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A new survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and reported on by Apolloseems to show that large companies may be tapping the brakes on AI. Large companies (defined as having more than 250 employees) have reduced their AI usage, according to the data (click to expand the Tweet below). The slowdown started in June, when it was at roughly 13.5%, slipping to about 12% at the end of August. Most other lines, representing companies with fewer employees, are also at a decline, with some still increasing.

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Personal Anecdote

Last week I used the AI coding assistant within JetBrains DataGrip to build a fairly complex PostgreSQL function.

It put together a very well organized, easily readable function, complete with explanatory comments, that failed to execute because it was absolutely littered with errors.

I don't think it saved me any time but it did help remove my brain block by reorganizing my logic and forcing me to think through it from a different perspective. Then again, I could have accomplished the same thing by knocking off work for the day and going to the driving range.

[-] August27th@lemmy.ca 46 points 1 month ago

Then again, I could have accomplished the same thing by knocking off work for the day and going to the driving range.

Hey, look at the bright side, as long as you were chained to your desk instead, that's all that matters.

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 month ago

At one point I tried to use a local model to generate something for me. It was full of errors, but after some searching online to look for a library or existing examples I found a github repo that was almost an exact copy of what it generated. The comments were the same, and the code was mostly the same, except this version wasn't fucked up.

It turns out text prediction isn't that great at understanding the logic of code. It's only good at copying existing code, but it doesn't understand why it works, so the predictive model fucks things up when it takes the less likely result. Maybe if you turn the temperature to only give the highest prediction it wouldn't be horrible, but you might as well just search online and copy the code that it's going to generate anyway.

[-] 7toed@midwest.social 2 points 1 month ago

But.. how else do we sell our tool as a super intelligent sentient do-it-all?

[-] UncleMagpie@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

The bigger problem is that your skills are weakened a bit every time you use an assistant to write code.

[-] KneeTitts@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

The bigger problem is that your skills are weakened a bit every time you use an assistant to write code

Not when you factor in that you are now doing code review for it and fixing all its mistakes..

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It depends how you're using it. I use it for boilerplate code, for stubbing out classes and functions where I can tell it clearly what I want, for finding inconsistencies I might have missed, to advise me on possible tools and approaches for small things, and as a supplement to the documentation when I can't find what I'm looking for. I don't use it for architecting new things, writing complex and specialized code, or as a replacement for documentation. I feel like I have it fairly well contained to what it does well, so I don't waste my time on what it does badly, and it isn't really eating away at my coding brain because I still do the tricky bits myself.

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[-] underline960@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 month ago

13.5%, slipping to about 12%

I know that 1.5% could mean hundreds of businesses, but this still seems like such a nothing burger.

[-] Truscape 65 points 1 month ago

The issue isn't the percentage, it's that inverse of growth. Most investors desire growth to see returns on investment for their upfront capital. If growth isn't occurring, that's a good sign to read the room and pull your funding.

Similar issues occurred with streaming services. Netflix is still profitable, but because the userbase isn't growing, investors and the financial world stopped seeing it as a valuable platform to invest in.

[-] sexy_peach@feddit.org 34 points 1 month ago

The ai companies haven't even found a viable business model yet, are bleeding money while the user base is shrinking

[-] underline960@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

Isn't that the case with a lot of modern tech?

I vaguely recall Spotify and Uber being criticized relying on the "get big first and figure out how to monetize later" model.

(Not defending them, just wondering what's different about AI.)

[-] khornechips@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago

Spotify is a music streaming service with subscription fees generating recurring revenue, it would be fine in a world without an investor class obsessed with infinite growth. Uber is to taxis what crypto is to banks, essentially exploiting a gap in regulations to undercut an existing market.

“AI” is a solution desperately looking for a problem to justify all the money and resources being wasted on it.

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[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 1 month ago

The AI data centers arnt cheap to cooldown, or power. plus the "customers" are mostly other csuites and ceos anyways.

[-] Saleh@feddit.org 20 points 1 month ago

That is more than a 10% loss of that customer base in 2 month.

For any industry that is huge.

[-] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 month ago

But they're already not making money, losing customers during the supposed growth phase is absolutely devastating. It's occuring all while AI is being subsidized by massive investments from the likes of microsoft and google, and many more namelesss VCs through OpenAI, anthropic etc.

[-] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 month ago

Because they are FUCKING TRASH.

[-] Dremor@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Not for all use cases, but for most it is.

[-] Pat_Riot@lemmy.today 20 points 1 month ago

They dressed up a parrot and called it the golden goose and now they're chasing a wild goose.

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[-] RedGreenBlue@lemmy.zip 19 points 1 month ago

For the things AI is good at, like reading documentation, one should just get a local model and be done.

I think pouring as much money as big companies in the us has been doing is unwise. But when you have deep pockets, i guess you can afford to gamble.

[-] SavageCoconut@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Could you point me to a model to do that and instructions on how get it up and running?

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[-] jaykrown@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago

It is absolutely a bubble, but the applications that AI can be used for still remain while the models continue to get better and cheaper. Here's the actual graph:

[-] r0ertel@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

This contradicts what I'm reading in that AI model costs grow with each generation, not shrink.

[-] jaykrown@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Also that is the cost to train them, not the cost to use them, which is different.

[-] jaykrown@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

That was published a year ago, highly selective, doesn't include something like Llama 4 Maverick.

[-] eronth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 month ago

Kind of a weird title. Of course adoption would slow? The people who want it have adopted it, the people who don't haven't.

[-] KneeTitts@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

We were initially excited by AI at my company, but after we used it a bit we didnt find any really meaningful use cases for it in our business model. And in most cases we spent a lot of time correcting its many errors which would actually slow down our processes...

[-] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It would also slow if companies were told insane lies about the capability of "AI" ("it's living having a team of PHD level experts at your disposal!") and then companies realized that many of these promises were total bullshit.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

Marx tapping the big sign marked "Tendency of the rate of profit is to fall", but then looking at the already unprofitable AI spin-offs and just throwing his hands up in disgust.

I think there's an argument to be made that the AI hype got a bunch of early adopters, but failed to entice more traditional mainstream clients. But the idea that we just ran out of new AI users in... barely two years? No. Nobody is really paying for this shit in a meaningful way. Not at the Enterprise Application scale of subscriptions. That's why Microsoft is consistently losing money (on the scale of billions) on its OpenAI investment.

If people were adopting AI like they'd adopted the latest Windows OS, these firms would be seeing a steady growth in the pool of users that would signal profitability soon (if not already). But the estimates they're throwing out - one billion AI adoptions in barely a year - are entirely predicated on how many people just kinda popped in, looked at the web interface, and lost interest.

[-] SunSunFuego@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 month ago

let's not forget the us is pumping EVERYTHING into ai, 3-4% of the gdp are just the ai economy. here's hoping it comes crashing down on them

[-] Mrkawfee@feddit.uk 10 points 1 month ago

Western growth is predicated on bubbles.

[-] reksas@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 month ago

oh the horror

[-] Asidonhopo@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

The US Census Bureau keeps track of things like that? Huh... TIL

[-] kazerniel@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

Fucking finally. Maybe the hype wave has crested 🤞

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[-] Sunshine@piefed.ca 8 points 1 month ago

Finally now decommission the slop.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago

It'll right itself when the CEOs stop investing in it and force it on their own companies.

When they're not getting their returns, they'll sell their stocks and stop paying for it.

It'll eventually go back from slop generation to correction and light editing tools when venture stops paying for the hardware to run tokens and they have to pay to replace the cards. .

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 points 1 month ago

and they will drop it altogether.

[-] probable_possum@leminal.space 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I mean the automatic speech recognition and transcription capabilities are quite useful. But that's about it, for me for now.

It could be interesting for frame interpolation in movies at some point maybe, I guess.

I dream of using it for the reliable classification of things. But I haven't seen it working reliably, yet.

For the creation of abstracts and as a dialog system for information retrieval it doesn't feel exact/correct / congruent enough to me.

Also: A working business plan to make money with actual AI services has yet to be found. Right now it is playing with a shiny new toy and the expectations and money of their investors. Right now they fail to deliver and the investors might get restless. Selling the business while it is still massively overrated, seems like the only way forward. But that's just my opinion.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I mean the automatic speech recognition and transcription capabilities are quite useful.

That's what LLM are made for; text stuff, not knowledge stuff.

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[-] psoul@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

Nature is healing

[-] RandAlThor@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago

Large companies (defined as having more than 250 employees) have reduced their AI usage, according to the data (click to expand the Tweet below). The slowdown started in June, when it was at roughly 13.5%, slipping to about 12% at the end of August.

Someone explain to me how I am to see this "rate" as - is it adoption rate or usage rate? IF it is adoption rate 13.5% of all large firms are using it? and it's declined to 12%? Or is it some sort of usage rate and if so, whatever the fuck is 12% usage?

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[-] MoonMoon@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago
[-] l_isqof@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

You might as well put your money on red at the casino.

[-] ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social 5 points 1 month ago

Because they suck.

[-] salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 4 points 1 month ago

Why is the Census Bureau tracking LLM adoption?

[-] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago

That is good news, assuming numbers being reported by a US government agency are accurate, which is no longer a certainty.

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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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