CEO where I work is driving this push - he's got enough stupid, uncreative, and trend-following ideas without the influence of a board. He came from a sales background and I don't think those guys can resist this. It's not going well either - just had a major customers board of governance kill a deal for our ridiculous llm toy. So glad I never exercised my options.
Nearly every corporate leader I've worked for charges after any trend that's hot. They don't have a tech background and can't tell if something is real or hype. They don't want to seem like a fool that's missing out, so they act a fool and chase everything.
Why not tell them something like “but let us wait till AI is strong! Then we don’t need to hire these pesky AI engineers for big money, we can rent access from OpenAI and ask it to build AI for us…”
Who are these experts saying AI isn't a good R&D investment? Like I understand an LLM is just a token predictor but it's a damn useful one if you use it right, and all the other applications are still improving too (some examples in another comment of mine)
Treating it like an R&D investment isn't a problem - you only spend what you can afford to lose on R&D. In our case, we have no R&D budget and any money/time spent playing around with llm's leads directly to degradation of the core product and risks losing customers.
Imagine if big corp waited until "the web was strong" to go online, they'd have been dead in the water. Sears was fully positioned to be Amazon, and look at them now. It's just not good business sense to not explore new things and invest in R&D - of course not every investment will pan out but you don't want to miss the important ones.
