You don't need general intelligence to make good memes to keep people scrolling through Instagram.

You don't need general intelligence to make a decent coding tool like Cursor.

You don't need general intelligence to improve SERPs.

You don't need general intelligence to sell a subscription for a decent AI assistant.

There's tons of value already added without anything general.

Yes but $500B and counting for memes wasn’t what was sold

I remember reading somewhere someone said "the problem with AI is it's a $50b industry pretending its a $10t industry"

$500B is future projections for total spending (a lot of that decently far into the future).

The revenues are already in the high tens of billions per year.

Models will get better from here, especially on the low end.

Costs will eventually approach peanuts for current capabilities.

Given enough time, this will pay for existing investments. If growth slows, future spending will slow as well.

The question is whether, if the models plateau, and "AGI" as it was claimed in the beginning never arrives, if it's enough to justify these ongoing multi-hundred billion dollar deals.

I mean, probably, LLMs as they are today are already changing the world. But I do think a lot of the ongoing investment is propped up on the promise of another breakthrough that is looking less likely.