provide it with a way of looking through docs, and inspecting the code and other tools to get it do some tests, the hallucinations disappear. I’ve been able to have better results with this setup.
This is very different than the “no mistakes” joke.
I’ll back you up on this. I’ve had the experience of seeing Claude fabricate stuff, and then when I challenge it, it says something like “I guessed, let me look deeper” and then it indeed does check deeper with docs or a configured LSP etc and then discovers the real answer.
It doesn’t matter if this was the result of reasoning or just more pattern prediction, the result is that if you tell it not to guess, it responds appropriately.
“it has reasoning skills” Nope. It has larger context windows and someone coded in the ability to reprompt itself for “thinking” steps that are literally just a new prompt with the same context that gets fed back in which merely increases the chances of it guessing the next output token correctly.
It still doesn’t “reason”. It still doesn’t know what the words mean. The modified algorithms are just attempting to generate the corrective prompts for you. If you’ve ever messed with them long enough, you’d understand that these, “no wait fix it” prompts have rapidly diminishing returns at the best of times. Their “thinking” is a bandaid, and a piss poor one at that.
I know I am getting down voted for this because people haven’t tried it.
People here have tried it, LLM use is basically enforced at a ton of companies and the tech industry crowd is a huge portion of the population here.
You’re likely being downvoted as you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs function. LLMs don’t reason. LLMs don’t think. Telling an LLM to not guess might help ever so slightly, but LLMs can and do hallucate search results regularly.
It’s a mistake to trust that LLMs aren’t hallucinating just because you told the LLM to not guess.
I juste don’t want to talk about this any more becausefor me adding those instructions in AGENTS.MD and giving it the full API and language and platform docs dropped significantly the hallucinations. You just disregarding my experience and want me to believe in your assumptions.
It helps, sure. But it still does stupid shit CONSTANTLY.
So do humans. Constantly.
It doing sgupid stuff is another issue separate from hallucinations. Preventing LLM from doing dumb shit is more difficult, you need more guards and harnesses.
This logically leads to a similar question to OP’s again: if it’s so easy to cut down on hallucinations, then why haven’t the designers of this software already integrated that in?
This is kinda fundamental to economics: the moment AI learns to perform some task, that task becomes less valuable.
But then aren’t there just different tasks to do? VisiCalc and Excel didn’t make accountants irrelevant.
That’s the economists angle, yes, but that’s not what I’m getting at.
You can’t make a business with AI because anyone can use an LLM to do anything an LLM can do.
There are exceptions in the short term, but they may not last. For example, we’re paying a hefty subscription fee for an AI service that scrapes financial data from scanned pages. It’s much more accurate than traditional OCR.
Presently its better than its competitors so commands a premium price. However, I don’t think it will enjoy that position for long.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Just because everyone can use Word doesn’t mean you can’t make a business using it. Oh no, everyone has calculators, guess you can’t have a business that uses calculators. Businesses and people in general use the best tools available for the job, which might be pencil and paper, or eventually an LLM.
You’re conflating a tool with a service.
If you noticed that calculators were really good at adding up numbers, and started a business using a calculator to add up numbers for people, you won’t attract any customers because people can just use their own calculators.
That does not mean businesses do not use calculators.
Wild, accountants must not exist in your mind. Everyone can own a computer but there are massive services of renting those computers ‘in the cloud’. Everyone can buy storage, but for some reason the majority think its easier and cheaper to buy in the cloud. Hell, you could go to the store and purchase a movie, but many still think seeing them in a theatre, or you know, streaming them are a better option. You say LLMs have no business opportunity which seems to show the failure of your thinking.
If you think accountants “add up numbers” in 2026 then I can’t help you mate.
In a gold rush it is better, on average, to sell the shovels then to mine the gold.
Slop image
When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.
Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.
The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they’re not because they know the limitations of the models. It’s what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.
I like your newly coined term: “marketing bullshit gap”. I will start using it.
A agree with your point of view fully.
I mean if you were an economist you’d know exactly why AI companies are making massive profits, because its more profitable to sell shovels during the gold rush than it is to find gold. Doesn’t mean gold is worthless and not profitable, it’s pretty basic economics, but you know that already.
I mean if you were an economist you’d know exactly why AI companies are making massive profits
They are literally not making massive profits. They may be making lyin’ Sam Altman rich, but the VC money is drying up and OpenAI has repayments coming up in 2027 that it doesn’t have a chance in hell of being able to payback.
You aren’t separating hardware/training costs and costs when the models are developed. Ask the Chinese how thats working out for them, and one of many reasons why their models are so much cheaper.
Well, hardware companies (Nvidia) are making massive profits. The rest, no.
Yeah, but they aren’t an “AI company”. They are a hardware company that is propping up AI companies to keep them buying (and warehousing) GPUs via circular financing.
I think the person “selling shovels during a gold rush” is nvidia slingin GPUs. And also in this analogy the gold is pyrite.
If I recall correctly, shovel companies made a lot of money while only a few of their shovels actually struck gold.
Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the gold rush.
The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began, he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and resold them at a substantial profit.
Because nobody but nvidia profits from LLMs.
How’s TSMC doing these days?
Yeah, all right, “hardware suppliers” in general.
Shovel salesmen
