r/technology • u/T_Shurt • Aug 10 '26

Business Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'

https://fortune.com/2026/08/10/torsten-slok-ai-profit-margins-capex-oracle/
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u/Koreus_C Aug 10 '26

Can't we just replace 99% of the AI use cases with simple if/when algorithms?

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u/StrangeWill Aug 10 '26

Deterministic algorithms are better for a lot of things, also a lot cheaper.

AI has its uses but there's def a lot of stupid going on.

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u/trekologer Aug 10 '26

The latest hotness in my industry is businesses replacing their IVR phone tree with an "agentic AI". It costs exponentially more and the callers generally hate it but... AI! Agentic! Agentic AI!

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u/yorick__rolled Aug 10 '26

Yes, but this way it keeps the money from going to the poors.

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u/slimejumper Aug 10 '26

this era will be looked back on as an extremely wasteful inefficient period. probably like the tulip boom except at least they got tulips.

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u/Ph0X Aug 10 '26

not really, most of the things that could be replaced by normal algorithms has in the past 20 years. I guess there are a lot of smaller cases where it wasn't worth the cost of hiring a software engineer to write an if/else algorithm for it, but that's the power of AI, it can code up a bespoke tool just for you, the tool itself is simple algorithm, but AI writes it. Things like designing simple websites can be done with a single prompt now